Making a Watercolour Set in your Kaweco Tin Case

This blog post is a bit left field for me, although not totally, because I just like all sorts of stationery and craft-y things. Some days it's really surreal to me that my "job" is doing this kind of stuff, and then taking pictures of it, and then writing it about it on a blog. I mean, I also occasionally send an e-mail or pick up the phone, or wander into the shop to put something out on a shelf, but it's crazy to think that it's really part of my job to write about my stationery adventures. Every once in a while I break out watercolours to do some brush lettering or just fool around. I've seen so many great posts on Instagram and on blogs using watercolour for visual journaling, so maybe I'll try a bit of that myself. I have a plastic palette and some tubes of watercolour paint, which I can use here at home, but I've seen so many great travel DIY Altoids tin watercolour sets that I thought I would try to make my own, in case I ever make it to the park with Caleb and he's playing independently (HAHA WHAT A JOKE...). We have Kaweco tin cases here, which come with Al-Sports and Brass Sports and Liliputs, which are the perfect size for fitting into my bag, but you can also buy them separately. I used:

• Kaweco Tin Case
• watercolour in tubes
• little pans (6) + half pans (7)
• rubber cement
• foam (optional)

Basically the idea is that I put some foam at the bottom of the tin because it was too deep, put some rubber cement on the foam, and seated all the pans inside. Then I filled it with paint from my watercolour tubes! I put a piece of foam in to raise my pans a bit, although it's not necessary - you could have them sit right onto the bottom of the case. After deciding how many pans I wanted in - I think you could also put some full pans sideways along the bottom half of the tin case, I put a thin coat of rubber cement on the foam so the pans would stick and not jostle around. You definitely need something, and I've heard of using sticky tack or double sided tape. It doesn't need to be too strong, but otherwise, the pans can fall out very easily. If you don't have these watercolour pans, which I've just had kicking around since I've basically been accumulating random stationery and art supplies since I was a child, you could use anything. For example, you could re-use the inside of caps for pop bottles or you could cut some plastic tubing into little cylinders, which you can squish in, and have the paint right onto the bottom of the tin case inside the tubes. That would probably be ideal for getting the most paint into your tin case, because you wouldn't be wasting any space with foam like in mine. The good thing about rubber cement is that not only is it not super sticky so you can easily lift the pans if you're really trying, but the residual glue rubs or peels right off the bottom of the plastic pans. After you put the watercolour into your pans, you should make sure it goes all the way into the corners, so it doesn't dry up and fall right out. You could also do it in two steps, to get really full pans - filling them halfway and letting them dry a bit, and then topping them up. You can leave it open for a couple of days so the paint dries. Apparently you can also stir in a drop of glycerine or honey so the paint doesn't crack when it dries, and the whole paint glob doesn't fall out.

I'm hoping this will inspire me to be a bit more creative! Having to break out all of the tubes and palette and clean it off after is a bit of a pain, so maybe this will be incentive for me to try something new without too much work. My brush lettering is so-so at best, but practice makes perfect ;)

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It's been rainy couple of days here, after our golden and sunny weekend. The grey skies and rain is sometimes a bit depressing, but I'm absolutely loving the cool and misty air compared to our snowy days just a few weeks ago.

Caleb is just loving the rain - he's got this thing about jumping in puddles, or just walking in and marching around and laughing like a maniac. It's crazy because he doesn't have rain boots, just these sock shoes that are socks with rubber bottoms, and running shoes. If we go out more than twice, and both his shoes get wet, he's left wearing his snow boots to go to the park.

If only my in-laws could see how I do things here...