For those of you who are reading my blog for the first time, I am a mixed media artist with degrees in Mathematics. Don’t ask how that happened, it just did I love to use materials that would otherwise be thrown away in my art. Things like soda cans, plastic packaging, plastic bags, fabric and paper scraps, old magazines and books, all find their way into my art and craft projects. My books and this blog are both logs of my adventures.

My latest project was an upcycled smash journal. I love what EK Success has developed and I bought and worked on a pretty pink smash journal for my 2011 scrapbook but I wanted to try my hand at an upcycled version.

The current post though is about a project I did a while back and that can be found, along with many others, in my book, Crafty Cans and Perplexing Plastic.

I made these small Valentine, Birthday and Baby cards using some paper scraps and soda cans. Here is how you can make your own.

Gift Cards

Materials:

• Small plain cards with envelopes
• Pieces of die-cut and embossed plastic and aluminum
• Double sided tape
• Decorative paper
• Ribbons
• Brads
• Embellishments

I love making smaller cards to give with gifts and the smaller cuttlebug embossing folders give the perfect sized embossed die-cuts for doing exactly that! Use punches or smaller dies to cut out the small embossed pieces. The way to emboss the soda can aluminum is as foolows. First you have to cut the can, taking off the top and the bottom. This is a little tricky so I would advise that you wear plastic gloves while doing this. Once the top and bottom have been removed you should have the middle aluminum piece. Flatten it out into a sheet. Use this sheet as your metal to be embossed. Either die-cut little pieces and embellishments from the aluminum and then emboss it using the cuttlebug embossing folders or emboss it first and then die-cut it.

For these cards I used the Cuttlebug stamp die to cut out the embossed stamp designs.

Add some colored paper and card, color in your embossed pieces using sharpies to match the paper and then add some ribbons and embellishments to create one of a kind designer cards.

I always make these in large batches since they go fast. These small cards also make great little card sets to give away to friends and family or to sell at holiday or other craft bazaars!

All three books are based on upcycling techniques. Turn soda cans, plastic packaging, fabric scraps, old books and magazines into works of art. Everything from cards, frames, scrapbook layouts, bags, ornaments and table decor!

The Ultimate Guide to Upcycling can also be downloaded for free if you sign up for my blog.

Yesterday was an amazing day. I had lunch with a team at our company and also found the time to shop and get an awesome pair of shoes while waiting for our order to arrive I had a lovely evening with friends and followed up on some very interesting projects at work. Got a few lucky breaks and made some breakthroughs and just generally felt blessed and happy. The feeling was something I wanted to document since I had been feeling pretty tired lately and a little overwhelmed with massive to-do lists both at home and work.

I thought that this would be the perfect way to start my upcycled smash book and so here is what my first page looks like!

I used some memorabilia from the places that I went to eat. I went for lunch to a restaurant and had the most amazing soup, steak and dessert. In the evening I had cheese fries and frozen yogurt! I tried blueberries for the first time in my life! Never thought I would like them but surprisingly I did

I added some stickers to highlight the happenings and special moments of the day. I found some awesome shoes and bought those and spent time organizing life at work and getting things done. The shoes were represented using some really cute stickers of shoes and sales. The paper bag from one of the eateries made a very cool pocket for a journaling card. I used the card to add some personal notes and journaling that will not be visible to everyone going through the book.

I used a black sharpie marker to add some basic information about the day.

Making this page was quite a smashing experience and I felt that adding things as the year progresses is a lot better than waiting for the year to end and then making a book. I did that for my 2011 smash book and it turned out to be quite a long project and got a little tiring in the end. I actually enjoyed my smashing session yesterday and since I had to make just one page I really enjoyed trying different things and adding new layers. Much better than having 40 pages to do all at once

Here are some more detailed shots of the page. I used some stickers, some memorabilia, some chipboard embellishments and a Sharpie marker. I like limiting my supplies. It forces me to play with what I have in a creative fashion and since this is an upcycled smash book, the goal is to keep things simple and green.

Have an artsy day y’all! I will be back soon with more crafty adventures

I am sorry to be digressing from my usual smash book upcycling series of posts. The fact of the matter is that my mind works in an enormously weird way. I tend to go one way and then another and then back again. You may have noticed that I started my upcycled smash and then went on to write about the Strathmore Artist workshops, which are quite awesome btw, and then went on to discuss how I would make a book of ideas and inspiration and now I am talking about desks and decoupage. This my friends is a hazard of taking a creative journey with me. I change course quite often, but always manage to find my way back and complete my projects. So have no fear we will be finishing the upcycled smash over this weekend. I just have so much jampacked in this week that I have not been able to find the time to take the book forward. My apologies for that and for this long explanation.

Back to the desktop. I loved the way it turned out at home and then ofcourse I had to take the same technique to my table at the office. I had just moved into a bigger office with large blank walls and L-shaped desks. The walls became the perfect canvas for some steampunk art and the desk was a perfect candidate for decoupage.

