Friday, February 12, 2010

I Finally

Got me some inspiration. Bet you thought I was going to say cleaned the house or something, didn't you?

The past few weeks I've been feeling kind of discouraged and down and not very into making things. I had done some collages for the ceramic tile coasters out of sheet music from a 1930's school book and some pictures from a black and white 1940's Mother Goose book and a lot of them got ruined by the resin even though I put 4 layers of sealant over the paper. The resin will seep under the edges and stain the paper and the whole thing is ruined, or you'll miss some bubbles in the finish or a stray cat hair and again, the whole thing is done for. Then I kind of have to hide the trash because Keith gets all weird when I throw stuff away saying that there's nothing wrong with it and nobody will notice a bubble or a cat hair. Well, I notice it A LOT and I don't want someone to buy something that's messed up, so in the trash it goes and stay out of my trash anyway!

Like this one here, looks okay at first, and I just loved the way the collage came out, but along the top is where the resin seeped and there is a huge bubble right in the middle. You can't see it in the picture, but it's there and it's huge!


So, not wanting to ruin more of the sheet music or cute pictures from the mother goose book I thought maybe I should use the more fragile papers for regular collage, but what exactly did I want to do with it?

I cut some paper for the backs of the collages but didn't like the size of them or the flimsiness, didn't have any poster board or thicker paper, didn't want to have to go buy poster board or thicker paper, and then thought about all the book covers that get tossed after I've cut up the insides of the books and went hmm...

So, I cut some book covers up into the same size squares that I use on the ceramic tiles, made a collage on one which came out nice, but it was just not finished enough looking, so inspiration hit and why not make a dimensional collage with another bigger piece of bookboard behind the collage with coordinating papers on it?

And voila! I put some ribbon hangers on the back by gluing the ribbon down and then gluing paper over the entire back to cover up the ribbon and the book cover.



I made quite a few today, they are all drying here:


I was trying to decide if I should open up a second shop on etsy again for all the stuff that isn't jewelry but second shops are kind of a pain if someone wants to combine purchases and it's getting so hard to be seen with a new shop so I'll probably just stick with the one for now. I don't like to have too much in the shop, though, I know when I'm looking at a shop I get kind of bored after about 10 pages, so who knows what I'll do right now. I'll take some pictures of these tomorrow and then decide I guess.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Those are so cool! I love them! Way to find your muse!
:)