Tumbleweeds

As the Covid-19 gets blown around a deserted world, like tumbleweeds in the desert, scientists still ponder the origin, and notice the positive side effects.

I had a lightly patterned piece of paper I didn't like, with a daisy  or sunflower in one corner.
There are bats from Smeared Ink (in recess), vivalasvegas stamps are responsible for the 3-skull bat, the cowboy-fence scene, the cowboy leading a horse (subtly altered text).  Bats were easy, I have many many batty stamps.  But not one pangolin.  So I took liberties and used Butter Side Down's Hylaeosaurus and Lost Coast Designs AUD mouse.  Both of them have scaly torsos, and a sort-of ant-eaterish snout.
And don't Seth Apter's spotlight stamps from Impression Obsession make marvellous virus-like shapes as a border.
This is an 8"x8" fat page, but as I've no idea how I will end up binding them, there is an extra half-inch at the left that will disappear into the binding process.  Over the past month I have been creating a few covid-19 related fat pages and posted in facebook - click along from here: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2805376092884498&set=a.2732369566851818&type=3&theater

And if your dark side is coming out in your art, share it on the right, with a 1 in 20 chance of a prize.
Stay healthy everyone.

1 October~Better known as THE BEST MONTH OF THE YEAR!

Yay!! It's finally October, month of the skulls, skellies and 

everything nice, I hope you guys will give us a busy month

linking all your fabulous Halloween and Day of the Dead and

other artsy, creepy, dark, strange  ---- well anything but cute ---

creations to us to come and see.

I made a skully card to honor the season

Using black inks, alcohol inks and VLV stamp

And lets see what Anne has for our delight:

To never...

Insist people respect your body - if your child doesn't want to hug Uncle Bob or Aunty Jane, don't force them, teach them they are in control of what is done with their body 

and back them up every time.  Otherwise, maybe...

Gallows stamp ButterSide Down
Text die Spellbinders sent me instead of what I really ordered - not my scene, but I've put my own spin on it now!
Blank Page Muse stamps - ATCoin back, Steampunk Gentleman (wings only), owl & moon
The skeleton & spooky tree-house scene are unbranded dies.

And yes we meant to scream out the title of the post! Too bad the letters can't be BIGGGGGEER!

The winner of the challenge for the great Fall month

of October, will be getting very seasonal die: 

Layered Jack-O-Latern

That's cool, ehh? 

wicked cool!

To win it ya gotta be in it! Show us your October fun, we can't wait! Trick or Treat what say you?? What's your personal art outlet? Stamps, Inks, Paints, Words? Bring us your story...

An InLinkz Link-up

Those Irish Snakes and Evolution

I offered you snakes, they've taken rather a devious route and still haven't got where I expected, but maybe next year... in fact the more I pulled out to use, the more got left out.
Ireland being an island, how did the snakes get to other lands?  Browsing through my stamp collection, it struck me... they had to be able to swim.  And I got side-tracked, as I wondered what St Francis, Patron Saint of Animals, would have said to St Patrick about his evicting them from their home.  I saw them on a cloud, harps set aside for The Debate.  The Muse insisted I deal with that first:

A super-thick chippie cloud, some stencils, Pebeo black mica mortar, snake-skin-looking papers die-cut, the Lamb of God refereeing.  St Francis was a line drawing image google found for me.

  Stampamania snake coiled at the bottom.  Like the wobbly eyes?

It occurred to me these guys were behind the Pearly Gates, and the right gate stamp had just come up from Artfull Crafts in Timaru (one of the few shops maintaining a street presence in NZ and a well-stocked online store just changing ownership this month).  And for pearliness, some bubble acetate to stamp on:

Typical of this whole project, great idea, didn't fit the cloud!  Ah well, it'll turn up somewhere some day.
But at last, The Muse let me get back to snakes, swimming away.

You'll never look at an octopus the same way again - all those snakes sharing a brain cavity, no wonder they're so smart - there are 8 brains co-operating in there!

Butter Side Down portuguese man o war, moray eel

Viva las vegas stamps: St Patrick

Chocolate Baroque August undersea, steampunk funky fish set

Stencil Girl Jly/2014 Lets Get Cellular, L186 Coral, Jan'17 Club

Teesha Moore for the tiny tentacled beings

Heartfelt Creations Festive Gate

Cheery Lynn Lucy the Lamb

The only theme this month is Anything Goes Except Cute!!  And we really mean it - sweet, cute is, as always, OUT

Keep sharing your weird, your dark, your off-beat, 

your non-PC with us every month, with the linky for thIs month HERE:

And Poe did write...

