Altered Art Antics Weblog

I had a busy weekend and haven’t been able to get back to the computer until now. Whew! This past weekend we went out to reset the coordinates on the two caches that we hid last week. While we were out I decided that we really needed walking sticks to help us over obstacles and to poke around for hidden caches. I am not about to buy any kind of walking stick, so we looked along the trail and found three decent sticks laying about and took them home. I’ve been working on them to turn them into useable walking sticks. I am almost done with my son and daughter’s. I sanded them all down and then got out my woodburning tool and burned some designs into their sticks. My son’s stick had a rotten/bug eaten trench in it, that I decided to line with red beads and little white skull beads. Then his stick got pirate themed sayings and a treasure trail with an x at the end. I’ve been using my heat gun to bend some plastic gold pirate coins into the shape of the stick to glue them on. My daughter’s stick got ivy and flowers with hearts, then I took the drill and drilled a bunch of random holes that would fit a round sparkly bead, which I then glued in there. The top had a hole, so I glued a small shell into the top. Before I started with the beading, I stained them with some light stain and when the beads are completely dried on, I’ll varnish them. I think I’ll finish their sticks before I start on mine. I’ve sanded mine down, so it is ready to burn a design on, but I’m not sure what I want to do with it. Needless to say, between Geocaching, laundry and walking stick making, I’ve been uber busy.

Here are some more techniques that I promised, sorry they are a little late:

1. Glue on crumbled tissue paper and paint over

2. Tear instead of cut

3. Try adding pockets

4. Fold pages into different shaped pockets

5. Use eyelets to attach things to the edge of pages as 3D tabs

I hope I don’t end up repeating techniques as I get into this. LOL. I’m really wanting to pick a book to hightlight text on a page to use as a theme for each layout. I don’t know if everyone reading has seen that technique, I’ve seen it in many books. But, basically, you circle words on the pages that you like, that perhaps form a meaningful statement to you, then paint over all the other words on the pages and connect the remaining words and use that as the theme for your images. I really like that idea. I’ve got so many projects going, that I have a hard time getting any of them finished. Of course, an altered book takes a while because there is a lot to it. But it is fun and rewarding, so we just keep working. 

Something I found in a geocache gave me an idea for something else I’d like to make. It was a little copper wire dog, here’s a picture:

Isn’t he the cutest?! Maybe I’ll try bending some wire into the shape of some little animals, people, whatever, looks like it might be fun! Of course, I would need to “alter” it by adding all sorts of buttons, beads, whatever to it. I’ve been trying to collect little items out of the geocaches that we’ve been finding so I can use them in a piece of geocaching themed art. I found a 7 stage cache, where the first 6 have clues to the location of the last one, the last one being a two gallon pretzel container full of stuff! WOW! I think I’ll make a small nature journal, like the one we learned how to make this past weekend to put in there. It is all nature themed items, so that would work really well.

Gonna go finish watching Wipeout now, plus… dessert is calling me. Thanks for reading!