Fabulous sunsets and recycled maps

Lately, my favorite medium is paper. Specifically, old maps from atlas or foldable road maps or those large map inserts in National Geographics. I find that the map patterns are instantly recognizable as a map (iconic, really) and thus to use them as the material for a different product entirely results in a pleasant mental juxtaposition that keeps flipping back and forth in your head. "Huh?" you say? Just wait...I'll get there.

Recently, I had offered to making some thank you cards as wedding present for some dear friends of mine who will be married on the beach this coming Saturday in Key West. They wanted something: beachy/tropical/maybe palm trees, please? on the cards so recently I got to work.

At the top you can see the envelopes that I made. Each was individually cut out using a template I made, folded, then glued down. The final step is painting on the gum on the flap so that its sealable. Et, Voila! A real, live envelope!

Next, it was time to make the cards. The background was going to be a tropical sunset. Blue ocean pieces were pasted down first.

Next, a series of sunset colored strips and streaks were pasted down in random but leasing more or less horizontal layers. Golds, yellows, oranges, pinks and purples from various different map sources were utilized. An extra strip or two of blue was also added, usually ending in a blue at the bottom. I planned to put a setting sun at the bottom but that just didn't look right, so I left it out. Man, I just love doing collages.

So far, so good. I thought the sunset clouds looked pretty good, and it was a lot of fun to assemble them one after the other.

Now for the piece de resistance! I had cogitated long and hard about how to get that darn palm tree in the image. Here was my process: palms can look either really cool or very stylized and hokey. Obviously, I wanted really cool. To me, really cool = biologically accurate. Hmmm. Biologically accurate palm trees have a lot of leaves. Each leaf has a lot of leaflets. OK--cut them out of black paper? Gack! Heck no. Take, mmmmm....maybe, 10 years? Nah. Draw them free hand? Too much variation possible and take, maybe, 7 years. I had good luck dealing with Simon's Stamps in the past so... I developed a biologically accurate image of palm trees in Photoshop until I had what I wanted, then I sent the image to Simon's and had a custom made rubber stamp manufactured to my size parameters. Here's what I ended up with--a unique palm stamp that I just love. Tell me that that is not a big-ass rubber stamp!

So then I got to the fun part of the project: stamping! Just simple black ink for the palm trees, thank you very much. Because that's exactly what color they are in front of a sunset, don't you know. And the palm tree shape is instantly recognizable too. (yeah, I know, I said that about the maps too, didn't I?)


And my last picture is a close-up of one of the cards. Obviously they are all unique as far as the background is concerned. Each stamp turned out a little different too. I also had to do a little touching up with a black marker as the ink image did not lay down at the paper piece edges. But that was fun and quick job, too. Overall, there's a nice continuity. Very satisfying to see all of them together.

Ok. Juxtaposition time. :)
Look at the bottom picture. Blur your eyes a little. Focus on the background only--its made of maps and countries and oceans and roads, right? Now, focus on the foreground/palm trees. My, those are nice palm trees aren't they?  Background becomes gloriously garish clouds that you would see any day of the week at sunset here in lovely Florida. Not maps any more at all. But wait, they are maps! See? look closely! and..



Boo yah! Mental juxtaposition!

:D

Updates...

Its been a busy weekend and I made a fair amount of progress on several fun projects. So here are some interim updates on three different works I've got going. {Don't ask me why I have so many projects going, sometimes it just happens that way. Just a little crazy sometimes, I guess.} And I'm not even going to mention the 3 different kinds of Christmas cookie dough that I have chilling in the fridge. gack! Never mind--you didn't hear that--

Anyway, On my large underwater piece, I sewed down some bias tape stems for some seaweed as you can see here. I personally love Clover iron on bias tape. Its so nice and curveable.  You still have to tack it down, of course, or it will pop off after some handling. The only downside to this wonderful stuff is that its difficult to come by in colors. Usually you only find it in black (folks use it for making "stained glass" quilts). Every once in a blue moon I stumble upon it in other colors and when I do, I snap it up. So I went to my stash and found some mottled light brown tape--perfect. Also a little gold for just a short stretch.

After that was done, I spent some nice, contemplative time laying out the leaflets of the seaweed--quite a few tan ones, some yellow and a few gold ones cut into 6 different sizes. I want it to look like some of them are catching the light underwater and flashing it back at you.

Obviously, I have a lot of leaves to sew down now. I'll be doing some raw edge applique to accomplish that. Since I fused all the leaf fabric to some Pelon Shirtailor interfacing, I will have no trouble doing that with a narrow satin stitch. I got a few of them done over the weekend but by no means all. Its fiddly work and I can only concentrate for so long before I start losing my focus and start getting sloppy.

When that happens, I have found that its just no good trying to "power through" or some such. I'll just make more and more mistakes and get supremely aggravated. Maybe even have to pick out some stitches. Which I hate doing, but I'll force myself if I've made a botch of things. At least in this medium you can do that unlike other media.

So when I exhausted myself on the leaves, I took myself off to the kitchen to design this year's Christmas card. Keeping it simple this year and no textiles, either. Something with some spray paint and an acetate stencil seemed the way to go.

Here's my sketch in the actual card dimensions on the left. I'm seeing lots of glittery gold. I bought some holiday spray glitter at Lowe's last weekend and I'm thinking that it might be just the thing.

And here is the acetate sheet half cut out. I'm not a big fan of working with an Exacto knife, but I worked slow and steady and kept it together and did an ok job of making a nice stiff stencil.

And then, since I've had a several sales from my etsy site recently, I worked on replacing some of the inventory of my biggest seller: business sized envelopes. So relaxing to trace and cut these out and then so fun to fold them and watch them become an envelope. Its a simple thing but I get a big charge out of it for each and every one.


Yay!

When the weekend was over, I felt so accomplished. Even though I didn't get anything technically completed, I still was deeply satisfied.

And its just as much about the process as it is about the product, isn't it??

Vintage map envelopes

Its been a busy week and its all about making fun stuff for my new etsy store: LizzieLuvs2Recycle. So here's the latest: envelopes made out of vintage atlas maps. It was a shot in the dark as far as a recycling project and it turned out much better than expected. Fun, easy and I really love the results.

I looked for an envelope template on-line but couldn't find one that I liked (they were all odd sizes for various greeting cards and I wanted a standard business envelope). So after sitting there stumped for a while I did the whole "headslap; duh" thing and grabbed an envelope from my desk, deconstructed it and used it to make a cardboard template. Luckily, I had an old atlas in the car that was crying out to be repurposed and...Voila!

After a crafty evening tracing and cutting out the envelopes, I had this growing stack. It was very satisfying picking the prettiest maps and arranging my template for maximum interest. They already look cool, don't they??

I had this annoying long floppy ruler made out of thin plastic that turned out to be the perfect tool to act as a guide for the folds. Side flaps first...

Then the bottom flap. Looking good!

Then the top. I can't wait to use one myself!

Of course once I started cutting up the atlas, I kinda had to cut the whole thing! So now I have lots of envelopes. I ordered some glue/gum online to gum the sides down and leave a wetable gum on the flap so that it can be sealed. Hopefully it gets here fast--I'm really anxious to finish these babies and get them uploaded for sale!

 The fronts are so pretty and colorful. I will likely use an address label to give a nice white area in the center.

I can't wait to make some more fun stuff out of maps. I just bought a bunch of old National Geographic maps from eBay for some even bigger maps.