Not just about the Darling Lenore and that pesky raven, but about hot air balloon trips, pirate treasure, death and being buried alive...  and Creative Jumpstart 2018 has Birgit Koopsen making a little (accordian) book. Cover:

Stamps used:
Our cover Man, Ode to Poe - a digi from Leigh SB Designs
digi skull by Rick St Denis for Blank Page Muse
 "Dead Men...", top-hatted "raven", opened skull, flying skeleman, crackle (heat-embossed) are all Blank Page Muse
Wizard bookshelf (parts used twice) and Airshow, are from ButterSide Down
Background text from Seth Apter
Rabbit is Alpha Stamps.  Why?  Why not!  There would be plenty living in the graveyards - food for ravens perhaps?  The tags are from them as well.
And what with the last page, and the back cover, we know what Poe REALLY died of!

​

An InLinkz Link-up

Snakes not welcome in Santa's domain!

At the start of the month St Patrick banished the snakes from Ireland back in AD461 (ish)

Some snakes did end up in Scotland - not a happy place for them, as it was just before the Scotlympics of 462 AD:

Looks like the Snakes will have to go further afield. (though as you see, the translator didn't do a very good job of translating "sassenachs") Wonder who paid for THAT wall!!!

But North is out of the question - Global Warming hasn't happened yet so there's waaay too much ice,

 and it looks as though Nessie has already staked out Lapland!

Not to mention those ferocious Viking dragons - who would want to be stuck on the front of a sailing vessel in the North sea?

There WILL be another chapter some day.

Viking Bear and Battle of Hastings on the last half-page, are Butter Side Down stamps (you should check out their adventurous and artistic teddy bear collection!),

the rest of them over all the pages came from Highlander Celtic Stamps - snowflakes, crop circles, Nessies, Piper, celtic knot works, angel, Welsh Dragon, Love spoon, Picto rock, Stone Henge, Caber tosser, castle...

Now if you've got something to freak everyone out, share it in the linkup here - we have "candy" for our favourite bit of gore posted this month Bwahahaha!

Dark places hide decorations

And where decorations relate to last year's Christmas, that have lain undisturbed for 11 months, you can bet your bottom dollar there will be dust... and SPIDERS!!! Possibly Shelob herself, as immortalised in Hobbit lore

Shelob has such a fearsome reputation among the orcs that few venture into her caverns under the mountains. And when they do, they make sure they bear “gifts” for her. And lest she come out and ravage other spiders’ territories, they too send her regular “tributes”. Bilbo was a hobbit who, in innocent ignorance, not only found his way into her clutches, but also got away. Later he floated his mates away from the goblins in barrels. Perhaps he had seen the spider tributes coming in to Shelob, not understanding the significance, but used the idea to make good his goblin escape.

Being a Middle Earthian myself, the idea of "innocent virgins" being sent to their doom, overlaying Bilbo & Frodo's escapes from Shelob, and Bilbo’s escape from the Goblintown, had obviously been in my subconscious came up pretty quickly, so I started auditioning ideas: a tangle of spiderweb that glows in the dark? Nope.  But there was some black&grey velveteen drifting round, I was checking through stamps I had from Smeared Ink - Rick St Denis images - insect & creepy stamps had just arrived from ButterSideDown. Then there was that soooo cute dolly border from Lost Coast just waaiting for re-use…

The background just fell in to place: Paint the sides of the canvas, glue in a piece of seascape scrapbooking paper, add another piece of it border-punched, drape the velveteen. I used double-sided tape to hold it in places until the gel medium dried. The corner folds were perfect for “lurkers”. The henge and portal stamps were just about the right width for the space, so they got painted up using Silks glazes and some Jacquard Interference paint.

Then it was back to those dollies again.

Paint the poker chips to disguise them sortof - Gold - All creatures like Gold. Stamp the centre of the web onto the scrabble tiles. Letters were chosen with intent! Glue scrabble tiles to the poker chips. Stamp a row of dollies with indian ink on sickly green thick paper and choose which ones to sacrifice. They needed to be sitting down, “drugged” with spider venom, of course, before being wrapped in spider web. That meant some geometry involved, which I haven’t perfected still: I inked up only part of the web stamp with Stazon, stamped onto acetate, cut and formed them into cones with a bit of overlap. I thought gel medium would hold the cut edges, but either I was impatient and took the clamps off too soon, or it was never going to work. E6000 did though. How to hold the cones onto the poker chips? Jacquard 3D Lumiere would fill any gaps as well, so out with the copper & red. If you are going to do this, know that you have to hold the cone and poker chip together for the same time as a tv program runs between 2 sets of ad breaks for the glueyness to work.

