playdate at Wendy's

Isn't it nice when you get to have a playdate with friends?  Especially when you get to meet blog friends in real life :)  The only trouble is, time speeds up!! 

It was Wendy's day off from the shop so Hels, Ruby, Wendy and I got together for a playdate.   And had a FaBuLouS time :)  Ruby put us to shame by speedily polishing off a beautiful card with some yummy papertrey stamps, but I forgot to photograph it!!  Sorry Ruby!!!  Email me a pic and I can add it in x

 

 

Wendy put these beautiful brooches together and mounted them onto stamped postcards.  Aren't those colours yummy?  Wonder where she saw this idea?!!! ;)

Hels made two stunning tags with distress inks and Tim's dies.  They are really, really GoRGeouS; the heart has little tiny sparkles inside, to match the crown.  

 

 

And I made butterflies with prima papers and Tim's butterfly die.  And you'll never guess, all these dies and papers are available at The Stamp Attic ;) (including that yummy, yummy, narrow, red, ricrac)

tattered floral PDCC #27

Oh what a happy time I had making this week's piece.  Trouble is, there's no way I'm going to get to keep it.  Wendy's had her beady eye on it right from when it was just a tag!!

I have had a wonderful, wonderful evening with Wendy and her friends.  We all had a happy, happy time playing with fabric and Tim's tattered florals die.  3 little cuttlebugs were very busy!  I wonder what a collection of cuttlebugs is called!!

I'm uploading these photos from my mobile phone, of piccies taken in artificial light, on someone else's laptop, so apologies for quality and lack of cropping.  I'll fix them when I get home from my little jaunt down near Oxford!!  I have absolutely no idea why blogger has turned this piccie around, but it has!! 
EDIT:  photos retaken (still on my mobile, that's what I always use!!) but in better light lol, and cropped at home with familiar software :)

 

The lovely Wendy 2, who works at the Stamp Attic on a Thursday, brought these yummy fabrics, and the gorgeous Kate brought the beads :)

The postcard tag is by American Tag, a very recent purchase from The Stamp Attic lol!  Ooops, just realised I haven't actually paid for it yet!!!

happy birthday Paddy!!

60 today!

did you know that today is 'Earth Day'?...and PDCC#26

It's printed on my calendar but I did have to look it up in Wikipedia to check what it was as I'd never heard of it before, although it was started 40 years ago.  Apparently it is "a day designed to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's environment".  In honour of Earth Day, Julie chose some earthy colours for this week's play date cafe challenge:

But get this!  I reckon that terracotta colour is the exact colour of 'rusty hinge', one of Tim Holtz' new distress inks.  So it would have been wrong of me not to play with my new distress colours for this challenge ;)

Not having any ink or paint in that pinky/peachy colour I decided to start with that colour card for my base.  It's been ages since I decorated an envelope so out came my Cricut and George cartridge and I cut a pale envelope.   Then it was time to get inky with the gorgeous Rusty Hinge and Tumbled Glass - they are both so yummy!!

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I used a little butterfly mask by Heidi Swapp as well as my faithful sequin waste to create some texture.  Along with a few splatters of water of course!

I do feel that this little envelope is begging for a tiny book to be tucked inside before finding a home in one of my journals.  I love how it's turned out, but it was a complete act of faith that if the colours worked so well in the challenge photo then they must also work on my piece..and they did!!  

We've got a very talented celebrity designer, Jen Tapler, over at The Play Date Cafe this week, and sponsorship from Mod Podge, so it's really worth heading over to the Cafe to see what all our designers have produced as inspiration for you, and to link your project to be in with a chance of winning this prize:

 

I love this image, all those little pots are so colourful!   Thanks Amy for this generous prize :)  ModPodgeRocks is Amy's blog which has lots of wonderful ideas for using mod podge, including making fabric bowls with your scraps of material!!

an insightful carrot [or PDCC25!]

Better late than never for my play date cafe design piece!  I so wanted to get a piece done for this week's challenge as my new carrot (from Wendy at The Stamp Attic) stamp was just too appropriate not to use!!!  I had such a busy week last week and into this, so I took some journal time last night to relax.

These pages had pieces of text on them from teaching my Art Journaling 2 class and the text still peeks through the white dabber paint in places.  Tim's clock mask is one of my favourites, along with sequin waste so I happily splooshed and stamped my black and white paints and added the odd hint of orange.

