Friendship fabric book now finished!!

Hoorah, the cover was finally done today, so thats it, I'm done! It has taken me about a month to complete the whole thing but I have enjoyed every minute of it. I did not rush it, only a couple of hours a day, sometimes more sometimes less, I just went with my 'mood'


The closure is a glass bead which I removed today and placed a brass keyhole thingy on it and then sewed the  glass 'button' back on. I wrapped fine copper wire around the Sun ornament, placed it onto a flower I made ages ago as the colours were right, then onto a horrid gold sequinned star which has nice fibre and gold sequins bursting out of the edges, then a couple of white feathers and an odd bit of fabric left over from making the closure. Oh yes, and added 2 blue roses with a bit of bronze coloured mica painted on.


The 3 little roses type flowers I made by twisting odd bits of fabric and organza that were left over, still have'nt got the hang of this method yet.


The spine: I photographed the word 'Friendship' from my Dictionary, photoshopped it then sewed it over with bronze organza, which I then edged with some  lace. Topped off with a couple of antique style brads.
And, that is about it.
Tomorrow I am going to make some fancy wrapping for it before I post it to my friend on Monday.


The whole 'book' is quite sparkly, which really does not show on the photos. These latest photos, I messed around with alot, blurs, textures, masks thanks to an inspiring site: Kim Klassen  Great and really simple tutorials on creating these effects. I am still surfing her site. Some PS sites with tutorials are not very relevant I find but most of Kims tutorials are things we'd all like to do with our photos.

Dartboard Cabinet Card. Gatefold

I think this has to be the simplest card I have made to date, it certainly seemed easy to do.
My friend is big fan of Darts, won a few trophies himself. Therefore as it is his birthday this week I thought I'd make a Dartboard cabinet card.
The cabinet itself is covered, both sides, in wallpaper. The hinges are flourishes which I got cheap from Maya road (eBay), cut them down, inked them in gold and walnut stain. The 'handles' are metal buttons which I filed off the shanks at the backs with my handy Dremel tool. After that, just a case of sticking padded tape into the backs.

I made the dartboard in photoshop, changed all the wire numbers so it reads 'Happy Birthday Symon 44' (that's his age), added his birth-date at the top to match the 'Champion' lettering.
To get the angle of the darts, which happen to be: 1 in where 19 should be, and 2 in the number 6 = 1966...smart eh? I wonder if he will suss that?
So I took a photograph of an actual dartboard with the darts in those places, printed them off and cut them out onto chipboard. The flights have a bit of foam behind them to give some dimension, whilst the tips are glued straight onto the board..

Chalk boards made from matt black paper, written on with a white oil pastel crayon.
And that as they say is that.
By the way, the front of the envelope is a photo of Phil Taylor, THE top English Darts player in PDC, I know Symon is a huge fan of his. I distorted the banner he is holding in Photoshop, then glued it into Phils Hands.

Not a card, digital art

I've been wanting to up my knowledge of photoshop for sometime so I bought a French photoshop magazine for advanced users. Yeah, dive in at the deep end eh? I had to spend 2 days in hospital recently and read it cover to cover and was itching to make a start when I got home.

This took me 11hrs to create, should of been about 2hrs!  I chose this particular tutorial first because not of the actual end result, but because of the steps involved taught me what I wanted to know.
Anyway, its supposed to be based on Alice in wonderland, hence the magic mirror in her hand. However, by the time I'd reached the bit for adding the white rabbit.....I opted to add a white cat instead, by then I had some idea of how it all worked.
The original had much less colour in it, rather gloomy I thought so the overall colours are much brighter.
I did enjoy this project even though it was hard going at first.
Layers???? easy peasy lol. not! There must be at least 40 layers in this project.

Thank you to Alina Silwinska who wrote the tutorial in the magazine. The magazine is in several languages, downloadable on www.psdmag.org
Any comments welcomed