I recently made two sheep for my good (virtual) friend at
Elephant's Child who has been a wonderful support to my blog and who had expressed a liking for the needle felted sheep I had made for my craft stall. I felt that she should have some of her own as a thank you. They arrived safely with her in Australia and she very kindly featured them on her
blog post for today.
I think they made her smile. I am going to be making lots more sheep in the coming year!
I have also been playing with new things, like embossing folders on satin board. For those not familiar with embossing folders, they are a plastic folder which has a pattern on the inside. When they are run through a die cutting machine, the pattern is pushed into the paper or card and it looks like my examples above. The ones I used above are really detailed, but the detail has come through really well. They will probably be used in card making projects.
I have also finally got round to playing with my Brusho paints. These are a highly pigmented form of watercolour paint which come in little pots. They are in a crystal form, so for my first experiments, I wet the paper and sprinkled a little bit of the colour out - you have to make a hole in the lids and shake the pots. The crystals immediately spread out and formed rather lovely patterns and colour mixes. I did find that they stained my fingers a bit so need to be aware of that (the colour did go after a couple of days). Adding more water helped the colours to blend, but I found I needed to be careful as too much water made them more difficult to control and I started to lose some of the lovely effects.
They can be used as traditional watercolour paints and there are videos on Youtube to demonstrate lots of other effects. I like the effect for the background on a card, and I also like the way each one is unique as I would never be able to get the same image twice. I hope to do more playing over the Christmas break.
