Yay! A weekend off!

I finally have a whole weekend off. Of course it will be my only one until the store opens in about a week and a half, so I must take advantage of it artistically. I get Saturdays off but not Sundays... I will start my Wings(6 ATC's) swap tomorrow. I have lots of background ideas! Speaking of backgrounds, here are a few I did a couple weeks ago I forgot to post here. I just played with various types of paint on a gessoed ATC. As soon as I start building on these I will post more.

I joined Swapbot today! I am very excited about it. I trolled the Forums a bit after joining 3 swaps. A little scary since there is alot of 'beware' stuff in there. I will keep it simple for my first couple swaps. Two of them are the smae guidelines as most of the swaps in my Yahoo group and the other one is more complex. I wanted to make myself a wand though and this way I can put my effort into someone elses. (I told my honey I wanted to make myself a wand, LOVE harry potter, he cracked up-silly boys!) I think I enjoy making for others more than myself. I seem to have a hard time finding the stop point when it's for me, but it leaps out at me on others..... Sigh. As long as the stuff I send looks good, I guess that's all I need?

And seriously! Must make myself something this weekend. I've spent the last few days making some zip loc baggies of 'goodies' to send with my MMAN swaps so I can throw them in there when I'm ready. I think that will make preparing the packages super fast!

I'm out for the night.... Must get some rest so I can get up and CREATE!

This weeks WU entry

I got my entry done today and got it posted. Such a relief to get it done. It's not that it was stressful but I wanted to finish it last night. But after the head injury incident, I was still not in good shape yesterday. The background I did for it was beautiful. I had this blue sparkly paint. Only thing is its washable. So after coating my surface and dropping more glitter in it, I heat treated it with my heat gun. Then I needed to finish it. Well thats where I got stuck. So today I went online searching for quotes about 'night'. I found one and it inspired the rest of it. All in all I like it. (top photo)

I copied the background technique onto another piece because while I do like trading these out, I am sad to see them go. (bottom photo) So this way I can keep my art by making another one very similar but not the same. I just need to find another tree!

Answers!

Thank you kindly for the wonderful comments! To answer your questions.... (since it won't let me do it on those posts....)

#1) Beeswax is awesome! I took the little pellets... natural yellow ones... and kind of pressed them down a little onto the paper so it would stay. They are sticky so it works well. This holds them down if you are using a heat gun. (you can also use a craft iron, but you can't watch it as easily) Once you have squished em', turn on your heat gun and keep it about 3 inches from the wax. Make sure you have your project on something to protect your work surface. The wax goes where it wants! You can try to direct it by tipping the card up and aiming the heat down. If you don't have enough wax, stick some more on and repeat. It takes a bit to get used to it. The piece under "Paris" is my first one. Travel was the second. Just experiment away and see what results you get~! I'm gonna try adding crayon wax shavings next! I'll post that when I do.

#2) The clock face is vellum. I bought it in a pack of assorted clock faces from Walmart. I wish they still had them.... I'd buy more! As soon as I get Challenge #4,I will post the next stage of my card.

If you haven't seen the book "ATC Workshop", I highly recommend it! This book has sooooo many ideas! Anyone interested in mixed media, altered art, or ATC's will LOVE it! It can be applied to almost anything! I finally really dove into it and can't put it down.