Stars

You may have already seen that we have another challenge up over at the Alphabet challenge blog. With the letter S, we'd like to see some stars in your projects. As always, you may interprete the theme as you wish, and I'll be more than happy to have a look at your creations. 

For my DT task, I prepared a stitched project again. I don't do many of those currently as they're quite time consuming, but I thought this geometrical pattern would go nicely with  the star theme. 

I stitched the pattern with a silver yarn, and once that was done, I placed the white cardboard onto a shimmering purple background paper. It may not be obvious as most of the paper is covered, but the motif on the paper is a galaxy of stars. I also like the different shades of purple it features, and in my opinion, the shimmer matches well with the silver stitching. 

For a bit more colour, I then embellished the stitched swirls with different gemstones. First of all, I added the big ones on the outside. Some of them are purple to match the background, but I decided to add some star-shaped gemstones as well to emphasize the challenge theme. I then moved to the inner circles by adding a round of tiny silver gemstones. In the end, I added bits of pink and white to the core. With the sparkly additions, the silver swirls look like the image of a supernova to me, which again connects to "Stars" as the theme of the current challenge.

I hope you can draw some inspiration from my work. If not, feel free to visit our challenge blog to have a look at what my teammates have created for you. 

I will also leave some actual stars to inspire you. I don't really like driving in the night due to poorer visibility, and I especially don't like driving at night in winter when the temperatures sink rapidly after sunset, and there's danger of ice on the road. I will try to avoid night journeys whenever I can, but since it's getting dark pretty early right now, I ended up on a dark road in the middle of nowhere just the other day. However, the middle of nowhere meant that the light disturbance was minimal, and driving above the fog soup that was brewing down in the valley, it meant that the whole sky opened up for me. I could get a glimpse of the starry sky from my car already (despite the headlights!), and I decided to stop by the roadside to take a proper look. In complete darkness, I was stunned by millions and millions of stars above me. I couldn't last long due to the icy wind, but I managed to snap some pictures which don't to justice to reality. 

It was an unexpected but lovely experience, and I can't help feeling sad about not being able to see skies like this more often. Living busy lives in cities, we seem to forget the impact of our lives on the environment, and it's moments like this that make me realize how even regular lights away stunning scenes like this. Of course electricity is what makes our lives easier, it makes it possible for us to be active after sunset, and makes us feel safe on the roads at night, but at the same time, we are missing the magic of nature by blinding ourselves with artificial light. I don't think that we need to turn our world into a dark place, but without a doubt we could cut down on unnecessary brightness: shiny billboards, illuminations of landmarks, shopping windows, and empty hallways outside of business hours... Less electricity for more stars, please.

challenges: 

- 613 avenue create: ATG
- a place to start: ATG new

- as you like it: ATG

- classicdesignchallenge: ATG DT 

- lil patch of crafty friends: ATG handmade

- love to craft: ATG

- morgans artworld: ATG

- pennys papertake: ATG paper

- timeout challenges: sparkly

- wortartwednesday: ATG