I made the Design Team on a rad Craft challenge blog and other Hot Air Balloons…..

Can you see that twinkle in my eyes????

I am so super excited. 

WOOOOOOHOOOOOOOO!!!!

I have been asked to join the Design Team for Our Creative Corner. 

Our Creative Corner is a design and craft challenge blog where your creative expression is unlimited in terms of what you create.  Readers are invited to take  inspiration from the creative process of an Internationally diverse (Canadian, Slovenian, French, South African ~me~, English and American) design team. Each Month, a challenge theme is hosted by one of the design team and readers are then invited to contribute their own interpretation or inspirations. 

From the Readers creative contributions, the best creative entry as well as 3 Top mentions will be chosen and will be gifted with some awesome crafty supplies from fantastic sponsors.  There is also a random draw where a random creator can win some more stuff.  There are sponsor spotlights – where the design team has a go at showcasing some of the cool products from our sponsors – and even then – readers are invited to contribute their creative interpretations and a randomly drawn winner will receive some prize goodies from that sponsor.  The Calendar for each month is as follows:

OUR CREATIVE CORNER CALENDAR

1st - Challenge issued
4th - Sponsor Spotlight
8th - Winner announced
11th - Surprise Guest Designer
18th - Sponsor Spotlight
22nd - Top Talent
25th - Sponsor Spotlight

Its all so exciting! I am so darn well stoked to have been asked to be on this amazing design team.

To celebrate my induction into the OCC fold – I decided to do an upcycle project.

(THIS CRAFT CHALLENGE BLOG JUST LETS YOU GO WILD IN YOUR CREATIVITY)

I like hangy things – and I have a thing for Hot Air Balloons.  I think they are perfectly whimsical.  So I decided to update the mobile efforts in my home and made some Hot Air Balloons from old lightbulbs, Christmas Tree Baubles, string, pegs and paint and ink.

Super cute huh?

Here is a very simple tutorial on how you can do that too!

You need this:

HOW TO:

• I used Distress Paint to paint the big baubles in the accent colours that would match the colour palette I have going in my lounge.  I used Dala Glass Glaze (but I think you could use Ranger alcohol ink as well), to stain the light bulbs.  I didnt bother hollowing them out because I wanted the fitting on the end so that I could make that into a basket.  Leave that to dry thoroughly.
• While that is drying you can start to work on making the easy-peasy macrame string wrap.  This is easier than it looks.
• You are going to to need 4 to 6 pieces of equal length string. When the string is folded in half or doubled, it should be long enough to be twice the length of your “balloon” .  If you plan on attaching the basket of the balloon to the same string wrap, make it a little longer.
• Get a small loop or ring of something. Thread each piece of string through the loop or ring so that it doubles over on itself and the tie it off with a love-knot.  For the purpose of showing you what I mean – I am using a curtain ring and red cord, but for my project, I used a beading jump ring and cotton string (or twine)
  
• The next step is to join the adjacent tails of each set in a knot so that it makes a diamond shape – so it should go like this
• First row:

• The second row is done by joining the original set of strings back together. So A1 + A2,  B1+B2, C1+C2,  D1+D2,  E1+E2,  F1+F2 must all join back up together so that you have a another concentric row of diamonds. 

• And for third, fourth, fifth, sixth, however many concentric rows – you just alternate between joining the adjacent strings (ie - A2+B1, B2+C1, C2+D1, D2+E1, E2+F1, F1+A1) and then bringing the string set siblings back together again for the next concentric row (ie - A1 + A2, B1+B2, C1+C2, D1+D2, E1+E2, F1+F2 ).  That really is how easy it is to make the string wrap.

• Slide the String Wrap over the bauble or the Lightbulb and wiggle it around until its nice and centred and snug.

• To make the basket, for the big Baubles, cut a small piece of toilet paper inner tube down to size.  Take apart about 6 pegs so that you have 12 pieces of peg legs.  Glue those on to the inner tube.  To make it stay fast – you can secure it with a rubber band – like this:

• Attach the “basket” to the String wrapped Balloon.  My mom and dad came over for a visit and I got them to be props for me to show you this.

 

• If you want to you can use a dye-spray to add a little more colouring and distressing to the whole balloon like I did.  But they look just as cute uncoloured I think.  For the lightbulbs – I just wrapped jute cord around the base of the lightbulb and added some beads for interest.

• Final Product Drying:

So there you go – be sure to go on over to Our Creative Corner and  check out the amazing projects the other Design Team members have come up up with leave a comment here or there if you liked this tutorial. 

See you soon

Tincan (Candice) Crafter

20 cards in a Scrappy flash

Just a show

I have been lost in real life recently - sorry for neglecting you!

