Playing and Creating

Well, it has been a nice relaxing start to the holidays so far. Sunday we took the kids to see Despicable Me 2 in Gold Class no less! Lucky they have some great family deals for early sessions. The kids loved the luxury, I just hope they don't expect that treatment every time we go to the movies!

The kids have also been hard at work in the garden helping to clean up one of our "problem" areas. The $10 per hour I am sure was the biggest incentive!! We have now got rid of most of the weeds in this area and we are just about ready to dig in an edging and then lay the weed mat so we can put down some pebbles. Still a lot of work to do, and I think I will be shelling out a few dollars, but still cheaper than getting someone else in to do the job!

Apart from that, I have even had time to sit at my desk and play! And I mean play too! I had some old Cricut stencil material laying around that I wanted to experiment with in my Silhouette to make some new masks. Well I did just that. The Cricut stencil material is quite thick and I wasn't sure that it would cut so I tried with a reasonably simple design of triangles. The result is pretty cool, even if I did have to manually "pop" each of the triangles out! So the moral of the story is it does cut and I may need to try with some other settings, but the thick material makes it a little hard. I also then remembered that I also had some Tim Holtz mask material laying around (so much stuff so little time!!) so I tried that too! I used the same settings (speed 1, thickness 33, blade 8 and double cut) and it cut beautifully! I knew the settings were perfect too as it only cut the mask material and not the backing sheet on the mask too. When I took it out it just peeled off the cutting mat, leaving the leftover bits and backing sheet behind!

 

This is the Cricut stencil material. The backing on this is very sticky, so you can see all the fibres through this from me trying to "de-stick" it a little! Otherwise it has turned out pretty well.

These two are the Tim Holtz mask material results. This cut so well, and I think I will be getting myself some more of this to make some more masks!

So now I needed to play with these new masks! So far I have only one finished layout to show the results of my masking experiment. But I do have another one in the works!

So I used the flower mask with some texture paste, then painted it with Mr Huey's mists. I also painted some gesso over the background and painted some gold Mr Huey's in random places and stamped and then layered some cool new text washi tape. A simple page, but it needed to be with all the colours and business in the photos. Loving my motex tape writer too!!

Well, that's it for now. I have been playing around with some other stuff so hopefully will be back soon with that!