Trying out some stuff...

Take one sheet of 70lb artists paper (which I buy by the roll), spray with water and then crumble into a ball. Put the ball into a pot of warm tea water and let it cook for about 30 minutes at which point it will have stained brown. Pour out the tea water and let the paper dry. Unless you are me, try and open it up and see it ripping everywhere. One day I will have the patience. Once dry spray with water again and place under a weight to flatten it out even more.

Now you can start drawing in your map. Use the contours of the crumpled paper as a guide for islands, rivers and lakes. Fill it all up. Afterwards add your creatures and boats and other piratey stuff. This one is my test map and I won't post the finished project until after I give it to the kid. The paper has a wonderful texture of crumpley old map, I even tried ironing it to flatten it out since it just wasn't getting there. I haven't decided if the finished map will be ironed or not...

In this one I drew the islands before I stained it with tea, you can see some sharpie bleed in a few places and it made the lines a bit fuzzy. It could be an interesting feature to an old map though...

This one kind of disintigrated in a few spots which may make the drawing hard. I'd iron it for sure first.

I keep adding to this! I'm going to use niece and nephew names for the places on the map and there's going to be a Duct Tape Island somewhere with maybe Adam and Jamie's duct tape boat in the water.

Fairy Godmothers

I had 2 birthdays come up, my niece and her cousin and I just finished and delivered these yesterday. The niece loved it and her cousin hasn't gotten hers yet.

The pages are chipboard which I covered with scrapbook paper and then a rectangular sized piece of cotton muslin. After it all dried I got some stencils and purple spray acrylic and stenciled small parts of each page.

When that was dry I punched 3 holes in each page with a template to keep them all the same.

I added some vintage pictures and then did the stencil spray with a different stencil and green paint this time.

I printed out the names and titles and sprayed all pages with alcohol based pink, purple and green.

I bound both books (so they would be easier to manage) and doodled over every page a few times. This part took the longest and I could still be doing it now.

Next up, rub ons. I had a bird, some flowers and butterflies and added them.

And now the objects. This was tricky because some could be glued and some had to be tied to the pages. For the heavier stuff to be tied I punched holes with an awl, careful of where on the other side it came out and then cut off the little mound you get when pushing though the chipboard. I colored in the chipboard surrounding the holes with markers that matched their backgrounds.

I added some images to cover up the waxed linen thread from tying stuff down.

And then came stickers glued down and some were glued over the top to seal it all. Some pages were painted with more and more doodling.

My favorite parts: the teeth. Paper clay baked to speed up the drying and then trimmed to look like little teeth. I glued the cork in both vials so some crafty little kid doesn't get it off and eat them.

This is some irish money I had leftover from a trip.

The books were rebound with embroidery floss and waxed linen. The ends were long enough for a paper bead each.

So Stella knows she has an awesome Aunt Beth.

AR

What the augmented reality app looks like.

Augmented Reality

I've had some ideas for augmented reality for a while now and after searching and playing around with different tools I found something that will work for some of the projects.

1. Download the Layar app with your smart phone, install and open.

2. Point your phone at this picture.

3. Let me know what you think.

This has worked for everyone who's tried it so far and this is only the first of me playing around with this program. The company was mainly thinking of AR as an advertising tool but I think there's a lot more that can be done.

Vivian Preview

This is one of the sleeves of my now finished Vivian sweater. I have some bad pictures (taken inside) but here's a close up for now.