It's been an expensive month

What with buying a Big Shot plus, and having to replace the broken fridge freezer and all the food that was ruined, this month has been a bit of a bad one, in terms of both saving and losing weight. I seem to have lost the drive for both if I am perfectly honest. That's not why I write this blog though. I have been busy making things this week, so here are the makes.

Here is a necklace that reminds me of sweets, especially the pear drop style gems on the bottom. Findings include eye pins and jump rings.

This was a simple necklace. There is a head pin with yellow and black beads on to represent bees, a cabochon with a stamped bee in it that I coloured with docrafts markers, a leaf bead, and a metal flower. This was originally silver but I painted it with black gesso then coloured it with wax.

The birds from this necklace were from a craft box. Another simple design  with some beads that I received in my Beads direct grab bag.

I got a Beadalon grab bag from Beads Direct the other day as I was running low on some findings, and among the various items were these tassel toppers. There were eight of them, so I dug out some embroidery thread and beads and made four pairs of tassel earrings. I didn't have any E600 glue so I used a hot glue gun instead, which works fine.

I've obviously been working on the cross stitch. Here is the latest update.

Finally I dug out my Tando Creative triple arch, and made something out of it. I started off by painting it with black gesso, and then cut out some paper for the inner arches. It was just white card that I used distress ink pads on, before stamping it with a script stamp in black, and Tim Holtz cracks stamp in brown. Around the outside of the arch I used a combination of white sand texture paste, and the mini art stones and bigger ones, before dropping alcohol ink over it. After adhering the paper to the arches I found some embellishments for it. The centre arch has a prima art heart that I painted with black gesso, then used purple and gold wax to colour it. There is also a Tim Holtz word band and spider that I coloured with gold wax to keep with the colour scheme. The left side has a couple of glass bottles that have coloured seed beads in, as well as a cabochon that has the dictionary definition of fantasy. The right hand side has a Tim Holtz key which I rubbed with gold. As well as this there are snip art cogs scattered around, all painted gold.

Definitely my favourite piece of the week - the alcohol ink on the texture paste makes it look almost like there are natural crystals on there.

Ems