Here are some pictures of my desk.

The look is pretty simple to duplicate. I started out by using white glue to cover the entire desk with pages from an old book. I used one on the history of literature. Then I started adding some illustrations and other items that I had saved. Everything was glued on, from maps to illustrations of hot air balloons and airships to pictures of paintings. Once this second layer was on and had dried, I used some stamps to stamp motifs in black. Once again I let the table top dry and then added some finishing touches like stickers and smaller ephemera.

I really loved the way  the table top turned out. After a coat of varnish to seal the top I used a piece of glass to make sure no harm came to my beloved table. Working at it is a joy and a constant source of inspiration. Do try this at home. You can use a small table or book cover or even a large jar or vase as your canvas.

Hope y’all have an artsy day. I shall be back soon with more crafty stuff to share!

Therefore I have resolved to make a book of inspiration. Have you noticed that since the new year has started I have been all about making scrapbooks, organizing memories and generally getting my crafting life in order? I love the new me, hope it lasts… My book of inspiration will have clippings from magazines, sketches of ideas that I dream up and printed pictures of anything that is found on the WWW. Finally I will have all my ideas in one place complete with notes and doodles so that I can start on a project whenever the mood strikes.

You can choose to have a physical book or sketch book or you can also take pictures of anything and everything that catches your fancy, and that you would like to try your hand at, and make a folder on your computer desktop. That way you don’t have to carry a physical book around. I love books and looking through them. That is why I will use an actual book or sketchbook to make my book of inspiration.

Now that I think about it I will probably use an old hardbound book. I’ll try and look for one which has thicker pages so that it can withstand a lot of things being stuck to it. I will alter the hardbound book and turn it into an altered/smash book. Yes! That is what I will do. I can’t wait to start work on it I am so excited already.

I have already made quite a few altered books and loved the experience every time. Till now I have mostly altered hardbound books and children’s board books to serve as scrapbooks for vacations. I have never tried making an altered book asanything like an idea book or an artist’s sketchbook before

I am going to alter the cover of the book. Maybe make a few pockets and alter some of the pages. Add some paint to the background pages… I want to use one page for one project. Affix a picture to the center of each page and make notes, add doodles and suggestions on the sides. In the end I’ll have an altered smash book of inspiration. Super cool!

Well I’m off to look for a book and to start my project. In the meantime take a look at this awesome post about a visual idea journal: http://looking-glass.typepad.com/looking-glass/2011/10/visual-thinking-mixed-medium-playtime.html

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THE STRATHMORE ONLINE ARTIST WORKSHOPS!

These look awesome and they’re free! I can’t wait to get started.

Just like I predicted, life at work has been so hectic that I have not been able to go through the first video lesson yet but since I can do this on my time I intend to go over the lessons on the weekends

There are three different art classes that you can sign up for. Here is what the Strathmore website says about them:

I love the internet and how it brings us all together, artists all over the world, doing different things and being able to learn from each other and share our work. That is what we all maintain blogs for as well. We’re constantly sharing and learning from each other and ‘conversing’ and asking questions through comments. All this reminds me of the reasons why I am a self proclaimed ‘artist’ or ‘crafter’, I love being part of something so big, something that links me to people all over the world. I love being an artist and I will try my best to find the time to do what I love to do – to create! I hope 2012 is a creative and artsy year for y’all as well!

In my opinion resolutions are a way of keeping yourself on track but sometimes certain things that you feel you should do turn out to not be so very useful or totally  irrelevant depending on the course your life takes in that year. So even though my resolutions were very relevant in the beginning of 2011, I felt that as the year progressed either other things popped up that were more important or that some of my resolutions seemed to lose their sense . This in no way saddened me or made me feel that I had not done enough in the past year.

Making my Smash book for 2011 really helped me to relive the year, celebrate the resolutions I was able to keep and also appreciate everything else that I did, as well as understand how and why some of my resolutions were left undone.

That does not mean however that I have given up the practice of writing down my resolutions. No way! I love making lists and resolutions are a step above. I have made my resolutions for 2012 and there is one particular bullet point that has been carried forward from last year. One resolution that I did not follow through on and one that I wish I had more time to work on. That particular resolution comes to this years manifesto.

Speaking of manifestos… before we dive into the resolution I wanted to share a future project with y’all. I regularly maintain a list in my sketchbook and a folder on my laptop’s desktop that contains ideas for projects that I want to try. I stumbled across this awesome idea for a 2012 manifesto a couple of days back and cannot wait to give my upcycled twist to this crafty project. It has been inspired by the Holstee manifesto that can be found here. There are so many ways to do this. You could either make this manifesto in a design software like Adobe indesign or photoshop or you could sketch it out using different writing styles and fonts and add lots of little sketches and doodles or you could use words and letters cut out of decorative paper, magazines or even use stickers. I can’t wait to start on mine. When it’s done I’ll add it to my upcycled smash journal for 2012.

