Today it's letters! By the way, you should all learn to write wonderful letters because that's what people save forever, but that's a different subject. Anyway, these are wonderful letters from the Philippines. They’re paper mache, kind of stuff, and they're hollow inside which means they’re really really light so when you hang them over your kid’s bed and they fall off in the middle of the night, you won’t kill your kid. This is an excellent thing. So, here they are. They come in all of the letters; we're so smart about these things. They come in uppercase, and here's a little blue one I already covered. you know, I lie when I say this, I don’t really cover the stuff, other people cover it for me, so I can look like I’m smart. But anyway, this was covered for me, and it’s a little "b", and you may have seen this in the catalogue, this is one we actually covered with our paper. Here are the letters, I'm going to move them away, this is Lokta, one of my favorite papers. It’s the official paper of Nepal. And it’s named from a fiber called Lokta. Very smart of them to name the paper after the fiber. It’s a wonderful quality paper; it has really long fibers, so it's really easy to use for things. Here are some sheets; this is one way you can buy it, just in the sheets, from that wonderful place called Paper Source. I’m going to use these papers because I’m going to show a decoupage sort of technique. Let’s do the "C". I'm going to use this wax paper. For those of you who like me, eat doughnuts, this looks familiar doesn’t it? I like it better with a doughnut on it, than a "C", but I'm going to dream about Dunkin' Donuts tonight. So anyway, here's my "C", here's a bunch of pieces of paper, you can use scraps, you can cut your paper up, the fun thing is to have small little pieces that you just hand tear, and you’re just going to cover the letter, it's such forgiving paper, that it looks more interesting as little decoupage pieces. You can use PVA, you can use methyl cell that I have all mixed up, not by me, but by someone else, you can use a glue brush. Methyl cell is so slimy. It doesn’t feel so bad when you’re working with it. You can just slather everything you see, it dries clear so you're not going to be stuck with a bunch of stained paper. And you just lay it over and you roll it around, and you make it go around the corners, and you just sort of slime it up like that. If you have a couple letters to be working on, because you get to a point where it's so messy, and see like this one, I can just if I wanted to, I could dry both ends, and it won’t stick to anything, but if you're using the wax paper, it won’t stick anyway. Now I’m just going to continue, slobbering methyl cell, each little piece, and you just go on and on, and it's a good time to check the first piece, to make sure that it's correct. You see here there's a little piece that I’m missing. So I just tear off a little piece like this, put a little methyl cell on it. It’s kind of like finger painting, its so much fun. Now I’ve covered up my little offending hole, and you can see, it's not hard, I don’t know if any of you have bough the pumpkin papering kit, it’s the same as that. It’s a wonderful kit that you can do really creative things, covering gourds, and pumpkins, and anything spherical. It just has some of the paper in it which is really handy. Actually I think I’ve got one, hold on. Let me look.
Here it is! This is these kits which are pumpkin papering kit! All it has in it is Lokta, we change the paper combinations all the time, just find one that's the colors that you like. And you can use it for these letters; you don’t have to use it for a pumpkin. Anyways so, you just continue on with this, and when no one's looking I’ll probably finish this. And you just keep adding more and more. And this is a great thing to do while you're watching television. It takes no intelligence whatsoever. So that's one way of covering up your letter. I just got glue all over me, that's sort of the story of my life. So one way of doing it, another thing you can do, I’ll just do that to cover up my glue. Another thing you can do is use a paper and you can just trace around and then put it on the top, and then you say well what should I do with the edges? Well you can paint them. You can paint the whole letter, as a matter of fact; I have some golden, bright gold fine iridescent paint. Which will be for the princess in your life? And you can just paint this on; maybe I should have used that under there. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with golden paints, they're easily the most luscious paints in the world. And you can get them from either us, or an art supply store. But you can see how unbelievably rich that is. Then after it's all painted and all dried, then we can decorate the base letter. We’ll get to that later.
So now I’ve finished painting my "B" and I’ve been looking at this little flower, I think I’m going to put some flowers all over it. The flowers come in these little packs like this. So I’m just going to take out a few of them, and I’m going to snip off the thin little wire. Because I have an idea, I hope it's going to work. What I did is I made a hole here, you know, I’m so technical; I’ll just make a hole, that's it! Then I’m taking my handy dandy hole punch and just, I mean handy dandy bone folder, and turning it in this way. I have a hole that this thing is going to sit in. Now I’m hoping that PVA see there's a little raised back and that's going to make it difficult. And don't forget PVA dries clear so I think I’m going to just dob some in there, and dob some in here. Remember these letters are hollow, so if you’re not careful you could just keep pouring and pouring. I’ll put that sucker there; oh I think it's going to work. And then this one in this hole. I think this is going to be really cute. And I’m just going to go on and on. Now if I were really doing a production on this, I wouldn’t be trying to do this with the little flowers in place, it'd be too hard, so I’d just be making multiple holes all at once. Remember to have them be scattered around in a nice way. If you have an awl, that would be your best tool. I’ll take the glue off of my handy dandy bone folder, now I’m going to deepen these. I hope my sort of general incompetence gives you guy’s just great desire to see how much better you can be than me. It’s not hard. So there I’ve got three big holes. Cutting through wire is not the best thing in the world with your scissors, but this is really tiny little wire so I hope I’m okay. Now I’m going to take out my bone folder, and goop it up with glue again, fill my holes, perfect. Oh no, my little guy came apart. There. He went back together just perfectly. Stick him down in the hole; stick this one in this hole. Stick this one in this hole. Oh, so cute! Let’s see, what else... the flowers come in all sorts of different colors, so you can be very creative. I’m going to put some little crystal stickers on. These are so much fun. And you could fiddle around a long time trying to figure out how to open them, or you could just be aggressive like me, and use the scissors technique. I’m not sure I would recommend these guys and flowers, but I’m having fun so there you are. I’m just going to pop them around. This is fun. They’re all the same size. Some of the sets have multiple sizes. And they're not all that difficult to adhere. You can tell that because I’m able to do it. I’ve just begun and I’m not sure that these flowers won't fall off, but here's hoping. Isn’t that cute? Betty’s going to be so happy. Or is it Bonnie, or Beatrice, or Bernice, or Barbara or well you've got the picture. Bye! Or baby! "B" for baby! Have fun, be creative, and do something creative every day!
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