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Other Color Crafts

Not all color craft is paper and pencil based. You can create color and enjoyment through textiles and yarn too, through knitting and crochet, among other crafts. Crochet and knitting do not have to be only about clothing. Recent events have included woollen woods, where woodland has been decorated with knitted or crocheted items such as flowers, birds and mythical creatures and some people have knitted covers for bikes and even skeletons!

You can find information about woollen woods online with a search. Many of these include prior workshops and help for anyone wanting to contribute a piece of woollen art to the outdoor exhibition. There is a woollen wood in Ireland at the Jubilee wood in Whitehead, County Antrim. This was the scene of fresh woollen decorations on Saturday 16th June 2018.

Some places also have active local communities with groups, workshops and demonstrations available for anyone interested in taking up knitting or crochet. Some of these are friendship groups, set up to help people gain some social contact, others provide knitted and crocheted goods to various charities, such as twiddle mitts for dementia sufferers and tiny clothes for premature babies. Any area with a local shop that sells yarn and wool may be the centre or a link for local groups involved in yarn crafts and may even be involved in yarn and wool festivals.

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Tips On How To Color

Color Outside the Lines – Tips for Adult Coloring Books

Adult coloring books are a hot new trend that’s allowing everyone from millennials to nursing home residents to relax, slow down, and enjoy a little bit of art therapy. If you’re having a little bit of trouble figuring out how to jump into this hot new trend, but still feel like it might be good for you, we’ve composed a few tips for you to consider.

Let’s look at a few tips for those new to the adult coloring/art therapy trend:

Protect Your Coloring Page

Once you’ve started a page, you’re likely going to feel strongly about the amount of work you’ve put into it. Consider putting a piece of plain white paper on top of your art, as well as behind it, so that any other coloring that you do in your book won’t bleed through. This is especially true if you use mediums that transfer such as crayons or colored pencils, or bleed through paper, like markers or gel pens. This “buffer paper” allows your colors to stay precisely where you put them, keeping your artwork safely where you want it.

Purchase the Best Materials You Can Afford

If that’s a pack of Crayola colored pencils and a drugstore coloring book, so be it. You’ll still be able to enjoy all of the psychological benefits that coloring has to offer. However, if you’re feeling flush and wondering if you should spring for the Prismacolor pencils, the answer is always yes. Trust us, you’ll be able to tell the difference. While the benefit comes from the act of the art, not from the tools you can afford, you’ll be able to recognize good quality artists’ tools when you feel them.

Follow Tutorials to Learn New Skills

If you’re struggling to learn new skills like shading, crosshatching, or making your pictures look more realistic, one of the best places to go to learn about coloring is YouTube. You can search the artistic skill you’d like to brush up on, then watch an artist show you precisely how to do it, on paper, in real time. This allows you to see how to do it, then practice on your own until you’re able to master the skill you’ve been wanting. It’s like having an art class in the privacy of your home, with your own private instructor. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Don’t Just Color Between the Lines

Consider adding shading, cross-hatching, blurring, water color techniques, and more to your pictures as you color. Take the time to really make the picture your own. Sure, an artist created it, but as you color it, you can really make it your own through the techniques that you use. You can even mix media on a single page, if you like, adding pastels to form a base, then coloring in with pencil or markers to darken in the design. That’s the great thing about art – the choice really is all up to you.

Sharpen Your Pencils far More than You Think You Should

As you color, you’re going to watch your pencils wear down, over and over again. If you want to be able to fill in the details of the intricate scenes featured in adult coloring books, you’re going to need a good quality pencil sharpener, and you’re going to need to use it far more than you’d like. We understand, you’re afraid of grinding your beautiful pencils down to nubs. However, pencils (even your favorites) are replaceable, and it’s a sacrifice well made in the name of art. So, sharpen them as much as you need to in order to make the piece stand out.

Adult coloring books are made to be a way to relax, unwind, and create art. You’re provided with a very basic form, and from there, you fill in the color, the shading, and the artistic imagery. You enhance the picture from black and white to color, making it something beautiful, one step at a time. In the process, you get to relax, breathe, and focus on doing something you love. Adult coloring books are therapeutic for this very reason. They allow you to focus on something creative, while stepping away from the outside world.

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An In-Depth Review Of Sizzix Big Shot

Sizzix Big Shot

The Sizzix Big Shot system is really popular with crafters, because of its ease of use, affordability and convenience.

It is really easy to use the Big Shot. Just make a “sandwich” of the cutting plates; with the material or paper and the cutting die as the filling, choose the right tab on the multipurpose platform to get the right thickness and send it through the Sizzix Big Shot.

The Big Shot is useful for quilters, stampers, card-makers, and scrappers. You can cut fabrics, paper, card, etc.

As a crafting tool, the Sizzix Big Shot has been hailed as a must-have. The award-winning tool has found utility in hobbyist crafting workshops and even in small creative businesses owing to its extensive capabilities and simplicity. For instance, it is frequently used for quilting projects, scrapbook making projects, and invitation making projects, and much more. With this in mind, we will review this tool in intricate details to give you a complete picture of what to expect when you make a purchase.

