Cathe Holden’s Inspired Barn | Creative Lifestyle

Doodling & Mehandi

Friday, May 8, 2009 by Cathe Holden

Last Sunday in church, my son leaned over and asked what I was drawing. I whispered, “I’m not drawing, I’m doodling.”
Later I explained to him how I can listen more attentively and more easily absorb what’s being spoken if I doodle. It’s the only way I ever made it through high school. I doodled at least one pocket folder a day, mine and the ones my friends would pass off to me in the hall on my way to class. I keep a small sketchbook in my purse at all times specifically for doodling.

I googled “doodling” and, to my surprise, it’s a subject with plenty of research and quite positive results regarding focus and retention of information. Cool, validation!
A few years ago I found a great vintage Mehandi reference book, a technique used primarily in the ancient art of henna body painting. I picked up another book recently with other great designs. To me, Mehandi, (Mehndi) is the ultimate technique in doodling. I enjoy doodling this style in my sketchbook and on 3-dimensional objects, such as my lake stick. Swirls, scallops, leaves, dots, borders, zig-zags, and flowers, it’s so fun and relaxing.

This morning, inspired to do a little Mehandi doodling, I poured a nice big cup of coffee, grabbed my vintage glove mold, a gold metalic marker, linked into favorite inspirational radio station, K-LOVE, and went to it.
This is the result of one hour of pure artistic pleasure, aka: doodling.

39 Comments | Tagged doodle, doodling, Henna, Mehandi, Mehndi

Shrinky Dinks Flowers and Leaves

Wednesday, May 6, 2009 by Cathe Holden

I adore working with Shrinky Dinks plastic. For this project, I only needed one sheet. This was such a fun project that I worked on last night, if you have the tools and supplies, you will have so much fun with this. I don’t know what it is about Shrinky Dinks that really gets me going!With a flower shape punch, I punched out several flowers. Then with a small paper hole-punch, center punched each.For the leaves, I used a scalloped edge circle punch and made several circles that I again ran back through the punch in halves to create 2 separate leaves per circle, colored them with a marker and punched small holes in the end of each.Following the Shrinky Dinks heating directions, I baked each flower individually to shrink (about 20 seconds each in my toaster oven), scraped them onto a stack of cut craft foam sheets and immediately, while the flower was warm, squished with the end of a paintbrush to create a bowl effect.I then baked all my leaves at once.With tiny glass beads, headpins, jump rings and pliers, I created the finished flowers.Threading two beads through worked best for the center to stick out a bit from the bowl of the flower. I then stacked the flower and created a bend in the wire.Wrapping the wire around round-nose pliers, I left an opening to thread on one leaf.I finished with a few twists and a snip of the wire cutters.Finally, clustering flowers and leaves with jump rings I made a few different small bouquets pendants.VARIATIONS: Try different flower shapes and coloring techniques. Colored pencils create a very dark and rich result when baked, whereas markers are a bit more subtle. Use a fine-point Sharpie pen to write your childrens’ names or motivational words on the leaves Also, with printable Shrinky Dinks sheets that you can feed through your printer, you can go wild with patterns, etc.

Click on coupon to go to ShrinkyDinks.com

98 Comments | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Shrink Plastic, Shrinky Dink Flowers, Shrinky Dinks

Printing My Blog

Tuesday, May 5, 2009 by Cathe Holden

I would be really devastated if something ever happened to Blogger. I love blogging and I enjoy reading back through my own posts. But there’s this little part of me that worries that someday, it could all disappear and I would loose my entire journal forever. So I have been wanting to print out my blog for some time now. I tried Blurb.com, a site that allows you to download a program to help you set up your blog for printing into a bound book. I had a hard time with formatting my different posts and photos with that one. I came across another site, Blog2Print, and saw that they also offered bound book printing (which would come to over $80 per book, 2 books, for my one year of posts), but even better than that, they have an option to purchase your blog in PDF format to print on your own for under $3 a file! It took 2 files to complete my book, lots of printer ink, a ream of paper, and some simple poly binders. (I bought extra supplies to keep on hand for updating and adding volumes in the months to come.)

The cover designs offered by Blog2Print didn’t quite suit my blog style, so I made my own and replaced theirs in my PDF file before I printed. I also added a custom intro and back cover page. I printed, collated, 3-hole punched and divided all posts into 3 binders. There is also an option to print out all comments from your blog, I will also do that soon and place in a book of their own. (Because I LOVE comments!)

The binders I purchased allowed for sliding in my own cover and spine, I opted for spine only and slid in strips of paper with my graphics.

Now I have my blog on my bookshelf, a little piece of mind, and possibly one day, a gift for my grandchildren.

{The other binders on the shelf with red floral patterned spines contain pages of vintage clip art.}

IMPORTANT NOTE: Before printing, review all of your photos in your PDF file. Any photos that I had directly linking to any Etsy shop or Etsy item defaulted to a shopping cart image. I had to manually replace those in the files.