I really wanted to use the shrunken head, sunken in the deep seas (river?) So it was stamped with Stazon onto a poker chip and tucked in a corner.


Then the dollies went on – and pretty much hid him!
Spiders – some painted with Jacquard interference paints – Essential! Populate the waters (stamped critturs), tuck those eyes back in the folds of velveteen, all ready for you to enjoy.

But if you've not already got your decorations out of storage, pleeeeeease BE CAREFUL!


Supplies:
8x10 canvas on deep box frame.
Hand, eyes & most spiders from Silver Crow Creations
Stamps:
web: Third Stone RS.
Dolls Border: Lost Coast Designs.
Sea creatures & shrunken head: ButterSideDown Stamps.
Portal & stones: Rick St Denis, rubberized by Smeared Ink

Jacquard 3D Lumiere paint for Tribute cones, Silks Glazes and Jacquard Interference paints on henges & portal, & spiders
Fiskars border punch for waves (scrapbooking paper).
Fabric is a panne velvet-type fabric.

Since there's a Crittur Party going on over at Lost Coast Designs, this has been entered in that challenge.
And of course, though it's busying up to Christmas, Evil Froggy needs feeding, so link your creepmas, weird (no element of cute!) here for the chance to win goodies from Grumbacher.

Hmmmmm, errrrrrr, ok!

You know how you can be totally planning something have it almost ready to the tee and decide to wait until the next morning to finish it off?  Well, of course, then it ends up in the Tardis and you are a week behind/ahead of yourself!  So that's the long and short of the theory and here is the remains of my little TP album :)

The cover with its little card that slides right into the TP opening :)  Skeletons and little cat from Lunagirl Halloween Digital Collage Sheet #4 who has so fabulously sponsored us again this month! and all red stamping with bargain bin stamps, unknown sets of stamps on sale, Smeared Ink, and VivalasVegaStamps!  Oop, a Dylusion's set of stamps from last 31 days of Halloween that I won!

On the back of card one is a bigger kitty from the set with the word Boo! and stamping and some washi tape and lots of distress inks and Tim Holtz's Paper pad.

The second page has a wonderful spider web full of spiders also from the collage sheet by Lunagirl with some yummy red flies and some webs and such stamped around.  The card has a die cut chandelier and a ticket for the big day.

The back of this one has an amazing guy...or just another talking head :)  from the collage kit word included.   Centi/milli is from ButterSide Down Stamps.

Last page with some sad guys who might have taken a sip of the devil's nectar or took a hit of poison from the loves of their lives!  Skellies all from the collage sheet and stampings from all the lovlies already mentioned! 

Please some by and drop off your entry with the frog man!  Ribbittymuwhahaha......Right 

HERE

Skull Appreciation Day~June 2016

Today is the day we celebrate that torso topper under our skin, the skull!

Hop along in this the annual Skull Appreciation Day 2016! Feel free to start the journey at any point, here is the Map otherwise known as the Hop List:

Terra
Black Dragon
Jorgey
Susan S
Julia
Alex
Alison
Ike
Leigh
Lost Coast Portal To Creativity​
Katie
Deadly Little Witch
 ​Susan R​ Dream In Darkness

Asylum Anne:

What do skulls DO for us?  Well actually, it's the skin over it that keeps our brains inside the skull.  Lose the skull, and our thoughts can escape... tactfully or not haha.

And this month's sponsor, Rubber Dance, has an awesome series of "thoughts" that were rattling round in MY skull.

I do NOT do "scrapbooking".  However, I occasionally use 12x12" pieces of paper as background.
In this case, for TCW's Mexican Skull stencil.  Coloured with daubers pulling colour off inkpads.

SKULLS - HOW THOUGHTS LEAVE YOUR BRAIN

kim

Skull stencil by Panduro Hobby

Body stamp by Rubber Dance ATC Backgrounds 1

Shrunken Head stamp by Butterside Down

Background stencils:

 Dylusions, STAMPlorations Artplorations Old Rose Print

Stencilgirl Club set by Seth Apter

Do clothes make the skull? 