I found the quote after googling 'carrot quotes'.  Who'd have thought Paul Cezanne would have been discussing carrots!

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To colour my carrot boy, I wet my stamp and coloured it with caran d'ache neocolour watersoluble wax pastels.  I then stamped onto dry card and coloured his body in with colour from the pastel on my brush.

I went shopping and I bought...

...some old books, dominoes, spoons, rusty nails, nuts and washers, a tape measure...in order to stock up for any mixed media pieces that may come to mind!

I went to an antiques and collectables place not far from us (the nearest we have to a 'fleamarket') and in one of the units, the guy sells house clearance stuff.  When I went to the counter with my arms full he suddenly declared "I remember you!  You've bought odd stuff from me before!"  He then insisted on packaging my purchases in two bags, one I was allowed to pay for...

... this was classed as 'normal' stuff!  And one that was a 'gift'!!  Although he did admit the spoons were normal.  LOL.  Very kind though, in a random kind of way! 

Last Saturday I was teaching my Art Journaling 2 class at The Cubby Hole in Crewe.  We tried a number of different ways of adding colour to a page.  Sue adored the shaving foam technique and would happily have made pages like this all day!!

We did manage to drag her away from it somehow!  Possibly by washing the trays ;)  If you visit the Cubby Hole website, you will see Cuthbert the Cubby Hole mouse who is their new mascot, knitted by Sue! 

Christine made this yummy page by letting her ink run on the page.  I love how she combined it all to have some drips down the page and some 'up'!

And Lynn produced this gorgeous effect by stamping on a Morrison's receipt!  Can you see how the paint has kindof lifted off the receipt paper, leaving a delicate blue line...stunning!

And I love Tim's umbrella man on Christine's train ticket!

 So many gorgeous pages:

I'll try and share more tomorrow but leave you with the piece I decided to work on.

I started with a page made from scrap card used as a mat in a workshop.  It had a beautiful blue and orange patch, which I kept, but it also had an inkpad shaped black blob.  So I decided to challenge myself to use black, and then picked up a terracotta dabber, a colour I don't own and haven't used before.  I decided my blue tag fitted well and thought a row of tags down the page would work - still a couple more to make but I'm enjoying this page so far!

Happy Monday everyone!  

Especially to Sue!  At least she's made it to Madrid in Spain and isn't stuck in Mexico.  But I wouldn't fancy queuing 6 hours for an hotel room!  Coming home on a Royal Navy ship might cheer me up though - how fab would that be (we don't know that that's how she'll get home, just wishiul thinking on my part)!  Such a British thing to do I feel, to send out 3 Navy ships to bring home our stranded friends.

more art journaling

It's a busy teaching week for me this week but I'm loving it!  I taught my Art Journaling 3 class for the first time yesterday, over at Paddy's Stamping Place.  We made little books to tuck inside our journals, decorated tags and looked at different things we could write about in our journals.  I'm not a big writer but I do like snippets of stuff in my journal like quotes/sayings, or little stories based around an image.  It was great using the new distress inks to make pieces for our journals.  The above gorgeous yumminess is Chris's.  She's teaching on Saturday at Paddy's and I got to see her pieces in the 'flesh'.

How gorgeous is this?  These stash boxes are exquisitely put together and Chris won The Play Date Cafe one week with one, hence the class!!    There are a couple of spaces left so if you're interested, contact Paddy [see link in sidebar to the right]

Anyway, back to my class, we had a wonderful time.  I really enjoy the laughter that comes through these classes.  Chris stepped out of her comfort zone and used my sewing machine to add pom pom trim to the edge of one of her pages.  The comment you can see peeping out of her journal pocket hints at what happened!

It wasn't a disaster, she just broke the needle.  Something that happens to me frequently enough to mean that I always carry spares :)

And we did chuckle about this snippet of text that Sylvia found in my inspiration jar, a little story in itself so on it went to Sylvia's journal pocket.  Not that it was a laughing matter, just the incongruity (wow, that's a big word for this time of the morning, where did that come from?!!!) of this statement being amongst snippets of paper!

"And how's the old lady, Mrs Beale?"

