Thing-A-Day Wrap Up

Hi everyone! It’s the last day of February, which means the last day of Thing-A-Day. And have no fear – while the posts have lapsed the creativity has not. Sometimes it seems so boring to post works in progress, and so little is finished in one day, that I wanted to wait to post. But, I also haven’t completed as much as I hoped for today because A-I always have unrealistic expectations of what I can accomplish and B-so many obstacles!

So here’s what has been going on –

I made a practice wedding cake for my brother’s upcoming nuptials. It was a disaster and all photographic evidence destroyed.

I made wedding mints. Both of these things were done with my mom but I didn’t want to drag her name into the cake mess above.

Believe it or not the dark ones are purple.

I’ve been working on a Christmas tree, but can’t get the wood stain the right color. Here’s the finished component, patiently waiting to be placed on a stained tree:

I tried brush calligraphy with Crayola markers as seen on Pinterest. It’s going to take practice.

I’ve helped my Mom design hair flowers for the aforementioned wedding’s flower girl.

AND I started a bullet journal! I’m going to put that in a separate entry this evening. Hooray!

Thing-A-Day #18 & 19 – O Christmas Tree

Work continues on the trees – but I thought I would back up and share a little more about them.

Following Christmas I bought wooden trees on clearance at Target. I have a really bad habit of buying things on clearance and then forgetting about them the next season, so the plan this year is to go ahead and make them, put them in my decoration box, and then be delighted to have new decorations when I open my holiday box next December.

I decided to cover these in paper, and while I stand by my decision in thinking this will yield the greatest finished product, it has proven tedious as shared before.

Each tree will be covered with two papers. Here are the supplies:

Good news! I’ve finished the first tree.

I’ll take a picture of it put together once they are completely dry.

 

Thing-A-Day #17 – Winter Trees

A quick check-in tonight. I am working on wooden trees that I’m covering with paper. It has proven to be more laborious than expected. So many small detailed cuts. Here’s the beginning:

Sorry for the image quality! Technology problems.

Hope to have the finished project for you by the end of the month. Fingers crossed – when they are not too busy cutting these out.

Thing-A-Day #15 & 16 -Masking Pen Watercolors

Today’s project was a couple days in the making. I ordered a Molotow Masking Pen and it arrived earlier this week and I couldn’t wait to try it. There are a large number of videos of people using masking liquid to do their lettering and then watercoloring over it. After the paint dries you simple rub the blue masking liquid off revealing the white paper below. Simple! Wrong.

Here was the first attempt. I was so excited and then once it was dry I COULD NOT remove the masking fluid. In spots where I was able, the paper was tearing, dyed blue and not creating clean lines. Incredibly disappointing.

So I went about searching the internet for troubleshooting tips and was unable to find anything useful. So, if you find this blog because you had problems removing masking fluid – here’s the solution: BUY BETTER PAPER.

I made an assumption that this was the case, as I was using only 90lb. paper. So I bought 140lb. paper and kept my fingers crossed that it would solve the problem.

As my grandpa pointed out, this is not perfect calligraphy – I just simply free handed it super quickly for the test. More complex designs to come. But most importantly, it rubbed right off. All those videos weren’t lying (I was fairly convince it was a giant conspiracy for a moment).

Thing-A-Day #14 – A Little Holiday Baking

I decided to take a break from all the crafting and do a little baking for my creative activity today. I have to give myself credit, because for the first time ever I saw one of those clever  videos on Facebook that shows someone cooking in fast forward AND instead of just thinking “that looks delicious, I should make that” and never doing anything about it – I MADE IT!

I’m not particularly fond of Valentine’s Day, but when I saw the video for Cherry Bread by Tastes of Lizzy T, it seemed appropriate to bake for the day. The recipe was easy to follow,  and all went well (minus the discovery that there was no more baking powder in the house that lead to a mid-mix grocery run). I will say the glaze is almost more of a frosting, and it makes about twice what you need, but it’s delicious so I’m not mad at that.

I clearly do not have a future in food photography, so please excuse the poor photographic evidence of my attempt. The rivers of glaze made it all the messier to try to capture, so for good pictures go to her blog.

Messy but delicious!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

 

Thing-A-Day #12 & 13 -Glass Necklaces

I spent most of the day yesterday with my father celebrating his birthday. We had a great day, including genealogy research and adventures to find the old family homestead.

When I returned home I worked on attaching my watercolor pieces to glass in order to make them into pendants. I continued working on that today – and here is the progress. They are still a work in progress, and because it is a new method I haven’t perfected them yet.

I look forward to posting the finished necklaces soon!

Thing-A-Day #10 & 11 – Adventures in Watercolors

Please excuse me for not posting yesterday – but I was confident that world didn’t need another picture of my slow going cross stitch. I have gotten some questions about the full quote though. Here it is:

The version I am stitching has an ellipsis between “garden patch” and “to know.” I did not know the full quote until now, and I’m in favor of the modification.

Tonight I experimented with watercolors for the first time since my Crayola set in grade school. The main goal was to create color variations, gradients, ombres, that could be used under glass for necklace pendants. In the photo below you see my first attempts, as well as the rectangle of glass that will be used to fashion them into wearable art (fingers crossed).

While I was at it, I couldn’t resist trying brush calligraphy with watercolors since I’ve run across so much of it while learning brush pen calligraphy. I need a better brush, or one of the brush pens with the water in the base, AND a lot of practice – but I was pretty happy with my first attempt.

Thing-A-Day #8 – One Stitch at a Time

I’m under the weather and spent most of the day in bed cuddling with my dog. But I crawled out of bed long enough to pick up one of my oldest WIPs (Work in Progress).

I didn’t get much accomplished today, but that’s because this is a deceptively slow project. I honestly can’t even tell you how many years ago I started it or how many times I’ve put it down in favor of other projects. I’m actually surprised it hasn’t been featured on here before.

It’s a giant Emerson quote, meant to be professionally framed and placed in my office – but I’m coming to terms with the fact that it might never be done. It’s about half finished at this point, which is actually a triumph itself.

Thing-A-Day #7 – Finished Wreath!

Hooray! The wreath is done.

I love it!

As I mentioned previously, this was made from a kit. The entire time I made it I thought about how I will have it for a lifetime, just like some of the felt kits that my mom made in the 70s that are hung religiously every year.

Here’s a better look at some of the details and stitching.

Thing-A-Day #6 – A Fumble & A Return

Well, that’s unintentionally football related and was probably subconsciously inspired by the 45 seconds of football that I accidentally watched yesterday. This evening I spent time starting a new cross stitch project, and it’s off to a rough start. It’s probably because I’m suppose to use this month to finish projects, not start new ones.

Since that is in no way camera worthy at the moment, and because it has been a couple of days since I last practiced my brush calligraphy, I returned to it this evening with a simple worksheet.

This worksheet comes from the folks at Destination Decoration, and is meant for blending – but I’m not there yet and this worked for me.