Learning to Pause

Well, it would appear that Monday is half over!! I spent my morning forcing unwilling children out of bed and to school after a busy weekend.  Wore out the dog (temporarily) with an hour long walk, started on the mounds of laundry that procreated while in the Toad's and oldest kiddo's duffel bags for a weekend retreat.  Maybe I should just start a blog on the prolific life that laundry has.....

Oh yeah.  And I almost, kind of sort of, ruined a project that I have been working on all weekend. 



Sigh.  I'm just going to chalk this one up to the ever needed practice and skill building that I so obviously need with metal. 

While cruising on SCS on Saturday I followed the inspiration challenge link to Uncommon Goods.  I was immediately inspired by these hummingbird feeders and went to work on my own metal version.

I was over all pleased with this  project until the blotch that is now the sentiment area came to be.  Initially, I traced around a Heidi Swapp mask onto a piece of TenSecond Studios Peacock metal for the flowers.  I then found a couple of pictures of hummingbirds online and modified the drawings to fit my needs.  After embossing, refining, embossing and finalizing all the metal work, I filled the puffed out areas on the back of the sheet with light weight Spackle. 

I think this is when I "ruined" my piece. 

After letting the Spackle dry (while on my walk with the pooch), I lightly sanded the Spackle to decrease any weird bumps I might get when I adhered the final piece.  Either I brushed off a large chunk of Spackle onto my craft mat or had unwittingly left a chunk there from my application and didn't realize it.  I then carefully applied Hummungo tape onto the back and carefully adhered the metal to a 9 x 12" flat canvas.

 THEN....THEN it happened 

When I flipped over my piece, there was a slight area that was scratched with a little blob of Spackle.  So I carefully scrapped the Spackle off.  Not too bad of a scratch.  But some of the Spackle was still present.  So I took a damp corner of my clean up rag and wiped the Spackle off.  Leaving a rather larger "spot" where the color was removed.  ACCCCKKKK!! I couldn't have removed the color better if I had deliberately tried!

OKAAAAYYYY.  I decided not to panic and sand the rest of the embossed areas, hoping that the "spot" wouldn't be so obvious.

Nope.  It became even MORE obvious. 

I considered cutting out and embossing more flowers and adhering it to the area, but I felt that the extra flowers would mess up my design flow (whatever THAT is).  I spent far too long online looking for "hummingbird quotes" to fit that area.  I tried cutting out a metal frame to stamp a sentiment on.  But the area became too crowded. 

Finally, I grabbed my wire brush tool and removed the color from the area and stamped the sentiment from Tim Holtz's Just Thoughts with Black StazOn. 

Still not completely thrilled with the result and may still work on a more dimensional type frame for the sentiment. Of course, now that frame would have to be even bigger to cover up the area that I brushed.

Do you ever feel like you are in a Three Stooges movie with trying to fix a tiny mistake and making a HUGE mess of the whole deal?!

No?.....oh.  Maybe it's just me. 

There are those in blog land who don't share their creative mistakes.  But I will.  for a couple of reasons:

 If I didn't share my mistakes, I would rarely post. And who knows, maybe we'll both learn something from my mistakes.  Hopefully, you'll learn quicker than me!

I've read that being creative is to make mistakes.  ART comes in knowing which ones to keep. See above.

I'm going to walk away from this for a while.  Maybe it will grow more on me.....

Till then..............have some fun. Take a risk and make some mistakes.  Maybe you'll make some ART!