Hi there guys

I am so grateful to be back here in blogland one piece after a whirlwind of life-storms.  But I am still here, relieved to be standing again and getting back to what I love doing CRAFTING!!!!    I do have some exciting news that I will be able to share with you later on this month.  Its all very exciting and I hope I have neglected you all too much that you havent written me off already so that when I do share the big adventure you will still be here to love it as much as I am loving it right now.

Now onto sadder news.  This last Saturday, the legendary South African Maestro Christian (Bunny) Ashley-Botha - retired director of the World renowned Drakensberg Boys Choir, passed on in his home after a long struggle with illness.  I was very fortunate to have known this epic man personally through his son with whom I had had a close relationship with, with whom you might be familiar with as my multiple references to him by my little nickname "the chairman". He was such a beautiful man.  He was so open and warm and full of love.  I loved him dearly and will miss his beautiful energy.  In addition to that, he was a musical genius and he touched so many lives.  I will miss dear uncle Bunny and cherish him in my heart forever.

I so wanted to send messages of hope and comfort and acknowledgement to his family, who stood steadfastly with him as he battled his illness.  I saw such a pure example of love and devotion to him by them. I didnt want to send just ordinary sympathy cards, because I felt that was too impersonal for a family that became my sort of other family for a while.  

What I eventually did was create personal cards that spoke my heart to some message that I wanted to share, and sent a personal letter in each one.  I wanted to share these with you.  

tincanhandmade.blogspot.com

tincanhandmade.blogspot.com

tincanhandmade.blogspot.com

12 Tags of 2014 – October

Well it’s October and time for another Tim tag….and it is truly scary because here in good ol’South Africa - Halloween is a non-event. 
Our kids dont trick or treat, I wear crazy outfits everyday and the only horrifying thing about the 31st of October every year is that we realize that Christmas is around the bend and we should have started saving earlier for that huge Christmas splurge. 
So to keep myself locally relevant – my big trick for this month is that I am going to pass on the all the Boo, pumpkins and Ghoulery , but treat you to my reinterpretation inspired by the October Tim Tag…..see what I am doing there huh with the trick and treat and all of that? I have kept the key design elements and techniques and adapted them to fit my needs.



Here below is my method of madness.
– the /ink/paint spatter. 


We dont have the distress spray stains in South Africa yet so I had to come up with a new plan – I soaked a regular paint brush in Distress Ink Refill Ink and used the Distress Spray Tool to “spray splotch” the ink onto the background.

- the texture paste & stamped, masked elements.





















I used the eye from the Stamper’s Anonymous Oddities Collection,a pastel gel pen to colour in the iris and the Victorian Velvet Pen to colour in skin.  You can’t really see it all that well in this picture but I used a dark purple metallic gel pen to give the eye some eyeliner too.  the  and the Eyechart stencil.  I felt like the stencilled paste needed a little more contrast against the hectic splotch background there so I rubbed some metallic tarnished brass Distress Stain on it, then I sprinkled some embossing powder on that and heat set.  Finally I took a black pen and outlined the embossed bits to create the illusion of a shadow.

- the pumpkin bit
I played around with the stamped eye image again and cut it out etc – but it looked well psycho, like a carved out eye on a ransom note or something. I hated that – yeah I am my own hater!  In the meantime I was experimenting with the bottle dies again.  I wanted to create a vintagey handblown glass looking bottle for some other project and I was spreading on Clear PVC Cement on a bottle acetate die-cut and loving the effect.  It suddenly dawned on me that I could frame the eye in the vintage bottle.  To create the blue glass effect – I squirted some alcohol ink on the craft sheet and using the waterbrush, I coloured the reverse side of the bottle die-cut.  I dripped some plain old alcohol into the coloured bits to give it more of a uneven effect like the way light catches old glass. I glossy accented on top of the dried PVC Cement bits.
- the boo part
 



















Those Alpha-tiles were not available yet here as well.  So my fix was to cut scrabble like tiles from board and stamp my sentiment.  I didn’t have a tiny numbers stamp-font so I wrote in the letter values for the scrabble tiles.




- the tinsel ,trinkets and the trim


I liked the look of the stripy tag hang on the original tag so I substituted the baker’s twine in for the tinsel bit.  See those trinkets there on Tim’s tags?  I thought it would be in-theme to substitute that with a rolled up eye-chart.  I had bought those tiny acrylic versions that Stamper’s Anonymous once put out and it had a tiny version of the eyechart stamp in one of those collections.  I did do Monocle thingie with the eye rub-on, and attached it to the top an all but it looked lame and too busy at that point, so I detached it and left the tag as it is.