Up the Wooden Hill to Bedfordshire!

First and foremost, Happy New Year, may you all be blessed in 2015. This is a month of reflection and at least for the first few months adherence to some resolutions. One of my main resolutions is to spend more time in my craft room. When we moved to our present home I tricked out a craft room in the basement and I don't like it down there. My last room, although small, had a floor to ceiling window looking out on a mountain creek surrounded by 200' cedar trees and birds singing all the time. We haven't a spare room to devote to my crafting so it's the basement or nothing. If any of you saw the room I craft in you'd think me a chronic complainer as the room is large, well equipped, and beautifully finished but in this space I am not inspired. A friend of mine (who is a psychiatrist incidentally) decided I am mildly depressed and suggested I take a walk in the woods a few times a week for inspiration and hang art that inspires me on my craft room walls. Anyway the outcome of this is I have made myself a promise to be much more productive, by setting achievable goals.

If I am slightly depressed (only where crafting is concerned) I do know a great contributor, ELECTRONICS!!! In a 3 month period my hard drive crashed, my much loved camera broke, and on this project my printer failed when I tried to print on linen. Actually I was proud of myself, after getting over the fact my long planned linen growth chart was doomed for failure I came up with the idea of a child's carousel without too much sorrow for myself. It was hard to capture the whole thing in a single photo but here are two shots of it.

For the TUTORIAL this month I will take you through the steps to create your own carousel.

I started with a wooden embroidery hoop. First I painted it with silver paint and then punched out the letters to spell "Twinkle twinkle little star" which were covered in glue and extra chunky silver glitter. That was all left to dry. Next I  used my big shot to punch out the star and moon border by Memory Box. That was painted silver and the stars and moon glued, glittered, and left to dry.

The silver hoop was assembled with the letters and border. I cut silver cord in 2 lengths the shorter cords hold the children and the longer cords hold the stars on the bottom and the upper half attaches to the hanging hook. The cords are glued inside the hoop. There are 5 alternating long and short cords. Lastly I glued strips of silver paper inside the hoop to hide where the cords are attached to the hoop.

The next step was my favourite of course, because it involved colouring. I used  "Bedtime Kids" to create these adorable little sleepyheads. I love this wonderful new Crafty Secrets set and it is wonderful value with 55 images.                                          

To create the kids I printed the five images you see hereand I paper pieced their pyjamas. The wonderful thing about digital papers is that you can scale the paper to any size you want. If I had used a normal sized patterned paper the scale would have been way too large. I shrank the patterns until the print looked about right for the images, overlaid the images and then cropped the excess paper so I wouldn't waste much ink (a trick I learned from Melody Clement). For each child I printed 4 images, one with the image exactly the way it comes, the second with the image reversed, the third with the image printed on the patterned paper, and the fourth reversed. Of the two images printed on patterned paper I cut out any skin part and the plain printed image I coloured the skin parts and slippers with copics. The pyjamas were shaded with copics as well.

I had 15 foiled stars and I cut out 15 glittered stars to back them with. To assemble I glued the pj's on the kids and glued the backs and fronts together sandwiching the silver cord between them. The stars were assembled the same way with a foil star on the back and a glittered star on the front face, three to a cord. The five cords were tied together at the top and wired to an "s" hook.

If I was to make it again I would have used fishing line as the cord didn't allow the sandwich to lie as flat as I would have liked. However the silver cord does look pretty .

"Now, go visit the rest of the design team blogs below and be sure to leave them some love. Then, link up your own Crafty Secrets project on the BLOG and you could win the entire Bedtime Kids Stamp Set! We’ve loaded a free image from the set into this month’s Linky Party post as our way of thanking you for playing along. You can download the image and use it in your Linky Party project, or use one of the FREE PRINTABLES found on the blog page. The rules are simple: Just create a NEW project featuring Crafty Secrets, and link it up on the Crafty Secrets blog before midnight Pacific Time on Sunday, January 18th. "

Crafty Secrets Design Team

Kathy Clement, DT Leader  http://www.kathybydesign.com

Darlene Pavlick, Dar’s Crafty Creations    http://darscraftycreations.blogspot.com/

Diane Hover, Nellie’s Nest   http://www.nelliesnest.blogspot.com

Melody Clement, Paper Melody’s   http://papermelodys.wordpress.com/

Michele Kovack, Thoughts of a Cardmaking Scrapbooker   http://chelemom.blogspot.com/

Shantaie Fowler, Inking Pink  http://www.inkingpink.com/

Sheila Rumney, Sheila Rumney Design and Photography,   http://www.sheilarumney.com/

Guest Designer

Our own dear,

Vicki Chrisman, http://vickichrisman.blogspot.com/

Thanks so much for visiting me at Paper Pass Times

Happy New Year

Elizabeth