PDCC49 further illumination

It's my turn to choose the colour inspiration photograph at The Play Date Cafe and I just fell in LoVe with this image...

I love the hot pink and turquoise, and it looks so beautifully against the rusty orange and brown background.  I could look at this photograph for ages!  Sometimes I love the colours in the photograph and then find it hard to translate them into a piece of artwork, but this time it all came together beautifully.

I've had this designer paper in my stash for a good while now so with the pink and turquoise sorted, I just needed to add in the browns.  The plan was to use my rusty hinge distress ink but my boxes of distress have vanished, temporarily I hope, so I used a promarker on the bird cage, and found a colour print I'd put aside for my steampunk journal with the correct shades of brown.

This week The Play Date Cafe is sponsored by Technique Junkies, and Pat Huntoon is our Guest Designer.  Pat adores techniques and provides step by step instructions in her newsletters.  As Cafe designers we were provided with the Clipped Corner tutorial from this month's newsletter.  This involves 'nestling' the focal image in one of the corners, then cutting along the image line within the corner, or leaving a slight border then following the image shape.

I left a slight border around the bird cage, revealing the steampunk background just in the corner.  For more inspiration using this technique, and this week's Play Date Cafe's colours, head over to the cafe and find out more about Pat and see what the other designers have been up to!

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!!!