4 Feb 2014

Altered Tin Can

Creating The Crafty Life


The Moderator for this Vintage group asked me to help her and I loved it. I would welcome new members answer any queries and organise the partners swaps and introduced a birthday club. . I did this for about 2 years and when the Moderator announced she was leaving I couldn't see any way of me being kept on by any new Moderator so I volunteered to take this post. By this time I had made so many friends and one of them in particular I got on extremely well with. We seemed to be on the same wave length. This was Karen from New Zealand, she took on the post of Admin and started organising swaps and challenges with me. Her challenges were all very interesting. She was coming up with ideas that had never been done before in this group and the members all loved her. Karen and I ran this group between us for 2years and we both loved doing it.It was a sad day when the owner of paper Craft Planet announced she was closing the site. Many of the other groups moved to another site but I had decided to let it go. What was I going to do with my time now. I started searching for a site that was offering the type of challenges I had become to love so I joined  Creating The Crafty Life and it wasn't long before I realised this was where I wanted to bring my group.

Creating The Crafty Life

December Challenge/ Christmas Ornament

Ive introduced my first swap for my group which is a Friendship Album and the first of the Friendship Pages and its gone down very well. The swap will invlolve the members to make a Friendship page which they will swap with a partner.  The style for the pages will be Vintage/Shabby Chic but the theme will change and I will suggest a different fold for the page each month. The page will have a pocket on it for the members to insert some information and maybe some photos of themselves and where they live.This will teach the members various types of folds to enable them to add when making Mini Albums. 
.I started joining in some of the other Admins challenges here at CCL and the first one was a Christmas ornament. I had been involved in a challenge as a Secret Sister and wanted to make her an ornament with a bit of Scottish style and also entered it in for the challenge at Creating The Crafty Life.

This is the ornament I made. I added Tartan Ribbon to give it a bit of a Scottish theme for my Secret Sister, Lady Anne.



I started by making a concertina circle with green card to attach all the embellishments to.  I added holly,a big red poinsettia,red rose,jumping reindeer, snowflakes etc.  I made an angel for the top with a pin and some beads and silver wings with a clear crystal bead for her head and a circle bead with gems for her halo. I tied a bow of tartan ribbon and attache a red sparkly bead to the centre and I also added a length of the same tartan ribbon  to the top at the back which would enable the ornament to hang.




Altered Tin Can

One  challenge I signed up for was to alter a Tin Can.
This was something new for me but I was beginning to like the Altered Art projects.
I borrowed a can opener from my friend Julie as this special opener can open a can in such a way that the top can be easily returned in order to re-seal the can 

Looking  ideas on what to do with this can I came across a book of pictures of Alice at the Mad hatters tea party, I took a small cut of a sheet of acetate and rolled it into a tube,cut one end like a fringe and this stuck very well on the lid of the tin, I cut out all the figures and attached them to the acetate along with some flowers. I had a silver pot charm and added it at Alice's feet along with a silver cup. I added a clock charm to the rabbit.  We were also to add some lace ribbon and a small selection of embellishments for our partner and I added all this inside the can and I was able to reseal the lid.  I hadn't given any thought to how I was going to package this to mail it and tried several ways but they were all hopeless then I came up with the idea of putting the can in a plastic box which was very light and wouldn't add much weight to the already heavy can.
My partner for this was Rosa and she lives in Puerto Rica 


I've been partners with people from all over the world and thats what makes these swaps so exciting. I've partnered people from. Italy. New Zealand, Australia. South Africa. Canada. USA to name but a few . 

 I hope Rosa she likes it















Thanks for looking in. Your comments are always welcome.

Happy Crafting
Lilian