Bunting galore, and a goodbye

I've been madly sewing this morning.  I'm off to teach art journaling at a Christian conference tomorrow followed directly by a family holiday so I was keen to get some bunting made for my tent (at the conference, to be transferred to the VW campervan whilst away after that).  I have tonnes of other things I should have been doing ;)

It was hard to get a decent photo of the bunting itself.  There are fourteen flags in total.  I bought the bunting from Paperchase then 'embellished' it!

The birds are from some fabric I bought on holiday a couple of years ago.  I have a matching tablecloth for the camper.

Yesterday saw a busy day of bunting making too.  I've been busy journaling, initially to de-stress after finishing work.  I'll share some pictures on another day.  I saw some blank paper bunting in Hobbycraft and decided it would be nice to do some journaling on the flags and hang them up during my workshops next week.  Over the week I have six classes, with a max of 11 people each class.  Attendees sign up the day before so I don't yet know how busy I'll be...looking forward to it though!

On a different note, a sad one really, we said goodbye to the play date cafe challenge today.  It was a quiet one, which is why I wanted to make sure I played this week.  It's a challenge I was honoured to be a part of right from the start, and one I continued to go to when my mojo needed a bit of help getting going.  Thanks for all your hard work running the cafe Julie and team!

Christmas in the Play Date Cafe

Don't say I didn't warn you!!!  This week we are sponsored by the fabulous Elusive Images by Glenda Waterworth.  I have many of Glenda's stamps and am so pleased that we have another great British stamp company sponsoring the Play Date Cafe.

I received the GoRGeouS Frosty Trees set to play with and decided to go green with just a hint of watermelon using Julie's fabulous colour inspiration

Glenda is offering a tremendous prize this week.  The winner of the Cup of the Week will receive FouR sets of stamps, and each of our Fab Four will win one set of stamps each.  How cool is that!!!  Head over to The Play Date Cafe for more information on how to play along, and to see what you can win,  and don't forget to check out the inspiration from our regular designers, the Elusive Images design team, and Glenda Waterworth, our guest designer this week.

Julie Ranae

Suzanne Czosek

Andrea Ewen
Savannah O'Gwynn
Lisa Somerville
Ruby 2 Shoes

Glenda Waterworth
Elusive Images Design Team

the world of steampunk

According to Wikipedia, "Steampunk is

a sub-genre of science fiction and speculative fiction, that came into prominence during the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used — usually the 19th century, and often Victorian era Britain — but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date. "

I love the feel of books in my hand, and would love the look of notebooks containing spidery handwriting.  I love butterflies, and ferns, cogs and gears and shiny things.  

So the story behind my steampunk journal is based on the idea that I'm on an expedition on an unknown island, deep in the heart of the Victorian era. [of course I'm also stunning looking, fearless, and don't need to wear contacts lol, but that's by the by]

I come across some butterflies that appear to have been modified to contain steam engine like workings.   But how can that be?  This is an island untouched by humans.

Of course, this story reflects my love of butterflies, but your steampunk journal might delve under the sea, or focus on a journey in a hot air balloon.  If you'd like to join me in creating this journal from paper and an old book, in colouring pages and adding tabs, pockets, and tags in addition to the other main images, I'll be teaching at 

Paddy's Stamping Place

Prestwich, Manchester

Friday 30th and Saturday 31st July 2010

0161 798 5115

Oh WOW!  The postman interrupted this post by bringing me all this yumminess!

How perfect is this parcel, which I've yet to confirm is from the wonderful Wendy at The Stamp Attic, but I spied OX12 on the parcel, and it looks like her handwriting.  Methinks she knows me too well.  But how about this for perfect timing - I didn't want modern paperclips in my steampunk journal but hair pins - they're perfect!!

And look at all this steampunk yumminess :)  Won on ebay on Sunday, arrived this morning :) 

EDIT: just remembered my blog giveaway, and using random generator picked out
 

Elaine, of 'Waves of Creativity', is the winner of the little house, a mica tile, and some little bits n bobs.  Contact me with your address Elaine and I'll get your prize out to you :)

busy, busy, busy...

... so I'm soooooooooooooo looking forward to going away in our little vw campervan tomorrow :)  We were supposed to go today but I didn't get the curtains made in time!!  I promise to put photos up when we get back next weekend.  Malc's been fixing and polishing her, and she's now resplendent.

I've had a really busy couple of weekends, last week I was at The Stamp Attic, and this Saturday at The Cubby Hole.  Carol has started holding exhibitions of artist's work at The Cubby Hole so when I walked in the other day the walls were filled with colour.  

