Ivy Lily Creative

As you may know, my favorite kind of storage boxes are old shoeboxes . I use them especially to store letters, cards, envelopes and art and craft supplies. Decorating them with magazine pages, used wrapping paper, book pages, decorative cardboard (Lidl's facial tissue boxes!), used stamps and old entrance tickets etc. makes them pretty and personal (and they're free , because recycling old materials) . The newest boxes I've covered using a collage technique. I cut out symmetric diamonds (rhombus shape), preferably several of each color/pattern and arrange them to cover the whole box. Cutting and gluing all the pieces takes a while, but I like the result. A shortcut is to cover a few sides with the diamonds and just glue whole magazine pages on the rest of them. Finally I cover the decorative storage box with contact paper so it's fine to wipe off any dust etc. without ruining the paper collage. I always do it in several parts and tuck the edges inside the box. I filme

I made a Matryoshka doll birthday card for my niece's 5th birthday. The base is pre-cut pink card stock. I used my old matryoshka doll templates (ones I made for bookmarks and fridge magnets ) to cut out the top and bottom half of the doll from magazine pages and the face from beige copy paper (looks yellow in the photos). I also cut out the number 5 from a sparkly magazine picture. I used a paper punch to make some flower shapes and glued everything on the card base. I wanted to cut cut pretty borders for the whole card, but I had forgotten how dull my decorative border scissors are and only cut one side.  I used a black fineliner, colorful Stabilo fineliners and colored pencils to draw the doll's face and make up. White gel pen is good for bringing out the white parts in the eyes. Finally I wrote a birthday wish inside with a calligraphy pen (ZIG, Kuretake). Watch the video (card making + snowy winter views) on my Youtube channel. I also have a printable PDF with differ

First letter of 2016 on sunset colored sailboat stationery. I wrote the New Year wishes with a similar color theme.  Vuoden 2016 ensimmäinen kirje auringonlaskun värisellä purjevenekirjepaperilla. Kirjoitin myös uudenvuoden toivotuksen samoilla väreillä. 

Varnish I updated my acrylic painting related art supplies last year. Apparently you should varnish your acrylic paintings to protect them. So a varnish was my first purchase. I wanted a matte varnish, but I could only find a gloss one so that's what I got. I varnished four of my acrylic canvas paintings with two coats 24 hours apart. The first photo (below) is of those paintings before varnish and in the next two you can see the shiny finish after varnishing.  Päivitin akryylimaalaukseen liittyvää taidetarvikekokoelmaani viime vuonna. Akryylimaalaukset pitää kuulemma lakata, jotta ne säilyvät paremmin. Lakka oli siis ensimmäinen ostos. Löysin kiiltolakan Akateemisesta kirjakaupasta (olisin mieluiten ostanut mattapintaisen lakan, mutta sellaista ei löytynyt). Päällystin neljä akryylimaalaustani lakalla kahteen kertaan vuorokauden välein. Ensimmäisessä kuvassa (alla) ovat maalaukset ennen lakkausta ja kahdessa seuraavassa kuvassa näkyy kiiltävä pinta lakkauksen jälkeen.