Summertime Crafting

My muse has still not quite returned.  Everything I have on my pinboards and saved in my 'crafts to do' photo folder is so uninspiring.  I just don't feel like doing anything.  Sometimes I feel like taking out my paints to do some projects but clean up is such a pain, so I haven't.  

I did grab my alcohol inks to try them out on canvas.  Results were OK....kind of interesting, a bit abstract.  The colours all mixed in together though.  So I've learned it's not a good idea to use dark and light blue, shades of purple, pink and green on one project because they just sort of ran into each other.

This one started out with me colouring on the canvas with sharpie markers and dripping alcohol on it. But my sharpies were old and ran out of ink so the results were awful.  I had to try to cover it up with alcohol ink.  One of my friends said this looked like a subway map.

Glued a starfish and shell onto my last canvas piece and then added the puffy paint dots.  Boy did my wrist and hand hurt when I was done.  I have a feeling all 3 of these are going to the thrift shop.

I have wanted to try a glass plate garden flower for awhile.  There were some pieces in the boxes of glassware that Robin gave me which worked really well.  I used 2 plates and a candle cup, and glued them together with E6000 glue.  

I found the green metal stake at Benny's and used copious amounts of E6000, letting one layer dry and adding more and more till the stake was encased in glue against the back of the plates.  We'll see how well it does the rest of the summer.

Another thing I wanted to try was to spray a wine bottle with the frosted spray paint, paint a black tree and then add lights.  First of all, drilling a hole in a bottle is a pain.  The special drill bit I got for bottles works well, but due to the curve of the glass, the bit doesn't touch the glass on the sides, so you have to keep angling the bit side to side.  It took a long time and drained the battery just for this one bottle.  I used a black paint pen for the tree....not my best work.  

But it looks kinda cool lit up.  I gave this to Marsha.

This nautilus shell took a bit longer than I'd expected but it's done.  I ran out of one colour of floss and since the kit company went out of business, I had a hard time matching it.  There was no conversion for that particular colour.  I tried to match it with DMC but it was waaaaay off.  I guess if I don't point out the areas that aren't matched, no one will know.  But I know and it bugs me.

This was another Pinterest craft.  You just colour a plastic bottle with sharpies, cut off the bottom, then cut the bottle into a spiral strip.  The only kind I had handy were water bottles, which are ridged all the way around.  That made it a major league pain to colour.  

Then it took a few days of me tugging at the spiral to make it hang down instead of coiling back up.

The original tutorial showed a bunch of them all stacked together at the tops and then the spirals hanging down, but I could not achieve that with these smaller, lighter bottles.  I hung them separately instead.  We'll see how long the ink lasts outside.  Good project for kids, but use a smooth bottle, not one that's ridged, and also remove the label.  

Finally, here is the Hummel cross stitch that a friend of mine asked me to make for her.  All the stitching is completed and some of the back stitching.  Now I have to do the backstitch outlines, which shouldn't take too long.  Working on top of this for so long it was hard for me to really see the design but looking at this picture, it doesn't blend together as bad as I thought; so many of the floss colours were just barely a shade off from each other.