Kerry-Jean Watson

So, now that Christmas is over and we are well and truly in to the new year I can post my creations for the December season of gift giving. As money was a major issue this year, the task was to make cards and presents from things or materials I had at home.

The Christmas Tree
I wanted to put up a Christmas Tree but know I couldn’t spend a lot of money on decorations and the tree itself. I had found some great inspirational sights with decorations made with just scrapbooking supplies, most which I had. I found a site that gave a demo on making paper snow flakes and I got to work making hand made decorations. There were some Christmas tree shaped ornaments  and LOTS of snow flakes cut out of some very light weight tracing paper.

The Christmas Cards
While making all the decorations for the Christmas tree I started cutting out half size snow flakes, which worked really well on the hand made cards I did for family and one or two friends. I am not huge on Christmas cards and sending them out but I made an exception this year.




The Christmas Gifts
In all honesty I began making the gifts in October, to make sure they were done in time. As I had made one of these wooden robots earlier in the year for a friends birthday, I know what to expect. The hard part was working out how to personalize them. It came down to each wooden robot, AKA Personal Desk Protector, having something painted on their chest plate. Each Personal Desk Protector came with a hand made instruction manual explaing to the owner of the important elements of owning a Personal Desk Protector. They were as follow: Name him, Dust him from time to time, make sure he is able to have a clear view of you.

The Personal Desk Protector were named as followed:

Rose

Jeffry

Boris

D’man Obi

G’bot

This is the bots in production having their arms tied on.

Some recent birthday cards I have made.

This friend likes Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory. He saw a t-shirt he liked but I couldn’t afford to get him one, how ever I made a card with the t-shirt on the front.

My father asked me to make a card for my uncle who lives in the UK. The theme was to be Motorbikes, so i looked for vintage looking bikes and found this one.

Due to some very annoying cloud cover, the Luna Eclipse of 10 December was not visible from Adelaide. But I did get this picture.

The newest additions to the collection

This was given to me by a friend who has moved to India is devote her life to spiritual enlightenment. I think of her when I use the set, remembering my last visit to her in Melbourne this year. GOOD CHIA TEA!


This little set was a luck find. I was having a terrible day, feeling very run down, I had to go pay for an event I was to go too in a few weeks at a shop. After I went for a little walk around and found an op shop. This was sitting on the shelf near the back and I grabbed it straight away. I don’t think it was ever used before it found it’s way to the op shop.

These last three cups were found again at an op shop, with no saucers. I searched all the shelves and still could not find the matching saucers. So upsetting, but I bought them anyway.

In the last few weeks I have managed to design a tea cup display stand, after seeing some for sale. I altered the design a bit so that I could use what materials I had and also so that they would fit better on my shelves. Once I have finished them up I will put up soem pictures.

I took some time this weekend to update my archive of my toy collection.
Below are my two newest Nerf guns, not sure what  my total count is up to now.




I made this little guy for a friend, who ended up naming him Watto. Watto is made from pine and aluminium. I have made a few more wood robots, but the pictures of which will only be put up after Christmas

This robot was a great find at an op shop a few months back, and yes he came in his box too.

 
Here we have the Borg Queen Barbie made by a friend of mine. The little wined up robot was sent to me by my brother for my birthday.

For the last 12 or so months, I have been hunting at scrapbook, card making shops and the World Wide Web, looking for a post mark stamp for card making and scarp booking, with no luck. So, remembering I had a rubber carve block, I looked in to how I could go about transferring an image to the block for carving.  After hunting through tutorials I found some thing easy that I would attempt. First I took a piece of baking paper (the wax coated stuff you use for cooking), which I cut a bit smaller than and A4 page and taped it to a basic piece of printing paper. I has to assist the page through the printer feed to start but the image come out on the other side perfect. This printed image was then place printed side down on the rubber block and I gave it a little rub, just to make sure there was contact with the block. See, the ink from the inkjet printer will not absorb in to the wax paper, making it perfect for image transfer.

With My set of carving tools I began carving out the white areas of the block. I started with a less detailed design first to get used to the carving. I eventually worked out a method that I could handle. I had to just accept that this would not be a perfect perfect rubber stamp because the detail in areas was just to fine to be able to carve out.

I am VERY pleased with my first attempt at rubber block carving. The only thing is I haven’t had an easy time finding the Easy Carve rubber block on line, but I do know and art store in Adelaide that stocks them.

 

So, I attended the Craft and Gift Fair over the weekend, and although there wasn’t a lot in the way of suppliers stalls there was heaps of gift stalls. Some great stuff, some not so great stuff, and then some stuff that you wonder how the hell they got included in to the show. I was able to spend a lot of money at one scrapbook supply store though, which was good. The following photos are of some of the REALLY amazing stuff, that I had no hope in hell to be able to afford to get.

Marianna Bunning of Melbourne. She specialises in Picture framing. Very nice stuff.


http://shop.jasesbooks.com.au
AMAZING collection on leather bound books and journals and note books.


Reflections of India
http://www.reflectionsofindia.com.au
I loved a lot of the items at this stall, some beautiful Indian statues

 

Rodney and I went hunting for a car part last week, and started at a car yard. Some interesting wrecks around.