Please, don’t eat the daisies!

The title of a Doris Day film. Also, a sentence oft spoken in our home this week, in a slightly different way. As in no ‘please’ and no ‘daisies’. More like ‘Stop eating the flowers!’ or just ‘stopitstopitstopit’ whilst wresting the paper pulp from the cat’s jaws. Don’t get me wrong, it is nice that he involves himself with my hobby, but eating the hobby is not the way to go.

This is a WIP. My sister made some bare naked Christmas baubles (UK English) or ornaments (USA English. Hmmn, don’t know where Canada sits on this one?) to decorate. We thought it would be fun, given we both have quite large and very different stashes and quite divergent crafty leanings. I collected my orbs a few weeks ago but haven’t done much so far. I know I need to be more Christmas orientated but I think that is where I fall down. I really cannot get in the festive mood this early. But I had a naked ornament to decorate. Fun, right? I have never done this before. The base is a kid’s plastic ball, a wire hanger added and then covered in a textured papier mache layer.

Now to get going! I’m not certain where this particular bauble or ornament will end up, but it is a start. So with the ’not yet’ feeling in mind I deliberately travelled the ‘not Christmas’ road with my first effort, and started by punching many, many paper flowers to cover it with. In fact each flower you can see is two layers, offset a bit. I am not sure how many it took. I started making a circle around the middle, which took 16 whole ‘flowers’ for a bauble measuring about 6-7cm diameter. I had hoped I would just eyeball it and get a beautiful encirclement to meet up in the middle, without actually mapping or drawing it out. Fail to plan, plan to fail, came to mind as my circle was so ‘off’ by the time I had made it around the circumference once that one end was clearly heading north without a backward glance. To visit Santa, presumably. But actually it didn’t matter. Maybe I was lucky, but I just kept going and managed to cover it all without any odd gaps or some being more closely squashed together than others.

I think I am going to finish it off with a gentle dusting of glitter and some pearls here and there. I may also cover the wire with ribbon or tissue paper. If anyone has any good ideas feel free to stick them in a comment – I have plenty more baubles!

Supplies (possibly the shortest list ever): a Martha Stewart punch. It hasn’t got a name on it and I bought it so long ago I can’t remember!

 

 

 

 

What would Doris say?

Another one of those days when you want to achieve so much and it all goes horribly wrong. The bin is now full of Altenew aberrations, Craftwork Cards catastrophes and I just hope nobody heard all the expletives. Still, determined to produce SOMETHING I carried on. Really, on a day where you have found yourself telling the cat not to chew on the Eiffel Tower (so that is also now residing, damply, in the bin) you know that you should have retired gracefully. There is no chance of winning the battle, because it is already over and the victors are in the bar, slapping each other on the back and drinking from the trophy, whilst you lick your paper cuts and secretly hope they get hiccups.

Casting around for something, anything, I came across yet another paper pad I have bought and never used. It’s called Sweet Paris and, unsurprisingly, is all Frenchy-looking, with a few florals thrown in. I don’t now have time to give it a great deal of thought, so I just have to dive on in and see what happens. I chose the paper with the Eiffel Tower as the main image. I could have die cut another but didn’t want to find the cat munching on it for dessert…

I almost stopped at just the background paper and panel, but wasn’t sure if that was because I was embracing minimalism or losing the will to continue. Caffeine ensued, followed by lace, pearls and little flags of other papers from the pad. Sometimes this is a good way to introduce a bit of extra colour. I think now I wish I had not added the lace.

The crown is Glamour Dusted (every crown should be!) but you can only tell in the zoom shot:

And what would Doris say? Que Sera Sera, of course. Sometimes only the wisdom of Doris (Day) will do.