The canvases were a riot of colour yet very precisely and exquisitely painted.

We set to work creating our own riots of colour after embossing metal and covering little books.  

 books by:

Christine    Wendy

me   Suzanne   Tracy

Lisa (+Lisa turned her sampler piece into a bkmk)   Tracy E   Sue

I really enjoyed teaching this workshop.  I taught it last week too but my phone was playing up so I didn't do well on the photos front. 

I'm not a big fan of yellow, but...

...that's what the play date cafe colour challenge is for - to challenge you to use colours you may not normally use! When I saw this photo by Maria Medeiros I just knew I wanted to challenge myself (and you guys!) with the colour yellow!

Yellow really isn't my colour, although it is definitely creeping into my box of supplies! A couple of years ago I wouldn't have been able to produce this journal page as I just never bought any products in yellow. But I've learnt what a great accent colour it can be, and I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed playing with it on it's own in my journal :)

Spring is certainly in the air here in the UK, and snowdrops and crocuses are adorning the gardens.  The only yellow flowers that make it into my garden are daffodils, well, narcissi really as I love the creamy white ones with the yellowish trumpets.  I also love the noise daffodils make - if you've never heard it, buy a bunch and once the flowers are open, shake them and listen to the sound as the stems and petals brush against each other :)

So do you have a colour you avoid?  I'd love to know what it is.  It intrigues me that we all have our own internal colour palette of colours we like and use. 

happy valentine's day!

I taught a metal embossing workshop at Paddy's yesterday (rpt next Tues still has a couple of spaces if anyone's interested) so I just had to continue my theme for my valentine!  I heated the copper in the flame from my gas cooker to get the coloured effect:

One of the things I love about teaching workshops is that people go away sometimes with a new confidence in themselves.  Two people on the workshop had metal tools at home that they'd just had no success with.  They both went home thrilled with their pieces, and keen to carry on at home.

We worked on copper sheet which allowed us to colour the metal in a number of ways.  We had such a laugh 'aging' our copper with sawdust, vinegar and salt n vinegar crisps.  Sawdust and vinegar worked the best, how cool does Kate's flower look?

We used rubber stamps for the images on our books

Lynn's work already looks fabulous, but think how amazing this is going to be when it's covering the book...all that yummy texture!

Sue, Cynthia and Kate all had different themes

Sue's had a dragon theme, like Kate's, but on the back she used the Tanda stamps roof tile image to represent scales!  Cynthia went for a heart theme.  The Elusive Images heart just looks amazing in copper, as do the keys and locks that Kate used.

Sue and Cynthia did work some more color into their books after I took these photos.  Sue was especially thrilled to be taking home a completed project!!

Kate took hers home to colour with promarkers so she could be more precise with applying colour to her piece.

 

This metal book definitely brought out the dragon lovers in our group!  Freema embossed a beautiful tree on the other side of her book...

[apols for photo quality]

Having noticed that Ten Seconds Studio had brought out a gears embossing plate at CHA 2010, I wondered how well Tim's gears would emboss.  I love how Sue used this idea to create 'leaves' on the tree her owl is sitting on.  I'd watch her blog for more pics of this yummy book, I suspect it wil have had more additions once it got home!

Inspired by...

Kelly Rae Roberts!

I had a play date on Monday with Sue, the Jabberwocky of blogland, and our friend Helen.  Last week we worked on our 365 calendar pages but decided to try something different this week.  Kelly Rae's book 'Taking Flight' has some great step by step photographs and included some techniques we'd not tried before so we decided to use this as inspiration.

We all used the same background technique on our pieces - layering pieces of scrapbook papers down then brayering over them with acrylic paints.  Helen [above] worked on an angel image to go over her background, whilst Sue added Alice:

I used a circular canvas and drew some flowers, before adding a butterfly made with polymer clay.

[please note that this photo is only here as I know Julie will complain if it isn't!  plus I'm trying to face the reality of the weight I put on last year due to medication!! lol]

Sue's a fast worker so had pretty much finished by the end of the afternoon!  I just had to coat my canvas with gel medium, and add wire antennae to the butterfly.  Helen's angel needed painting still.

Sue stamped into texture paste to give that great effect on Alice's body.  I used the large butterfly from Elusive Images' Patchwork Butterfly plate [also available now at Paddy's Stamping Place]  and stamped it into polymer clay, a technique Kelly Rae shares in her book.

We had a fantastic play date.  Thankyou Kelly Rae for some true inspiration :)