Well dressed skeleton!

That stamped face has some creepy imagery happening...

Granne

Not only humans appreciate their skulls, I bet...

VLV Antelope in a dreamy (or nightmarish) Stampscapes scenery... 

Asylum Anne!

And now for something waaaay different - give Flowers on Skull Appreciation Day:

Flowers - sweet.

Crochet flowers – double “sweet”

But... just as a cog or gear on a project means you can call it Steampunk, simply involving a skull makes it Dark or Creepy. Well, sort of.

First up: if you can't crochet yet, let me refer you to Auntie Google's right-hand man, Youtube for a lesson or three. It's a compact skill – a small ball of cotton, a crochet hook no bigger than a ballpoint pen and you are occupied in the dentist waiting room, the bus queue, and in days gone by, that 40-hour sequence of flights to get one from Middle Earth to Malta. (I wonder if bamboo hooks may still be ok)

Anyway.... Skull Flowers:

One can take any Irish Crochet flower pattern, and attach a skull in the centre. Or crochet a length and spiral that round itself. The advantage of doing it this way is that you can adapt the rate of spiral, and have far more “petals”. The tail of the cast-on end of the thread can be used to thread through a skull bead and hold it in place. The finishing tail can be used to catch-stitch the spirals to keep their place.

All these ones have the same Row 1, 2 & 3. Row 4 changes. I was brought up in the “English” tradition of labelling stitches, and really prefer charts.

Row 1: Chain 72 (or any multiple of 3)

Row 2: Skip 5 chain, Treble in 6th chain. * Miss 2 chain, Treble ch2 Tr eble in next chain * repeat until you run out of chain. Turn work

Row 3: Chain 1, slip stitch in ch2 loop. Chain3 (= Treble), treble, chain 2, 2 treble all in same loop. Repeat in every loop across.

Row 4 variation a: Chain 1. Turn work. Dc in treble. In loop: Halftreble, 3 treble, half treble, double crochet. Repeat across to the end.

Row 4 variation b: Slip stitch to loop. Chain 3 (= 1 treble), treble, chain 3, slipstitch in top of treble (=picot), 2 treble. * Chain 2, double crochet after 2 treble, chain 2. In next loop 2 treble, picot, 2 treble* across the piece.

Row 4 variation c: In each loop 3 treble, picot, 3 treble. Double crochet between 2nd and 3rd treble

Once you've done enough, use the cast-on tail to stitch the skull bead, then start winding the length round & round to form petals.  Use the finishing tail to catch-stitch them in place.

Thanks for Hopping, come back and link up your skully make with us *HERE* and 

you just might win some Rubber Dance stamps!! yes! and...

Dream in Darkness readers get FREE shipping in June and July, so go shopping! :)

Eastertide~Asylum Anne

Easter, and the commercial world expects us to take great joy in helping our families towards obesity & diabetes by buying up Easter eggs.  CT-Kim had shared an idea  that took off in my mind.  I know I've got some polystyrene eggs somewhere.  Find my stash of polystyrene shapes fairly easily - no eggs.  But adjacent were a packet of Christmas baubles that come in 2 halves, to be decorated, connected and hung.  So I digressed.  Alcohol inkpads for some newly-arrived Rubberdance stamps on the outside.  Now here's one of the joys of unmounted stamps - you can place them in the palm of your hand, press an curved object into your hand and mould the stamp round the shape to get a decent impression:

I have some brown-tinted cottonwool in here.
Next was to drizzle & spread some alcohol inks on the inside of the bauble:

Losing the mushroom images a bit - probably because I didn't use black ink, but brown.  Apologies for the photos - camera gone to hospital under warranty, so I'm using a mixture of cellphone camera which likes to add a pink cast, and DH's swanky heavy camera.
Maybe I'd better pop out and get some polystyrene egg shapes after all, it's only a 5-minute drive...
I poked kebab sticks up their fat ends, coated them with gel medium first, then started stamping.  One then got a wash of brown paint, then some granular gel (Golden) painted dark blue, then bits of a pterodactyl stuck into it.  Another... a theme was developing with magic mushrooms and genetic modification perhaps:

and from a different angle

Not my "normal" stamp purchase, but I'm liking that figure/person.  I played with a few more eggs then got sidetracked, as one does.  And facebook kept throwing up umpteen challenges that were interesting.  So I grabbed one of Ike's Art images - the Zombie cat & dog, printed it, coloured it, and decided it was too small against the eggs.  So I enlarged it, printed it, coloured it... and being a Christian celebration, gave them halos.

