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What about Pinterest?

Recently I learned about the existence of a website called Pinterest. Many of you probably know this site but for those who don't, Pinterest is a site where you can "pin" all the interesting things you find on the internet on your own virtual pinboards. For me, it seemed like the perfect solution for all the pictures and links that I am saving on my computer, and the one at work, and on my husbands notebook, my Moleskines, and of course my favourites on Etsy, Google Reader and so on. Of course, when I am looking for one of those images I can never find them. And when I do, I don't remember how I got them, which is not so nice if you want to show them on your blog and give proper credits. So from now on, I' am using Pinterest. I'm still pinning things from all the sources I mentioned above, so apologies if I missed some of the credits. Hopefully I'll do better with this new tool.

Anyway, I’m allowed to invite five friends to Pinterest, so leave a comment if you want an invite!

Collage experiment

I try to keep things a little chronological here, but I am hopefully behind with showing you the results of my screenprinting classes and the latest stamps I have made. That has everything to do with my awful skills in photography. I just can't get the photos right so I can't show you anything.

However, yesterday I made a collage and immediately photographed it and it turned out fine. The white wall is a little darker than in real, so I probably should edit it. But the colours look good and  if I wait until I have time to edit this will become one of those post that stays on my computer forever, so I just show it now as it is.

(Have you heard about fashion  magazines that have a 'no photo-editing' logo on their cover because they don't make models look better/skinnier than they are? Perhaps I should use that logo to on my blog ;). Although, now I think about it, the fasion industry has great photographers and while some of them edit to make people look better than real, I have very limited photograph skills and would use editing software to try to make the object in my picture look as good as the real thing. Conclusion: I should buy a good camera and sign up for a photography course. Or just make things that fit in my scanner.

But back to the collage. Sometimes nice package material inspires me. Especially wrappings of drinks and snacks are very appealing to me. Not surprising, as I love to eat! Anyway, when I see a nice label or something in a cafe I take it home with me. In my mind, I always make nice collages with them, but today I made one for real!

I used Ninainvorm's tutorial (sept '09) for 101woonideeen for inspiration. I had never made this kind of collage before and I thought it would look good as the background for the labels I had collected. It was more difficult than I expected but I loved doing it. I started with a A3 sized white sheet of paper, because the labels are quite large. Soon a problem arose, because I don't have a large paper collection. I used every nice paper I have in this colour combination and it took me two days, but now I am quite happy with the result, especially for a first attempt (except for postcard sized collages).

I had some problems with finding the right balance between the colours, textures and patterns. I didn't want to make it a boring piece, but I didn't want to put too much different things on it either. Somehow, it think if you would draw a line from the left corner above to then right corner below, the part above the line is more successful than the part below. What do you think?

Next time I might stamp the collage with some of my hand-carved stamps, to  make it a little more 'mine'...

This is rain

I recently bought some funny colored stickers in all kinds of shapes. I had to make this collage with the coloured drops.

Quick collage

A couple of months ago I quickly made this collage for a colleague who was leaving our team. It is inspired on Java-eiland, an island in the part of Amsterdam where we work and he also lives on his boat. I wanted to post this earlier, but I made the mistake to scan this in high quality on my then new scanner. Now it is 173 MB large and I can’t do anything with it. I tried many things to make it smaller, but it didn’t work. So now I just copied it to Paint by using Print Screen. But if anyone has a better idea to solve this problem I love to hear from you.

As original as can be

When I read the funny story about Nina’s seven Dala horses I immediately knew I wanted to make a Dala horse stamp. Later I learned Nina has one of those too. That made me doubt for a while if I still wanted to make one. But I guess this is what happens when you see a lot of creative work on the Internet, you learn soon enough that your ideas are seldom very original. And because I didn’t want to kill my renewed love for crafting even before it came fully alive, I carved my own Dala horse stamp. And while I was carving, I decided to make also a two sided ‘orange slice’ stamp and an ‘&’ stamp.

Since Ninainvorm inspired me anyway, I thought I could just as well try to make some little collages and so I did. I am quite happy with the result. My only handicap was that I had hardly any nice piece of paper in my house, so I immediately ordered some Japanese paper from CraftingBug on Etsy. They arrived this weekend and I am very happy with it.