Summer Productivity

Well, it's been a ridiculously long time since I last posted anything, but that's to be expected given the demands of school. I really have zero time for creativity between September and May, with the exception of spring and winter break. I'm sorry for the long absence, but not too sorry since I know only a few family and friends are following and no one is impatiently hitting the refresh button on their browser, anxiously awaiting my next post. But just in case you were....

Ta da!

This is a lampshade project I finished back in January, in the days before the semester got out of control. In fact, as I was finishing it Josh was shaking his head because we had only a few minutes to get me to class. But I'm pretty happy with the painstaking time I spent. The elephant and map images were once a single piece of paper, which I hacked into carefully chosen shapes to fit together like a mosaic on the lampshade. This took a lot of planning. I had to make a template of the lamp first, using wrapping paper.

Then I had to cut shapes from the elephant paper than would contour to one another and fit together like puzzle pieces, starting with the elephant who was the main focus.

 

Yeah, can you tell how complicated this got? I had to label each individual piece of mosaic on my template and on the piece of paper itself. Then I wrapped the template around the inside of the lamp as a guide, and glued the pieces (with Modge Podge again) onto the outside of the lamp.

Even with all this careful planning it didn't come out just right, and I had to trim a lot of pieces to get them to fit and ended up with wider gaps than I had intended. Overall, though, I'm quite happy with how it turned out. Now all it needs is some gold braid trim around the top and bottom. Maybe that'll get done by the end of summer.... maybe.