Book Review- Collage Playground

Collage Playground: A Fresh Approach to creating Mixed-Media Art by Kimberly Santiago is full of wonderful layering and mixed media techniques for creating collages. Several steps beyond anything you may have done in school, these techniques would also apply to rubber stamping and scrapbooking very well.
She uses old textiles, scanned images and lots of color to create these works of art. The beginning has instructions for the techniques used, followed by projects. Because of the nature of the pieces, and because it is an art book, the projects are starting points rather than hard and fast step by step projects. They give you ideas for ways to piece, layer, and create your own collages.
My favorite project in the book is the Anatomy of a Flower, using simple techniques in an elegant way, it's the most inspirational for me. My favorite technique in the techniques section is weaving. The use of old textiles in the books just thrills me as well. There is a vase full of flowers made with vintage handkerchiefs that comes in as my second favorite. It's bright, colorful, cheerful and the technique would work just as well with scraps of vintage floral fabrics from old treasured dresses. Or for that matter, it would work if you abandoned the flowers/vase theme altogether and designed something of your own based around your scraps.
It's a lovely book, lots of colors and ideas. It reminded me of how much fun collages were to make as a teen, and showed me a lot of ideas for playing with them as a grown up.

My son, who has never done any collaging, really liked this book and has been collecting pop culture ephemera to make his own collages. So that's a bonus. I love seeing my teens inspired to create.

You can buy the book directly from the publisher at MyCraftivity.com or by clicking the Amazon.com link above.The Amazon link is an affiliate link and helps pay some of the costs of maintaining this site.

Printable eagle box

This box is a bit out of the ordinary for my usual posts. Most of my designs are made and tested at 100 ppi which makes a nice small file for the web and still works fairly well for most of my designs. Every once in a while, I do one at 300 ppi. This template is one I didn't even have in 300 ppi until today.

I was trying for a faux leather effect, and that's the other difference between this and my more usual fare. It's very ink intensive. I do like how it turned out though, and my test model was made from the PDF so I could see exactly how the PDF would print out.

You can get the PDF here. This is the biggest file I've ever posted here, and will take a few minutes to download.  The reason I made it such high quality is that eagle was a long way away, I didn't want to resize the image to fit the box. 

I hope you like it. The pdf also includes one of the photos I took of that eagle if you want to use the image for anything else.

A printable box with a special story

The perspective makes the box look kind of small, it's a 3x3x1 inch box.

A little over 15 years ago, I started an afghan made up of lots of solid color yarns from garage sales, thrift stores and gifted stashes. It's all acrylic yarn of course, got as cheaply as possible. I crocheted hundreds of 3 round granny squares, edged them in single crochet with black yarn which mostly did have to be store bought. The squares are set on the diagonal which creates a nifty looking zig zag edge on all sides.

It took forever. It fits a queen sized bed nicely. 

15 years and 1 day ago, a week overdue to deliver my child, I became absolutely convinced that she wouldn't be born until the blanket was finished. I was frantic to finish. I called a friend to take me to get the last of the black yarn I needed. I worked through the day and halfway through the night. Finally.. it was done. It was as pretty as I thought it would be. Reminiscent of stained glass, somewhere around 40 colors of yarn total. Some only one or two squares of a specific color. No two squares next to each other in the same color. 

15 years ago today, my daughter was born.

Happy Birthday Queen of the Turnips. 

(she still sleeps under that blanket, which she absolutely considers hers) 

ETA: the knitting needles in the picture are a handmade pair that's very nearly done that I'm giving her for her birthday. I will be posting the pattern on Beadwork at BellaOnline when they are done. But not today. Today we celebrate!

Polka Dot Semi-circle close box

I haven't done a polka dot box in a while. This is a new size of an old template, and it's one of a set I'll be putting up on my Etsy soon. I'll bundle up a few different sizes in this style.

Click on the images for the full size 100 ppi versions. I did a couple different colorways, but if you have a request for a specific color, just let me know. The finished size is 2.8 x 2.8 x 1 inch deep.

I hope you like them! I'll post it on the Don't Eat the Paste Facebook page when the template set is up on Etsy.