Completed Dish

I seem to have collected a few empty pate dishes (really excellent stuff from CostCo!) which I’ve been keeping because I was sure there’d be something I could do with them!

When I recently bought some flavoured tea bags (Lemon & Ginger etc) I decided not to store them out of sight in a cupboard but to have them in plain view so I would actually drink them now and again. They are all individually wrapped so won’t go stale exposed to the air.

Planning

Then I realised that I couldn’t have them sitting in a plain dish – not in my kitchen and so took a couple up to my craft room to play with. You can see what the original looked like below (and you may spot a few holes – I was wondering if I could add brads or eyelets and Crop-a-Dile said yes!!) and then how it was when I’d given it a coat of gesso. I only have white gesso so I added some red and some green and came up with this strange base colour (which looks very pink on some photos!).

I dug out some images I liked, some co-ordinating papers, a couple of die-cuts I’d just practised cutting out and a rhino (this is a nod to Twinings whose teabags I generally use, it came from one of their boxes).

Basic Pate Dish

Gessoed

Choices

Step 2

I ripped various papers into small pieces and cut out the printed images and then just glued them here and there all over the dish using pva glue. Got to say that it doesn’t look too exciting at the moment – I did think that maybe I shouldn’t have bothered photographing it as it wouldn’t be fit to share with anyone!

Twinings Rhino

One side

Black flourish

Leafy end

Spot the rhino

Other end

Step 3

The base colour does look very strange on these piccies, it really isn’t pink, more beigey….anyhow, I like a bit of sparkle so I sponged all over the dish and the images with some gold decor paint. You can see on the close-ups above that the pva pulled off some of the gesso but this sponging seemed to cover it.

Sponged

Rhino sponged

One end

Step 4

I had made a bit of mess of the top rim with the gesso, it wasn’t very neat and some had flaked off with handling so I got out my gold acrylic paint, put some in a little dish and sponged around the top edge and into the inside of the dish. I think this looks very rich, although it won’t really be seen much when it’s full of tea.

I guess I got a little carried away then and went over all the outside of the dish with the same gold paint, you really can’t see much of the beigey/pink gesso anymore but that’s fine, I love gold!

I have given the whole lot a couple of coats of watered pva and will do a couple more before I put it in use – hope you like what I did with something so boring.

There are several views of the inside and out of the finished dish below, it’s amazing what the different lighting does to colours.

Inside

view1

view1a

view2

view2a

one end

other end

Art Nouveau Display

My second set of canvasses were inspired by some lovely embroidery designs I got from Embroidery Library. Absolutely gorgeous designs but far too big to be embroidered on any articles of clothing – though they’d probably look really good on something like a shopping bag.

Anyhow, I stitched them out onto some heavy white felt-like material, took a long time as my machine is just a home sewing machine, nothing industrial with lots of heads etc.. So everytime I change colour I have to re-thread the machine and that does take time. Still, I think they were worth the effort involved. I was going to hang them in a guest bedroom but decided they wouldn’t be seen enough there so I hung them in the upper hallway.

Lady Lida

The canvasses were first painted with white gesso and then I swept thick bands of other colours of acrylic paints across them.

I glued some plasterers joint tape in places (like Magic Mesh but much, much cheaper, especially when you’ve got builders/plasterers/electricians all over the house!) and then painted over the whole lot with some glitter paint meant for walls. I also squiggled some glitter glue on each panel.

Lady Aria

Lady Ana

Decorative Maya Road celtic shapes glued in the corners were firstly embossed with a few layers of powder and then I twisted some electricians wire (as described in ‘Bathroom Canvasses‘) and added beads here and there.

A hot-glue gun works really well for attaching this heavy guage wire and left some lovely cobwebs all over the place – as it always does! Horrible, stringy stuff but very effective.

Small glass mosaic tiles were glued here and there and then I thought about the embroideries themselves.

Lady Kati

I had been given some green velvet paper a while ago (thanks Gloria) and it added just a nice bit of contrast and texture to the ‘girls’, they were glued onto the canvasses and also held more firmly by some dragonfly and jewelled brads. The names, I guess, were given to the girls by the designers at Embroidery Library so I printed them out onto glossy photo paper in different font styles and then picked the uncial ones which looked most in keeping. I stared to colour them a little which made the ink smudge but I quite liked that – isn’t that what we always say when we make a ‘mistake’! I gilded the edges a little and glued them in place.

Four-square (almost)

To mount them on the wall I carefully made card templates so that I could hang them in a perfect square – they’re not too bad.

NB: After a little over 2 years, Embroidery Library have published photos of this project in their Stitchers Showcase. I presume they are sent hundreds of photos of projects made with their fabulous designs which explains the long delay. Still, I am thrilled that they’ve chosen to feature them at last.