Birmingham NEC Hobbycrafts show

Google made me smile today!  Apparently Sesame Street has it's 40th anniversary today, which makes it the same age as me :)

Anyway, back to the matter in hand.  My friend Helen and I made a last minute decision on Thursday evening to visit the Hobbycrafts/Crafts for Christmas/Art Materials-Live show in Birmingham yesterday.  It's about an hour and a half drive down there, which makes it pretty accessible, and once we got there I realised it must be years since I went to a craft show as a customer only!!  So I made the most of watching people I admire demoing their skills and products :)

First up was Tracey from Lavinia Stamps, who, as you can see is working very hard

whilst her other half just hangs around ;)

They're a lovely, friendly couple and it was just so nice to sit and chat to Tracey for a bit, watch her demo brayering, and listen to the questions people ask.  Normally I catch a few minutes with her at the close down of the Port Sunlight show when we're all busy and tired!  [And Kevin (who I thought was called Steve...oops!) is packing up, he does work hard really!!]

Next stop, via the Dremel stand where I engraved a glass for the first time and bought Tom's Christmas present, was the Paper Artsy stand.  Leandra kindly and patiently told us all about the paints she's been using to get such fabulous textures in her work.

And kindly posed for a photo for my blog!!! :) 

Leandra has an article in this month's Craft Stamper describing the process of getting this type of texture in your work.  The base is a texture paste from Australia which you stamp into; once dry you can colour it with acrylics and add stunning sparkle with the precious metal colours.

I bought the colours for next week's play date colour challenge and am really looking forward to having a play :)  I also got to see some of the projects from the Artisan weekend 'in the flesh' as it were! It's funny how it's so hard to imagine size correctly from blog photos....this box was quite a bit smaller than I imagined,  large matchbox size really.

And just stunning, both outside, and inside...

I had time for a quick mooch round the rest of the show, but only about half an hour so visited very few other stands.  However, the Liquitex one was a bit of a find as they had some fab examples of mixed media canvases (which I failed to photograph, duh!!!) by an artist called Linda Hollingshead.  Just as I was taking a photo of the display (as I was too tired by this point to get out my pen and make a note of her details) she appeared and kindly posed for a photograph.  I've not checked out her website yet but it's on my list of things to do.

Right, best get back to cleaning my house, then off to see Eddie Izzard tonight :)