soul enchanted

We've been under snow for months, and I think some color spread throughout our home might be just the thing to remind us that Spring really is coming! Our bird is on a wet-on-wet watercolor painting . Quite a while ago we made a beautiful paper art project . This time we're doing details. For this project you'll need paints if you like, any kind of paper (for quilling, we used actual quilling paper, patterned scrapbooking, construction, and regular printer varieties of paper), glue , scissors , and a quilling tool - you can use an actual quill, if you like, or even a pencil or wooden skewer, but I had the idea today of using an extra large embroidery needle as a tool -- it worked beautifully for little hands. For making the paper strips, first you need to find out which way the paper fibers lie... tear a strip off the paper (around an inch thick will be a good indication). If the tearing line curves, then try tearing it the other way. Following th...

Oh, I've wanted to make paper for the longest time! I bought a book like fifteen plus years ago, and had never done it. What a lovely process. Yesterday Maddie and I went through her paper box, and tore up copy paper that had been drawn on (both sides), and a few coloring book pages that were in there, as well. We put our bits in a five gallon bucket, and set it in the bathtub, and filled it maybe a third of the way with hot water. We let the paper soak for three or four hours, then we dumped paper and water into our blender, blending it into tiny bits. When the blender got stuck, we just added more water. As the batches finished blending, we poured each one into a large , shallow box. When all of the paper that we had soaked had been pureed, we stirred it up with our hands. I dipped our smallest screen into the plastic box, and then swished the fibers over the screen. When it looked like it was full, we lifted the screen straight up, and set it on the edge of the box to ...