Sizzix Big Shot Features

#1. Dimensions: 15-3/4″ x 11-3/4″ x 7-1/2″
#2. Comfortable grippy handle
#3. An extended multipurpose platform
#4. Sturdy build

Details

Exceptional Versatility – When you purchase a crafting tool, the main intention is to increase your capability with regards to the amount and variety of crafting task you can handle. The Sizzix Big Shot has been developed to comfortably handle a variety of crafting tasks, all the while just making use of one machine. For instance, it can handle cutting and embossing. Importantly, it can work with very many different materials, including:

Vellum,
Metallic foils,
Leather,
Foam,
Felt,
Magnet,
Craft aluminum,
Chipboard,
Cardstock,
Fabric, and much more.

This gives its users the ability to perform different tasks on a variety of different materials. Additionally, the Sizzix Big Shot can use folders and dies from a wide variety of die and folder suppliers.

 

The Sizzix Big Shot can use almost all dies in the Sizzix Library, with the Bigz Pro dies being the only exception. It can also use Cuttlebug dies, Acquiquilt dies, Anna Griffin dies, Spellbinder dies, and QuicKut dies. As for folders, it can use all folders that are less than 6’’.

Sturdy, Lightweight, And Highly Compatible Machine – The machine has been designed to be easy to handle and move around. As such, it has a lightweight construction and one of the best designs with regards to portability. Therefore, it is not a tiresome machine that is overbearing to handle, but rather a user-friendly machine that you will find joy in using.

That being said, its lightweight construction has not interfered with its sturdy build. It is designed to meet its function and purpose and last long.

Stellar User Experience – Every aspect of the Sizzix Big Shot has been meticulously designed to make it easy for users to use the machine and perform the task at hand. for instance, it has a grippy handle that operates a smooth running crank. This makes for a comfortable user experience. The entire machine has been designed for enhanced control of the process, keeping in mind matters of precision, speed, and alignment.

The Good And The Bad

Among its advantages is the lightweight and sturdy construction, the easy to use design, the versatility of the machine, and compatibility with numerous dies and folders. This means that you can use the tool in a variety of projects, and comfortably so. However, its main demerit is the incompatibility with the Bigs Pro dies.

In Conclusion

As an investment for your business or hobby, the Sizzix Big Shot is a worthy investment. While it has its drawbacks, the advantages and the capabilities that it has are second to none.

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Overcoming Depression With Fairy Tales And Adult Coloring

Depression is a terrible problem, made all the more terrible by the fact that most people don’t really understand it. Certainly friends and loved ones will be supportive when the depression comes from a specific event. But the moment depression is a chronic problem, the moment depression is a mental illness that takes away your ability to trust in yourself, your ability to so much as get up and move in the morning, that support tends to wither.

Thankfully, whether it’s chronic depression that requires SSRIs and other medication or stress-caused depression that will start to clear up as you process and deal with whatever event triggered it, there are some things you can do to help feel better.

“Go Outside” And Other Dismissive Insults

This is around the time most articles on depression start talking about getting some exercise, going outside, and eating healthy. It’s true that those things can help you deal with depression, there’s no argument about that. However, they may as well be talking about throwing yourself at the ground and missing in order to fly for all the help it offers. If you could do those things, you wouldn’t be depressed in the first place!

For some people, depression is anything but a temporary problem. It’s a chronic problem, one that affects every single part of their life and will do so until they die. For some people, the best they will ever do is manage the symptoms of their depression. For those people, calling depression a “temporary problem” is straight up insulting, as it’s dismissive of the constant work one must perform in order to maintain even a semblance of normality.

Things That Really Do Count As Self-Help

Hopefully, you feel more comfortable that this article isn’t like the others. It can be difficult to accept advice from places that don’t even seem to understand the problem, after all. Not to mention, it’s always good to explain how damaging some of the common responses to depression can be since many people don’t realize it.

If you’re depressed, there are a number of things you can do to help yourself. Things that you might actually be able to do, rather than things you’d need to no longer be depressed to pull off. Things such as watching light-hearted movies and television, taking a shower, and feeding yourself. Getting outside and getting some exercise may take far too much energy, but if you can at least get out of bed and pull yourself into the shower, your body will begin creating chemicals that will boost your mood.

Another thing you can do is color. Adult coloring books have become all the rage these days and for good reason.

Overcome Depression With Adult Coloring

“Overcoming” depression may be a bit of a reach, but it can certainly help with the worst of the symptoms. Studies have shown that coloring can help reduce anxiety and increase focus.

How? And more importantly, how does this help with depression? There are several reasons coloring can help. First and foremost, it’s an incredibly simple physical act that none the less requires some amount of mental focus. This means it’s easy enough to do, allowing you to manage the act even when your depression is telling you that getting out of bed is the worst idea ever. It can even be done in bed, if that helps.

Secondly, as you color your brain will immediately begin to focus more on creating the picture and less on how terrible you and your life is. It’s not that you’re no longer depressed, of course. It’s that the human brain is designed to create and notice patterns. Coloring a picture is nothing more than creating a pattern of colors. This triggers parts of your brain that can allow you to forget about your depression, at least for a bit.

Adult coloring isn’t as good as actual therapy, and should absolutely not be used in place of psychiatric medication. But for those with chronic depression it can provide a small bit of relief, even if only for a time. And for those with stress-induced depression, it really could be a major factor in overcoming the internal upset that causes the depression-like symptoms!

Fairy Stories

Fairy stories can be a way of escaping from the current situation and finding yourself in a magical place, where your worries disappear for a while. Not all fairy stories are suitable of course, some are very dark and can make you perhaps feel worse. Some modern forms of fairy story are now called science fantasy or even just fantasy and there is plenty of fun and light-hearted magick to be found in the teenage sections of many libraries.