Sod's Law

This last week has been a living testament to Sod's Law--which states that not only will everything go wrong, but it will do so at the WORST possible time.
Here's what happened:
Our neighbors on the other side of the double accidentially severed their power line on tuesday. I got a call saying that inorder for the electrician to make the repairs the power had to be shut off on both sides--but only for an hour on wednesday morning. Ok, I said, no problem. I re-arranged my scheduale so that I'd be out of the house. Power went off. The electrician came.
And then the storms hit. (The wind was so ferocious that it caught my car door while I was getting in, ripped it from my hand and smashed it back into my head giving me a lovely black eye.)
And power went down all over the city.
We found ourselves at the bottom of the power company's to-do list.
Thursday, no power.
Friday, no power.
Then, we hear from our neighbors that the power is back on. Hooray! We come home, and low and behold, the power company had turned on the other side but not ours. So, we called and begged and argued and finally they came out and got it back on.
Ugh!
Needless to say, I am in a foul, foul mood.
Luckily, I managed to get this birthday present done for my friend Sarah. Here is her card:

And here is the ring I made for her. The doll is actually made out of UTEE. I made a cast from the original and then cast it using white utee. I used easy cast resin to fill it. The red background is sequin waste.
Here's hoping this next week is better than the last!

Alcohol Inks Card

It was my anniversary last weekend and I made this card using alcohol inks for my dh.
The process is really quite simple: using a non-stick craft sheet drop several colors of inks and a little bit of blending solution then push a piece of shinny card-stock onto it and lift off. Repeat until the page is covered. When I was done, I embossed the stamp (which is from Paperbag Studios) and then I dropped some blending solution on the card. That's what caused the white-ish spots. I also dropped a good amount of blending solution inside the heart to lighten it up. The swirl is chipboard that I inked with metallic green ink, heat set, stamped with stazon, heat set again, and then embossed several times with UTEE.
Hope everyone is having a great weekend. Hopefully I will be back tomorrow with more work.

ETSY

I have finally done it--I've opened an ETSY store. I don't have very much in it right now...I have a couple more pieces that are about half finished, that should be going up sometime soon. It was a lot more work than I thought it would be....mostly figuring out what to charge for shipping and all that. Here are a couple of pictures of pieces I have up for sale. One of them is the piece I showed at the end of my last post all finished in necklace form. The other is a canceled British postage stamp. It was actually difficult for me to list that one, because I wanted to keep it for myself! I am just in love with the heart cancellation mark over her crown.

I have some new journal pages done, I will try to get them posted tommrow. In the meantime, happy Wednesday everyone.

how to colorize UTEE

I know, I've been totally absent the last week. I am a bad, bad blogger. Sigh. But, in my excuse, I've had more work than I know what to do with. It seems like my list keeps getting longer and my days keep getting shorter. So to make-up for my absence, here is a little how-to for you:
HOW TO COLORIZE UTEE
It is no secret that I love UTEE. It has so many wonderful uses--and one of the best things about it is that it can be colorized. Here is what you will need, plain UTEE, alcohol inks, mixing container, Popsicle stick, and pearl-ex (optional.)



I like to use a watchmakers tin for mixing because it has a nice wide mouth and makes stirring easier. Put some UTEE in the tin. I like to use about 2 tablespoons, but you can do as much or as little as you like.
Next put 3 drops of alcohol inks in your UTEE. It will clump and ball up, this is where your pop sickle stick comes in--use it to mash and stir the UTEE dispersing the color.

You know it's ready when the UTEE is dry and stirs easily with no clumps. If you can't get it to this stage add a little more UTEE to help dry it out and keep working. You can, of course play around with color combinations--but I've gotten my best results with mixing the colors into the UTEE in separate batches and then stirring the powder together (for example mixing one batch of red and one of yellow and then combining the powders to make a nice orange) because sometimes mixing them directly makes the color get muddy.

Now, for the last step I like to add a little pear-ex to the mix. It gives the powder a nice shimmer. (Actually, what I do, is take half the powder and put it one container without the powder and mix the pearl-ex into the other half so I have both.) All you really need is one little scoop--a little but of this stuff goes a long way.
Here is a picture of a piece I did using colorized UTEE both with and without the pearl ex powder:

You should note that the colors will always be opaque, unless you mix in some white UTEE. There is just no way around it.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Some Work

I haven't gotten a lot done in the past few days--mostly because I started sleeping again and that really cuts into my productivity. There really aren't enough hours in the day.
But I have been working on some necklaces. They're mostly mock-ups for designs I'm, considering. I am hoping to have some stuff up in my Etsy store in the next month or so...but it seems like there are a lot of ducks to get into a row for that to happen.
In the meantime, here are a few of my pieces: