Altered Holiday Bird

Today's the last day of year 2007, 1 more day to a brand new year ... exciting and nostalgic at the same time. I'm in a holiday mood and I've altered this little wooden Holiday Bird with stamping of snowflakes. The bird was then crackled and wings and a little ribbon were attached. Tips on altering the bird can be found here.

I love the crackle effect!

Here's wishing everyone Happy New Year ...

Materials - Pattern Paper: Sassafras Lass, Basic Grey; Stamps: Hero Arts; Ink: Tsukineko Brilliance, Tim Holtz Distress Ink Pad; Others: wooden bird, Ranger Inkssentials Crackle Accents, ribbon.

Love Is ...

... this.

Me & my baby at Christmas - perfect!

Winter Solstice Festival

This year's Winter Solstice Festival was fun. Fun, as in we had J's participation this time round when the family got together to roll the little colour flour-balls (normally in white and hot pink) which would later be cooked in sugar syrup. And this was what the little apprentice cooked up ...

Hard at work.


The finished product ... well, not exactly round balls, but i guess it's acceptable. In between making balls, we made some snowmen and mice flour-thingies too. FUN! I didn't manage to get photos of the cooked item as all got consumed before I had the chance - maybe next year then.

Altered Snowflake

I can't believe that Christmas is barely a week away. Time passes by too quickly, really. I haven't done any Christmas shopping yet and judging by my workload, it looks near impossible ... sigh! But, by some miracle, I have managed to do up this wooden snowflake which was given by a friend, so here it is...
I had painted the raw light wood with a layer of bronze acrylic paint followed by the pearl finish acrylic paint - you don't quite see the pearlescent effect in the photo (sorry, it's been rain weather these past weeks and really difficult to get better lighting for photography) but the pearlescence is 'mildly' there. Okay, after the layers of paint, goes on the swirl stamping done with the Brilliance ink, then I outlined the swirls at certain areas by hand to add a bit of detailing to the swirls and adhered the photo. Edges of the snowflake were then lightly inked with distress ink.

Next, my favourite Modge-Podge was applied to seal everything. Those little fan-like prongs in between the wood are actually of an embossed snowflake stamp that I had cut up and glued on. Finishing touches of beads and sequins were then glued on. Voila!!

Materials - Paints: Making Memories; Stamp: Autumn Leaves, Hero Arts; Pen: Zig Writer; Embossing Powder: Scrap-n-Crop; Others: wooden snowflake, sequins, beads, Modge Podge.

Altered Lunch Tin

Here's a lunch tin that I have finally finished altering. This took waaayy longer than planned due to lots of 'unforeseen circumstances' (I love how that makes it sound like such a valid reason!!) along the way. Anyway, it's finally done and I have to admit I really had a great time working on this - by far my favourite project so far in terms of enjoying the process!
Lined the tin cover edge with velvet ribbon.

I made a little tag too (on the right side of the handle) - an excuse to use my tag die-cut on my Cuttlebug.

This is what it looks like opened up.

A close-up. I adhered a pearl centre to the flower and added a little 'bling' to it. And finished it with my favourite process - Modge-Podge.

Materials - Lunch tin: Provo Craft; Pattern papers: My Mind's Eye, Basic Grey; Rick-rack: Phrase Cafe (EK Success); Flower: Prima; Others: Modge-Podge, Making Memories Pearl, various ribbons, bling.

A Whaat???

Okay. The picture you are about to see is a Caly-bird. Yup, you read it right, it's a Caly-bird. And no, it's not some kind of new bird species, but more like something J made up. She just came up to me one day and asked me, "Mummy, can you please draw me a Caly-bird?" Of course I patiently asked her what that was and what I got back was this look - this duh-helloo-where-have-you-been-living-all-this-while look. So never mind, J proceeded to describe to me in detail what a Caly-bird looked like and this is what I came up with ...

... and believe it or not, J squealed in delight when she saw my finished (err ... I think it's finished) drawing and went, "Yaay, that's Caly-bird!!" So I must have done something right. Oh well, now Caly-bird shares a space above her pillow in bed, her special treasure trove ...