the bird

Yes, Julie guessed right, I painted a bird on the wall once everyone had gone home on Saturday night :)

She's the bird from Hero Arts Clear Design:  Birds and Branches and I fell in love with her after putting her on my art journal. 

  

On the journal I stamped the bird on scrap paper and paper pieced her body onto the cover.  And fell in love with that flourish by Mr Holtz :)

Miss Bird's painted with Adirondack acrylic paint dabbers and the texture was created by stamping a variety of stamps, mostly from Tim Holtz.  She just needs a bit of company now, and to be surrounded by nature ... over to you Sue, you're there next ;)

Back to art journaling, I know you'd love to see some of the pages everyone created on Saturday.  I love how people's styles, personality, interests and sense of colour shine through even the background pages. 

  

Jen's backgrounds including dabbing, stencilling, masking, and printing with bubble wrap and cardboard.  Gorgeous yummy colour combos.

 

Lesley's pages stacked and ready to stamp onto.  The top page ended up with a Buddha stamped in white, with the words peace surrounding it - beautiful!

 

Laura's background pages now stamped with images she loves...aren't those images beautiful :)

Kathy's 'time' pages, with masking, stamping, collage and highlighting.  What did we do before white Sakura gel pens were available? ;)

 

Joan loved the bird too!  I work very 'parallel' to the sides of the page and love how Joan uses diagonals.  Her pages reminded me of Kandinsky's work.

Every single one of us used the Pool coloured paint, and I loved it when Kay combined it with Lemonade/ Peach Bellini.  In fact, when I drove to school this am the sky was these colours plus grey...colour inspiration is everywhere :)

soooooooooooo tired...but what a fabulous workshop!

I was teaching at The Stamp Attic yesterday, my first workshop for Wendy.  And it was just GREAT!  I went down to Wantage on Friday in time to help prep for the workshop.  It was like having the world at my feet, look at all those yummy stamps to play with in the workshop :)   I don't own any Wendy Vecchi stamps, yet, so it was great to use them to demo with.

The workshop space is opposite the shop,  So I had the absolute pleasure of sitting in the quiet workshop, working away in my journal,

and being able to turn and look out of the window at the shop; it was fabulous once it had gone dark outside,  looking out across the cobbles, from such a safe, magical space :)

The kitchen area of the workshop has a very distinct roof...

Wendy said this is protected; it was the garden shed from the buildings that were here before the shops!  Isn't it fabulous :)

Anyway, back to the workshop, what a wonderful group of people they were.  It was great to meet Laura (who I spent the day calling Paula, sorry Laura, I misheard!!) who is a regular visitor to the play date cafe.  Once I'd persuaded her that she really needed to journal on paper to keep it permanent

(only joking, couldn't resist that quip)

...she produced one of my favourite pages of the day!

To me this penguin like bird looks like it's saying, "right, ok, WHAT am I doing here?  In fact, where am I?  What's going on?" and it just tickled me!  I loved lots of the pages people made, and will share some more with you tomorrow. 

Just look how hard they all worked, you can't see an inch of table!!  And at the end of the day, when they'd all gone, and the room was quiet once more, I worked hard too!  Any guesses as to what I was up to?

And sorry Mrs Roddis, you know so no giving the game away ;)

play date cafe challenge 6: my turn again!

My turn to choose the colours again this week.  I decided it would be fun to use the colours from my blog header, which  was taken from one of my journal pages, before I worked on it some more.

For the challenge, I turned the colours around and used orange as the main colour [yummy Distress Spiced Marmalade] and used a colour copy of the journal page to add embellishments  - that's the recycled art bit :)

The cute owl is from a Hero Arts stamp set from my visit to The Stampman last Thursday.  I love owls!

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

fairies in the Stamp Attic

Well, that was the plan!

 

It wasn't until I spoke to Wendy yesterday that I realised that the first two cards I 'd made using the fairyland stamp set didn't feature fairies at all!  Duh!!  But stay tuned, as fairies are on their way, I promise!!!

 

This ATC was made using the Radio Times, Adirondack Colour Wash in Stream and a Lake Mist acrylic dabber.  I printed the quote off the computer and stamped the nest on off-white card before cutting it out.  All materials, apart from the Radio Times ;), are available from the Stamp Attic!

I sketched this card design out last week and am really pleased with how it's come out.  EDIT: [The card is against a background of painted Radio Times paper to make the photo look a bit more interesting ;)] I didn't let my lack of nestabilities stop me making an oval with a scalloped border!  I printed an oval shape in Word and used it as a template then drew the scallops by hand with a white gel pen.  The background to the bird was made in the same way as I often do the backgrounds in my journals, and again features the Radio Times :) .   The background paper is a Daisy Bucket design called 'In the Meadow' and I used the swiss dots EF with my cuttlebug for the top section.

I love how vintagey these images are! Don't forget to watch out for the fairies...coming soon :)

to be sung tunefully!...

"Didn't we have a lovely time, the day we went to Skipton!!!"

Kate Crane and I discovered that Skipton was halfway between where we both live, and since it just happens to have a great stamp shop as well, we met there!  If you've not seen Kate's work yet, head over to her blog as you're missing a real treat. 

It's even more amazing in real life.  The colours are stunning, but it always gets me that it's so hard to judge size on the internet.  Her leather journal is A6 in size, much tinier than I'd imagined.  A treasure to hold :)  Jill and Ian are very warm and welcoming and we had a fab time chatting, sharing art and ideas, and shopping...of course!!!