"Zillah Craddock's dead, my dear"

Sylvia is a very talented quilter and mixed media artist and I always love how she puts colour together. [just look at those accordion books she made, the colours are wonderful]

Again photos are limited as I forgot to take more!  And this time there was room on my phone...aarrrgh!!  Paddy did the most gorgeous piece using Tim's new bird cage die alongside Paper Artsy's new bird stamp...YuMMY!!!

pdcc25 - another colour splash week

...and my turn to choose the splash of colour :)

I'm loving the colour 'orange' at the moment,  and I love how the rest of the play date designers have interpreted these colours :)  Between my art journaling classes, and writing this week's play date blog post [poor Julie's really under the weather with a nasty flu bug], I've not had time to do my entry.  But I will!  Here's a hint as to what I'll be using...

 

I did, however, manage a digital contribution!

I adore young children's drawings so when my four year old nephew produced this on my patio, I took a photograph!   For the challenge, I changed it to a black and white image (rendering the weeds almost invisible!), and added a little orange heart.  

Don't forget to check out the Play Date Cafe Blog, we have another guest designer and sponsor this week so some more fab goodies are up for grabs!

art journaling at The Stamp Attic...and more!

Just look at these gorgeous pages...and Joanne had never journaled before!  I had such a fabulous weekend teaching two of my art journaling classes.  The first, on Saturday, was my 'introduction to art journaling' and we all enjoyed smooshing paint around, and using the new Tim Holtz sizzix die cuts as masks and stencils :)

I'm not sure that Peni's got the right idea about photos for blogging though (or maybe she has lol!!).  It was so lovely to meet people I know via blogging, in real life :)  

I didn't have much space left on my phone for photos so didn't get as many as I would have liked.  I did get this fun one of Wendy and Kate though.  They joined in Art Journaling 2 on Sunday, which is aimed at getting colour on the paper in different ways.

Kate is very kindly sharing her shaving foam with Wendy!!

It was an absolutely wonderful weekend, and it continues for me.  I'm teaching Art Journaling 3 (I'm drawing the line there at any more numbered AJ classes lol) tomorrow at Paddy's, and Art Journaling 2 at The Cubby Hole, Crewe, on Saturday.  Tomorrow we're playing with little books and envelopes, and funky tags to add into our journals.  Then spending some time adding words in different ways.

art journaling is fab :)

but sometimes you just need to take a break in the sunshine, and do your own thing ;)

mixed media monday at kpink

What a fabulous weekend I've just had down at The Stamp Attic :)  I just wanted to say a HUGE thankyou to everyone who came on my art journalling workshops.  It was so great to meet blog friends in real life, and spend time with you :)  And a special thankyou to Wendy for looking after both me and Sophie so wonderfully.  Photos will follow tomorrow, but for now I'm sharing a card I made using one of Kristen's digi images.  It's Mixed Media Monday over at kpink - my kind of day :)

After printing out Kristen's 'growing tree' image onto a piece of textured white card, I followed the lines of the digi image with my sewing machine. 

I love this tree.  It makes me think of a tree growing sparkly jewels or sequins.  I'll definitely be using this image again!

Dropping the feed dogs (the zig zaggy metal bits under the foot that feed the fabric through as you sew) and putting a darning foot on the machine, rather than a regular foot, means I can move the paper where I want it, following the lines of the tree.  

Once I'd done this, I turned the card over and used a needle to prick some holes, and sewed beads onto some of the 'branches'.  I then mounted this piece onto folded white card - a simple yet elegant card.  Voila!!

If you love this image too, head on over to Kristen's etsy shop here.

For £1.95 Kristen will send you this image to use in your own artwork.  Using digi images is so easy.  Just print out the image in the size you require.  At it's simplest, print out the image and paint those circles in bright colours, or glue on sequins.  Have fun!!

sharing a cup of tea in the play date cafe :) [pdcc #24]

This week we have a celebrity guest and sponsor at the play date cafe - Kristen Powers!  If you've read my earlier posts you already know I'm a fan of Kristen's work, so it was a real treat to work with an image she designed especially for the play date cafe this week.  Mona chose some beautiful colours - plum, lavender and cream - which worked beautifully with the teacup design.

So out came the sewing machine again and I spent an enjoyable evening listening to Dr Who on the tv (it was the third time of 'watching' so I knew what was happening!) and sewing this piece together.

[sorry, not the best photo, I think my camera is dying]

The quote came via a google search and is by Sir Arthur Pinero; it just made me smile and think 'how true' as there's something very comforting about a cup of tea, and it's often shared with friends, and with friends there is always hope, even in the darkest of times!

Have fun with these colours, and don't forget to visit the other designers to see their creations.  Lisa Somerville is our featured designer this week so head over to the cafe to read how she started stamping :)