Playing catch up again

Had a busy week with the workshop on Sunday and Sparkles visiting this week, but am trying to catch up as I have four clocks to make before next Friday which are examples of the kind of stuff will be doing for the your creative journey workshop in October.

Got a bit behind with the Round Robin swap, but I have done Susan's, just needs to be packed up and posted (I find that part really tedious!) But here it is! If you want to read more about Astrid's RR swap have a gander at the blog 6x6 RR page

I am hosting a 'I dare you' swap on the Docrafts forum.. basically the idea is to take people out of their comfortable little hole and plonk the right into a very uncomfortable hole!

Dee 62 challenged me to make a house... that bit's fine... but to use colours that you would not usually use. I don't think she believed me when I said I would have to use brown/copper/bronze/gold.... cos I really dislike those colours! ( she was quite right to disbelieve me lol) but I think she may have been expecting me to use pinks, yellows etc..

But I really do have trouble using black and white together on their own, and believe me I had traumas making this for her, but it's done now. The line is my new paperartsy stamp, the 'nor is it black and white' play on words.. geddit? LOL, is my own fair hand. There is a working clock in the middle. I hope Dee likes it, I'm not at all sure about it but maybe that's cos I don't like the colours. I do like the roof bit though, it is a triangle of mount-board with the centre cut out and replaced it with a bit of wire mesh, behind it is black and white embossing enamel which I have heated onto a piece of silver foil and then whilst it was still hot I pushed it through the mesh.

Next comes Sian, who also asked for a house but her challenge was to use purple and flowers.... purple mmmmm ok... but flowers???

Well hopefully she wasn't expecting pretty flowers! The house was painted with various shade of purple and then William Shakespeare was stamped onto a piece of tissue paper which was much larger than the image. I scrunched up the paper around the image trying to leave Bill flat and adhered it to the house with gel medium. Then painted it purple again. The flower element is metal, embossed with flowers and painted and cut out. and entwined around the flowers is a serpent, reason being that the wording is a quote from Shakespeare's Macbeth 'look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under it..'

Finally Carol V asked me to make a necklace for her challenge using shrink plastic and once again colours that I wasn't comfortable using. I know it looks like my kind of colours but they did start off as pink and yellow, but due to the nature of shrink plastic the colours intensified as they shrunk and I like them now!

You can't see too well from the picture but they are alcohol inks so have a kind of polished stone appearance , once shrunk I added a couple of layers of UTEE which gives it's glazed look and then heated some friendly plastic straight onto it... hung some charms from the bottom and strung it onto a strip of leather.

So all I have left to do now is Katherine T's challenge of textiles/sewing.. gulp.. leave the 'worst' till last LOL