Then yesterday I received a parcel in the post from my great friend Julie.

After savouring the moment, I opened it to discover all these wonderful goodies.  How fab are these?!!!

Julie had told me she'd found a book that was just 'so me' she had to order it straight away.  And I'm so glad she did, look!!!

Fairies, fibre art and all bound in a book, how fab is this!!  It's very me!  So a VERY BIG THANKYOU Julie! I love it!  Watch out for some fairy artwork here tomorrow, I've been in 'fairyland' today, busy creating :)

play date cafe challenge #5

I'm soooo glad Julie C, now known as Jules so we don't mix up the Julie's, has joined the play date team.  I LOVE her work and her blog is a wonderful mix of vintage artwork and gorgeous recipes.

It's probably no surprise that my contribution this week is a journal page!!  I've had a very emotional week re work and journaling really, really helps.  Edit: I've changed the photos, hope these are clearer now!  I used Nick Bantock inks to stamp the paisley images which are by Tanda Stamps.

On the right hand side of the spine are three pages.  The smallest page is grey card.  I clear embossed the image then sponged charcoal grey ink over and around them.  The other images were stamped on white paper and glued to the page.  The page behind is white with images stamped in grey.  And the final page has blue images glued to it.  I really like using different size pages in my journal, and different types of paper and card.

 

i do love journaling

I love cutting and sticking.  I always have!  I used to have a tin of 'scraps' that I loved gluing into a scrapbook.  After adding some glimmer mist and Adirondack colour wash to this page I stamped some of Jennie's flower power images onto the Radio Times pages I'd used to cover the table.

The text looks great with random splatters of ink and paint on it. 

bad days = good journal times

Yesterday wasn't great.  Somebody, I'm guessing in a 4x4, hit my car in the Trafford Centre carpark.  A big dent.  Did they own up?  No!!!

But then I went into Sainsbury's and the little bottles of Innocence wearing their woolly hats made me smile.  I didn't risk taking a photo of them there.  Last time I tried taking a photo in a supermarket (it was Asda, I was taking photos of my friend shopping so I could make a book for school) I was swooped on by security and escorted out!!!

Today was a very, very difficult day at work, so I spent the evening doing pages in my journal.  I find it so relaxing smooshing paint and ink around, cutting out images, sticking them down.  They're pieces in progress, but thought you might like to see them.

I've got different sized pages in my journal, different papers, and some collector's wallets which I'm going to put collage/journalling in.

These are the pages I started on the workshop on Saturday :)  Tonight I added stamping, stencilling, inks and collage.

I just love this page.  It's done on glossy-ish card that was used under stamping projects at Paddy's so it already had random patterns on.  I've used a mixture of paints and inks on here and in real life, the texture is fab!  The butterfly is from a gorgeous piece of paper by K & Co that I found in Hobbycraft the other day.

a dream come true! ;)

It's a good job I consider Paddy a good friend!!!  Look at that mug she gave me today ;)  The really worrying thing is it's true :)

I was on Sue Roddis' 'Trees and Angels' workshop and had a fabulous time.  I won't say too much as I know some people who read my blog are booked on the workshop on Weds.  You're in for a great day.  The techniques are very relaxing, just what I needed today; and Sue's samples are stunning as always so you'll really be inspired .  And I realised a long held dream!!!

Since taking a journal with me to Julie's Art Stamp Cafe eight years ago, I have wanted to work on a journal page whilst taking a workshop.  Normally I make notes and splatter paint etc in my ideas journal but today I took my play journal and painted a few pages with the colours I used on my trees and angel.  YAY!  And it only took eight years, how embarrassing!!

Not a great photo I'm afraid, and it's not finished, but here is the most complete of one of my trees.  It is possible to finish pieces in the workshop, as long as you don't work as slowly as me and keep stopping to talk :)  Thanks for a great workshop Sue, and I'll definitely be playing more with these tomorrow :)

play date cafe challenge #4

I'm not sure it's that easy to see this week's colours in my piece but I promise you they are the only colours I used paint-wise!!  When I'm buying a new product I'm usually hopeless at choosing which colours to start with so when I decided to invest in some Kaisercolour paints from Paper Artsy last week I picked this week's challenge colours - antique white, mud puddle and raw umber.  I love that name 'mud puddle'!!

Unfortunately the blue I picked up, sea breeze, was way to turquoise for the piece, so I picked up a more suitable blue from the local stationary shop this morning.

I also got some pearl metal from Paper Artsy although with the raw umber paint and creme de chocolat glimmer mist you can't really tell anymore :)

I used an old hardboard bookcover for the base of this project, added terra paint for texture then stamped into it and smooshed paint and glimmer mist around.  I had a bit of a 'wobble' about this piece earlier today but am feeling happier with it now it has the metal and watch pieces on.

a new art journal

I finally got round to putting together an art journal tonight.  I took all the bits n pieces I needed to the climbing centre when we took George, and Sophie and I settled ourselves at a table in the cafe.  She made this gorgeous print...

She was really, really pleased with it!

Inspired by Sue I used old book covers on my journal, then used a mixture of papers of various sizes inside.  Apart from putting it together back to front (I didn't have the instructions for the Zutter with me!!!) I'm really happy with it.  Can't wait to start painting :)  Better pics tomorrow, this is one of the work in progress...