craftgrrl | (no subject)

So my new years resolution was to post more to this community. It looks like it's not working out. :/ Anyway, here are some of my recent crafty things. Hopefully I'll be back soon with more stuff.

Oh, I need advice. I've been playing around with alcohol inks. It's a fun experience and you'll never know the outcome until the end. So far I have two wood pendants that I stamped and inked. I'm trying to figure out how to seal the color so they won't bleed or fade. I'm thinking regular wood varnish that you would use on any household wood piece with but I'm also not sure what to use. I obviously don't want it to wear off, yellow, or distort any aspect of my pieces. Does anyone have suggestions? And is there a such thing as a spray varnish? Is that worth my time?

First up is a makeshift card... or board drawing for my best friend's mom. A few months ago she was in the hospital so I figured this would be good to cheer her up. She loves moose. Meese. As you can see it's corrugated board and colored pencils. Freehand moose. I'm lucky the moose came out the way I wanted him to come out... cute!

Then I added fabric flowers!

Project #2: See all the colored papers? These are from my boyfriend. We work for the country's most hated student loan company. I work in Customer Communications and he in the mail room. Our building is an important building as it is unique to the other centers in the country. Our building has my department which corresponds to customers' emails and letters. And the mailroom is also unqiue as it serves as the mail hub for the entire company. Approximately 70,000 pieces of mail arrive to our center on a typical Monday. Most are payments. Some of our customers wrap their payments with colored sheets. If our customers do not write on the piece of paper, I get them. (But if the customer writes anything like a name, account number, or even a SCRIBBLE, the mailroom employees have to put it in the non-personal information (NPI) bin. Then the bin is whisked away by Cintas. SOOOOOO long story to get to the point, but this is my collection ready for projects.

I made a Valentines Day ... card. No it's not a card. Just a flat picture. The boyfriend wants me to frame it but I haven't gotten to it yet...

Big thanks to jennetters for the Easter egg dyeing tips. The left dozen is normal food coloring and the right dozen is dyed with the following natural dyes: (from top to bottom) red beets, yellow onion skins, and red cabbage. My mom wanted to try red beets since we make red horseraddish sauce for Easter dinner, and the water is purple after we boil the beets. Obviously, the eggs didn't get the beautiful purple coloring but it turned the white egg into a natural egg color. Go figure. So that was a bust. BUT my other natural colors are beautiful!

Lastly I made a super simple bookmark. I was using a bead fair postcard as a bookmark which had to go. Luckily for me I found something that did the trick. The Green Tea strip is a plastic clothing tag that came off my mom's sweater. I had matching satin ribbon, star pony beads and faux shell stars to sew on the ends. The ribbon is super long. My bad.