Tortoise Birthday Cake

Hexagon Clock

Here, I decided to 'improve' a clock, bought from IKEA. I wanted a clock which was going to add to the artwork on the walls and something a bit different. After some internet searching for inspiration I came across the IKEA Smycke wall clock which has been a source of interest for 'IKEA hackers'. If you Google image search 'IKEA Smycke' you'll see a number of people have made their own customized clocks, the product lends itself perfectly and I really wanted to have a go. The clock comes with a central piece, some connectors and lots of hexagons, which you can arrange and re-arrange as you like, the aim was to change the colour of the hexagons and to include lots of pattern and textures. Many of the Smycke restyle examples I found used the hexagonal patchwork approach of covering their hexagons in different fabrics. Initially I was going to go with this method until I brought the clock home and realised I didn't have enough fabrics that went well together, I didn't want to buy any new materials for this project so, looking around, I realised I had lots of shades and textures of brown and gold materials and settled for that! I mostly used 3M Spray Mount to stick my papers and fabrics to the hexagons, some of them I covered in brown parcel tape and three with a grey polka dot washi tape. A bit of cutting and sticking later here's how it turned out:

Background

Continuing from my previous post, I developed the background image for this blog, I took the fern pattern I had created and cut it out of brown paper. I photographed and scanned the result and played around with it a bit in photoshop, it definitely is an improvement but I'll see what else I can do with it later.

First Post

I've made this blog to encourage me to make more things. The name Frondulous comes from the word 'frond' - "a large, divided leaf" such as that of a fern. Hence I have started to design my background around a fern pattern, I began by taking some photos of the fern that my Auntie gave me:

Using the last photo, in photoshop I took the curly topped fern leaf and rotated it to create a repeating pattern:

I then traced this straight from the laptop and scanned in the pencil image, which I put in my blog to see the placement and then edited to surround the title:

I'm not finished yet, I think I would like to turn this into a paper cut version and now I have the template perhaps I will make a new variation and change it once in a while...

My aim of this blog is to fill it with lots of creative projects from textiles to paper craft, photography  and baking, I think my blog could branch off in lots of different directions and Frondulous might be quite appropriate.