This was just a preview of projects to come. Back to the resolution. Read on in Part 2 coming soon…

My upcylced version of the smash book was supposed to be made using only recycled craft items or things that I was going to throw away. In the last post I talked about the many materials I would use. From mailers, to old magazines, to old scrapbook paper and printed photographs for the pages to soda cans and plastic for the embellishments. I also used a few pages I tore out of my Smash Book, the pretty pink one, since I did not need so many pages. I resized them and added them to my new book.

I worked on the pages and have almost 40 ready . I gathered all the images I wanted to use and cut pages out of them. I used a slightly smaller size than the actual smash books but you can pick any size you are comfortable working with. My only advice would be to keep it smaller than an A4 size. The pages were glued together if they were not strong enough. You have to make sure the book pages are sturdy since they need to withstand ‘smashing’ . The pages were all punched using the Cinch as well and I used 3 book rings to ‘bind’ the book.

What I love about using the book rings is that I can always go and add more pages if I feel I need to. There is a lot of room to play and experiment, add and subtract.

I also worked on the covers that were made from an old corrugated card box and then covered with old prints that I was going to throw away since I never ended putting them up. The covers were cut out of an old corrugated card box and were punched using the we r memory keepers Cinch 2. It really is an amazing machine and this is my first project using it. I can’t wait to make more stuff soon!

I am sharing a few pictures of what my book looks like currently and would love to hear from you on any changes you think I should make or any other suggestions. Please do share your versions of upcycled smash books as well and let me know if you would like to guest post on my blog as well with your project.

Here is are the pages and what they look like right now as well as the pictures of the covers and the Cinch

that I might want to smash in that I might have missed.

Looking at the book now is an awesome feeling. It really is a timeline of everything I did and felt during this past year and makes me understand how much I have done, learnt and experienced. Makes me feel this project was really worth doing.

Smash books and scrapbooks are not so much about capturing memories perfectly, with all the pictures in a straight line and gorgeous embellishments and perfectly typed journaling. They are about capturing memories the way they happened, in a natural and imperfect manner, as they happened. Not stressing out about how things looked really paid off in the end and I love the book.

I ended up using a lot of A4 sized sketches and so added them to the book as fold-out pages. I also stuck some cards to the front and back inside covers. Added movie tickets as well. Basically just stuck and smashed stuff in . You can see the pictures below for more details.

Do share any smash book adventures you may have had with all of us. I would love to hear from you!

Here are some pictures:

Here are the other blog-posts in this series.

Part 1 http://alteredfantasy.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/the-smash-books-craze-and-how-to-start-a-smashing-upcycling-adventure-part-1/

Part 2 http://alteredfantasy.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/the-smash-books-craze-and-how-to-start-a-smashing-upcycling-adventure-part-2/

Part 3  http://alteredfantasy.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/the-smash-books-craze-and-how-to-start-a-smashing-upcycling-adventure-a-bit-of-a-detour-part-3/

Part 4  http://alteredfantasy.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/the-smash-books-craze-and-how-to-start-a-smashing-upcycling-adventure-back-on-track-part-4/

Part 5  http://alteredfantasy.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/the-smash-books-craze-and-how-to-start-a-smashing-upcycling-adventure-part-5/

Part 6 http://alteredfantasy.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/the-smash-books-craze-and-how-to-start-a-smashing-upcycling-adventure-journeys-end-part-6/

How do you make an Upcycled smash folio? First you identify what you love about the current smash books and set out to mimic that look.

Well, what I really love about the smash books is that the pages are all different and yet seem to come together because of an overall theme and colour palette. I also love the few unexpected pages, with big bold typography or a cute quote. That is the look I want to mimic in my upcycled smash folio and actually that is quite easy to do.

All of us receive catalogues and mailers that are very beautifully designed. Paper Source for one, has gorgeous mailers, catalogues and shopping bags. Starbucks also has some interesting ones over the holidays. There are countless other stores that will have fun ones too! I used catalogues and mailers to cut out some pages like the ones shown below.

I also took out all my art experiments gone bad and finally have a chance to use them. Some prints that were made during a print making class will find their way into my upcycled smash and will make awesome textured backgrounds. 

I love to take photographs and get a lot of my work printed. Sometimes I end up framing the prints and other times they just make their way into my craft stash. Some of these photographs will make really cool pages for the book. I especially like the print shown below for use in my Smash Folio.

Wedding invites or fun shaped cards also make cool inserts. One can always add a layer of gesso or make a collage and use them as smaller pages or pockets or inserts to add visual interest to the book. What I love about making my own Smash book is that I am able to incorporate a lot of different paper with different colours and textures. I can also choose to add pockets and customize the folio to my needs.

I also have some papers in my scrapbooking stash that I am going to use as well as some of the pages I tore out from my actual Smash book.

Now that we have looked at some sources of paper, why don’t you dig into your stash and find some paper that you can upcycle. Tomorrow we will talk about sizes and then we will move on to discuss the cover for our smash book.