Experiments with Sugarmice: February 2011

I do ocassionally pick up a copy of the Financial Times. I can never be bothered to read it, but there is something nice about using the stocks and shares pages to draw on with charcoal. I hadn't done this for ages as I just haven't had a great deal of time recently but I acquired a copy when travelling last week as they occassionally give you news papers on the plane. I had a choice between the FT, The Mail and something printed in Russian, so the choice was an easy one.

This is the box I keep my receipts in. The scorch marks on the top were as a result of me playing with a pyrography iron, but didn't really like where it was going so never finished the design. I've been wanting to brighten it up to cover over this scribble, but as usual, it's been langishing in the work-in-progress pit for ages.

Just using slightly watered down PVA glue to stick strips of paper to the box allows me to build up the layers and cover the previous attempt at doing something with this box.

Carrying on...

We have this jar at home where we put coins from overseas that we didn't manage to spend on sweets at the airport. Last time I checked in here there were coins from over fifteen different currencies, some of which don't even exist any more and some of which are from places I'll probably never visit again. As I'm still going to be using this for keeping reciepts in, it seems fitting to use some of these coins to embellish the box.

I've just added a couple of stripes of ribbon down the sides then pasted a couple of the coins on top to finish it off.

I have been a bit tardy with the whole blog thing recently, but that is mainly because I have been organising a wedding.

Actually, I say that loosely because I haven't actually be organising a wedding, I've been answering emails to a person who is organising my wedding for me whilst trying to stop other people attempting to out-organise my wedding organiser. Quite frankly, if I had my way, we'd have run off somewhere ourselves and just told everyone when we got back - but the risk of the wrath of family was too much to bear (I started this blog after the "curious incident of the graduating in absentia fail" but you get the general idea).

As far as I could see it though, the easiest way to avoid full on veil-fail was to go abroad. This has several advantages as far as I could see - I don't have to invite people I don't like, I don't have to have an after party and I don't have to give a damn about chair covers and table scatter. In fact, I don't have to do anything because a lovely lady in another country is doing it all for me.

Given that OH proposed in front of a glacier in Iceland, we've chosen somewhere equally freezing to get married; an ice castle in Finland. This rather handily solves a lot of problems for us - in particular not having to worry about anything other than just turning up and trying not to freeze to death. A lot of the traditional things simply just go out the window; which is great for someone like me who really doesn't like to do things because other people think I should and likes even less doing things with such horrible roots just because the meanings have been lost over time. But there was a problem - OH proposed at the end of September and the ice castle only has a short season, so we either winged it and did all the planning in a couple of months or waited until next year.

As far as I can see, planning a wedding doesn't actually involve as much effort as people seem to think it does. Venue - done within a couple of emails, food - checklist with the venue, guest list - as short as possible, dress - that is what the internet is for and the rest of it was just a case of talking nicely to the make-up lady in debenhams and going to the outdoor shop in search of ski gear we could fit under a dress and a suit. All of the sundry bits came from folksy and etsy.

But then there is the issue of the flowers. I wasn't actually going to bother with flowers because it will be minus five inside the venue, but when I was sorting through my craft box, I found some wonderful old glass vintage buttons and combined with some lovely plastic flowers I bought from folksy, a frost-free flower bunch resulted.

Twisting the beads, buttons, broken jewellery and flowers together allows me to build up sprays. The wires are paper coated cake wires and just came out of my sugarcraft box.

Carrying on allows layers and layers of stuff to be wired together.

Eventually it gets to this stage and the shape starts to appear. I was aiming for a teardrop shaped bunch rather than a round one.

Further building up of beads and buttons, then sealing the sprays in with white waxed florists tape gives something that looks like this. I've made a matching buttonhole for OH using the same sort of technique. I think I'll ditch the snowflake ribbon though.