Yarn + Old Glass Bottles

I really do not like throwing away empty glass bottles. I feel like there should be so many fun things out there that you can do with them. Recently, my collection of wine bottles started getting a little out of control so I started some hard core pinteresting and found something that seemed simple and fun... actually I found several different projects that look fun and I pinned them (http://pinterest.com/sweetlacy/crafty/). 

Here is the project I did using clean empty glass bottles, some cheap yarn and a hot glue gun. 

I used a beer bottle, a wine bottle and a rum bottle, all different sizes.

Just the typical hot glue gun. 

I found that it was easier starting at the top and working my way down.

It doesn't have to be perfect because you can fill in those holes later.

Use extra hot glue at the bottom to make sure the yarn doesn't start to unwind. Then just start going back up the bottle to fill in the gaps.

For this bottle, I added some black. 

Also, wine helps the creative juices flow.

Here are the finished products. Different sizes, different looks. I might accent the solid bottles with the other color of yarn just because I really like how the little bottle looked. Otherwise, I think they look great!

Cool Jewelry Cleaning Trick

This doesn't really have to do with painting but I haven't had much time for painting lately - hopefully that will change this afternoon. However, I did uncover a cool little trick a few weeks ago about cleaning silver and I thought I would share my success! 

Now, beware, this only worked with my silver jewelry that has a higher silver content. Most of my other silver has a lower content and lower quality. On those, I was able to remove some of the tarnish but not all of it. 

So, the science behind this is really cool - basically, when we wear our silver a lot, our oils from our skin protect it from the hydrogen sulfide that causes tarnish. Conversely, when we have silver that we don't wear often, hydrogen sulfide is able to chemically bond to our silver, forming a top layer of tarnish. Only the top bit of silver is affected and, from what I read, the tarnish can actually act as a barrier to protect the silver underneath from more harsh chemical reactions. 

So, to remove tarnish, you simply ask the sulfur to bond to something more alluring... like aluminum!

Just follow these easy steps to clean your jewelry:

1. Line a dish with aluminum foil. Add about a teaspoon of baking soda to the bowl in the center of the dish. Add in your tarnished silver.

2. Bring water to a boil. Pour over silver and baking soda in aluminum lined dish. There will be some fizzing and, I'll warn you, it doesn't smell great. 

As you can see from this picture, the tarnish immediately starts bonding to the aluminum. 

3. When the water cools, dry your silver with a paper towel - make sure to wipe all of it down as there is usually some baking soda residual. Use a polishing cloth to really bring out the shine. 

Here are some before photos and photos of my silver after I dried it with a paper towel. I was very impressed!

These are earrings my mother gave me a few years ago. I think they are really pretty and I used to wear them pretty often but they are heavy. They became tarnished really quickly and I didn't know how to clean them so I haven't worn them in a long time!

And voila! All clean :)

Another little ring given to me by my mom.

All clean!

Clean silver!

Painting with Painting Knives: The Adventure Continues

I went home yesterday and spent the entire evening working on this painting. It took much longer than I thought it would but it ended up working out. I had a thought in my head of what I wanted it to look like. The only thing I couldn't clearly envision was the background so I winged that. If I paint it again I will probably try to do a different color in the background. 

Regardless, I think it turned out pretty good! 

It is somewhat abstract but I learned so much while painting this. I don't think I'll have another chance to paint until next week as we have quite a busy weekend coming up but I'm definitely excited for the next time!

Flowers painted on 10/2/2012

Learning Some New Tricks

I'm a YouTube painter. I follow along with artists as they have lessons. I've talked about the main person that I consider to be my "Cyber Mentor," if you will - Wilson Bickford. Well, Wilson has a lesson on knife painting. I had watched it a couple times before I decided to tackle it. I was a little hesitant at first - the painting was of a winter scene and, honestly, I'm not the biggest fan of winter or snow. I much prefer Fall. 

Mostly what convinced me was the beauty of other knife paintings that I see. Seriously, you should Google "Oil Paintings Palette Knife" or something like that and you will see images of these beautiful bright paintings by artists like Leonid Afremov (who also paints on YouTube though I don't think he does lessons). I was blown away. I wanted to be a part of it... or at least try and fail miserably and know I was meant for other techniques with oil painting. 

So here is my finished painting when I did the lesson with Wilson:

If you are thinking "not too shabby!" that's what I thought too... really the same rules apply for knife painting as does for painting with brushes but it just doesn't have to be as perfect. The strokes do matter more because they are what gives the true impression if you are painting something specific but they are bigger and deeper and you use a ton of paint so there is some awesome texture involved too. I think it just makes it so much more interesting to look at! 

So last night, I figured I would practice some knife moves on my own after browsing some pictures online that others had done. I decided to tackle a sunflower-like flower and just tried painting them on a piece of canvas board, expecting them to look terrible the first couple times. However, I liked the flowers that I did so much that I actually ended up just painting the rest of the canvas to make it a true painting. Here it is:

And here is a close up of that awesome flower:

So I was pretty impressed with myself, to say the least, and I am excited to practice more tonight!