What do you think of the dead cockroach on top of Pandora's box?  By now I realised I was needing a shadow box for this piece, and it needed to be pretty large.  But no problem - I've been tripping over a couple of usps boxes lately.  February is usually a ruinously expensive month with "superbowl" sales etc. and goodies have found their way to me by mid-March.

.

That watermark should really say Anne pigstyed this!  But cloths on clothespegs hanging off the protective sheet over the (ex)dining table are ideally placed when one needs finger-wiping.  One of those eggs is being "auditioned" in the green cup.  Good size, these boxes.  34x28x8cm!!! Then I got sidetracked (it was the following weekend) and there's a op shop that has a junky branch down a back street.  I wandered in there, spotted a picture frame that looked about the same size as the boxes so I grabbed it, and it turned out to be an almost perfect fit.  Masking tape at the back to hold the frame to one box, and layering strips of heavy paper bags on the front will make it pretty sturdy.  Now you can buy these "period" advertising-covered bags from Stampington - or something similar.  But I get mine free - Silver Crow Creations pack some of my shopping in them before shipping in a box, and I'm often shopping there... so I'm recycling with a vengeance at this stage.

As I'm working on this and subsequent layers of stencils, I'm meditating on the diverse elements that are coming into this piece, about the "quirkiness" of humans in these hi-tech days of taking onboard zombies, despite science relieving the Middle Ages people from those fears of people rising from the dead in random states of decay, to steampunk, which  romanticises a mechanical era that relied on coal, steam, causing such pollution. Genetically modified critturs in the eggs, becoming extinct, man's fascination with unscientific things-

And the theme begins to emerge. 

From Sacred to the Profane (Secular).  From superstition to science.  From the Christian beliefs about God, to the way we (mis)treat our selves and environment, and romanticise those outmoded beliefs that our intelligence has disproved.  I like working with steampunk, but it IS pretty much a fictional notion - so are Alice and Wizard of Oz - but that's another session.

OK, so that's explaining all the random elements that are coming together.  This is what I ended up with, followed by some closeups:

The frame got the Demented Derma crackle treatment.  I played with my hot glue gun, the cogs were diecut then coated with Ice Resin in a strip to go down the side of the frame.  All the text was printed on white paper and cut.

Top Left: Hanging off the hot-glue web - obligatory spider, having caught a shrunken head from Butterside Down Stamps.  Can you find the gas mask behind it, or the dove?

Bottom left:

Had the leg & boot from Caustic Ratflynger by Rick St Dennis made into a "stuffie", left over from another project - Carbon footprint!   The delightful hedgehog-looking crittur is a Mini Meckie - a groundhog - still trying to look after the season-change for the Americans.

Moving to the right, some more eggs.  The blue one has broken open and a bloodied hand is reaching out (was it perhaps a landmine?) to grab the planet - a bead depicting the globe.  It also has a crown of "thorns".

I used the same 3 stencils from TCW, Joggles and Stencil Girl, repeated with 2 & 3 layers of each, finishing with just a couple of words from Seth Apter's Unfinished stencil first coloured in a  dark red, then an interference paint very lightly over it.  Viva las vegas stamps alien baby face and Nosferatu were stamped on tissue paper several times and glued to the background in places.  The box the zombies are sitting on is labelled "Pandora's box".

Top right diecut dove, diecut tombstone - is an autumn leaf dried, laminated then diecut, the heart is a diecut coated with granular gel, indicating the emptied tomb, the hope for redemption.

Both left and right sidewalls have steampunk characters from Third Stone stamps - one visible here.

All sorts of goodies have come from silvercrowcreations - gas mask (look hard behind the spider web), spider, cockroach, shredded greenbacks, globe bead, thermometer, the monkeys with attitude, mini meckies (groundhogs), lightbulb and crinkle wire holding it for instance.

If you can find a ray of hope in this tale of man's inhumanity to man, hang on to it!  Meantime, let your own expressions of the dark, the weird, come to light and shared at evil froggie's  Linky  Your ray of sunshine might be to win something from this month's sponsor, Make It Crafty if you do.

Asylum Anne doesn't have her own blog, so she's hijacking this post to share with the following blog challenges:

Show Us Your Pussies for Lucky kitties (define "luck!")

Things to Alter steampunk challenge

Left of Centre challenge #122

Forever Dark 2 Marchchallenge