Little Boxes gallery now complete

If you want to be blown away by some amazing miniature works of art - please feel free to check out the gallery for the recent Little Boxes swap I hosted....

Gallery this-a-way

It has taken me forever to get all the house pics loaded up, but they are all there now.

Little Boxes on the Hillside - literally :)

Ever had great fun taking part in a swap, and then got to the end of it, looked at all the lovely little pieces of art you have been sent, and then thought "now what do I do with all these??"

I did :)

So I made this.

It doesn't fit anywhere near all of my new houses on it, because as the swap hostess I am lucky enough to have a full set of 55. That is despite it being huge (my foot wasn't in there deliberately but I have left it in for scale). But I have set it up so that the houses are interchangeable (all stuck on with velcro) - so they will all see duty on the hillside at some point.

Before the velcro went on:



It's just a cheapo box canvas coloured with acrylic washes - took no time at all, but I really like how it looks with it's little town in place.

Oh... My... God!!! :) This ain't a town it's a city....

Ever wanted to know what roughly 1,200 little cardboard (mainly) houses look like???

They look like that :) (click on the pic for a better view)

That is (most of - I'm still waiting on 2 or 3 sets) the output from my recent Little Boxes swap.

I have a fairly large living room - approx 24 foot by 12 foot - and that is it completely covered.

I couldn't fit them all into one photo - hence the rather odd looking pic - I took 3 and merged them together in Photoshop (thanks again to Darby for the lend of his PC :))

Insane isn't it??? lol

Darbs and I were up till around 3am this morning sorting them all out into envelopes to be sent to the swapees.

I'd say we were about two thirds of the way done when we gave up.

More envelope stuffing tonight for me tonight then!

It'll all be worth the effort though when people start to receive their swaps :)

More Little Boxes

I'm on the home stretch now :) 13 down, 8 to go

These four little buildings have one thing in common - they all feature image transfers from a tattoo magazine.

I'd forgotten how easy and how much fun gel medium transfers are from magazine pages - it's a lot easier than from a photocopy - less scrubbing to get the paper off.

I did one transfer into metallic paint on card, one onto cork, one over some vintage sheet music and one onto canvas.

First up a couple of little churches - these were made in pretty much the same way. The main body of each church was made by rubbing green and brown pigment inks over pale yellow textured card, and then sprinkling and heating some bronze UTEE randomly over the inked surface. I then cut the church shape, with a window, and stuck the transferred tattoo image behind. I stamped a Zetti image of filigree arches all over the churches just to add a little detail - and outlined the building and the window with copper Krylon pen. The little cross made from twigs from my garden and a bit of copper wire was the finishing touch.

The next building has a more traditional tattoo image - so I decided to make a tattoo studio for our little community - called the House of Pain :) Way to reassure the clientele :) The image transfer of the dragon tattoo is on a sheet of cork, which gives a nice texture. The roof of the tattoo studio is made from little vinyl brick stickers that I have had forever, and only remembered last night - they are perfect for this project. I have used platinum UTEE for the "cement" in between the bricks. And yes - I know a roof made of bricks is a little unusual :)

Finally I was inspired by the Japanese horse design on my last transferred tattoo to make an Oriental palace. I have a feeling that pagodas are more Chinese than Japanese, but hopefully nobody will mind my cross cultural faux pas.

The Emperor's horse was transferred onto canvas, out of which I cut the pagoda shape freehand. I painted roughly around the horse with red paint and stamped some kanji-like characters in black. Gold UTEE edging and an Oriental charm attached with red brads complete this piece, which was mounted onto card for stability.

I am so enjoying making these little beauties - and also receiving everyone else's, as the swaps are starting to come in now.

Please check out the gallery over the the Little Boxes web page to see some of the miniature masterpieces that have already been sent in - check back every weekend as I add more.

"Why is mum blendering bog roll????"

(is blendering even a word???)

This month over at the Green Pepper Press street team, the Crusade topic is paper casting.

This is something I have never tried before, but I will definitely be doing it again. It's fun of the highest order.


And it's hard work, but worth it, to keep a straight face as your teenage son and three of his friends look on incredulously as you merrily tear a toilet roll into little strips and run it through the blender :)

(My smoothies have tasted a bit odd ever since.... :D)

I made this huge job lot of casts in one night - some were made with moulds, the rest by pushing the pulp onto an upturned rubber stamp (I think the harlequin stamp could have done with a clean first!).


They took about 48 hours to dry, but once dry they were rock hard and ready to use. And a great thing about these paper casts is that they are really lightweight - so this is a great alternative to clay for projects that you don't want to be too weighed down.

And use them I have - on Little Boxes, of course :)


By the way - that one with the heart and wing? See the background? That is proof positive that you don't need a die cutting machine to use the Cuttlebug embossing folders - I did that with a rolling pin and good old fashioned muscle power :)

and they're all made out of ticky tacky

It was raining this afternoon, so I took Connor to the local soft play centre, and while he ran around for a couple of hours, I made my first Little Boxes.

3 down, 18 to go :)

The three were all made roughly the same way. For each one, I cut a house shape out of a thin piece of mica. You can't see the mica at all on the pics unfortunately - but it has that lovely sepia tone and shimmery finish as you move it about...it's one of my favourite things to use.

I stamped an image on the front of the mica house with black Stazon (all three are Stampotique stamps), and then painted them with acrylics on the reverse...so it didn't matter if I went over the lines a bit :)

Then I cut the same shape from a background piece of card - the boy's background is a spin-art piece made with Daler Rowney fluid acrylics, and then sponged over the top with distress inks - and the girl and the spider are over an old piece of sheet music stuck onto plain cardstock, with mica flakes added, which has been coloured with pink and green Stazon.

I made a window for each house out of an old postage stamp - the windows are cut right through the background card, so all that is covering them is the transparent mica.

And finally I stuck the 2 houses - mica and background - together, and then finished off with a border of thin copper tape.

These were a lot of fun to make - and I'm looking forward to making my next batch when I get the time.

Rally call - do you like making ATCs? do you love house shaped stuff? read on....

I am chuffed to have been given the go ahead by the lovely Angela Cartwright to run a (primarily) UK-based version of the Skylines and Skyscrapers swap that you may have seen featured in Somerset Studio magazine.

Our version is called Little Boxes (on the hillside).

Read all about it, and sign up to join us if you wish, here.



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