kristen's nighty night owl

Over at kpink it's Mixed Media Monday and Kristen's featuring my owl card :)  I just love this image and it was perfect for a couple of birthday cards I needed to make.

I cut a very layered piece of watercolour paper  (made on Dina Wakley's workshop at Art from the Heart a few weeks ago), and persuaded it through the printer!  I then printed the image again on white paper and cut out, then painted, the owl's head feathers and the leaves on the branch.  I also used gold adirondack paint dabber paint to colour her beak and heart, and espresso to colour the branch.  Then it was time for the sewing machine - yay!!  There's just something so satisfying about stitching on paper!!

I use a free machine foot, drop the feed dogs, then just follow the lines of the image.  This little nightime owl is layered onto some text paper, photocopied fabric (you may recognise that from a recent play date challenge owl), and a colour photocopy of my layered Dina paper  :)

Happy Birthday Kristin and Congratulations!

...it's a BLoG!!

I have to say I am absolutely THRiLLeD to be on Kristen Powers' inaugural creative team :)  Kristen has launched a blog to accompany her etsy store  but it is more than just that; in Kristen's words it is

"about creativity and the love of paper and art

and the many different forms that those things take. 

That is why you will notice a huge diversity in our senior creative team. From a U.K. designer that teaches art journaling to an internationally known watercolorist to a card maker that creates strictly for the love of paper crafting to some blogger/crafters and crafter/bloggers and a few of us in between, we have a foundation for one of the most diverse creative teams in blog land!"

I can't believe how excited I've been over the last few weeks whilst working with her digital images (although  anyone who knows me well only has to look at the images Kristin draws to know I'd be in love with them ...how cute are those owls lol)  There are lots of lovely digi images out there but although I love colouring in, they really haven't called me.  Until I saw Kristen's!!!  I immediately wanted to sew them and have had ideas flowing over what to do (just sneak peeks here today though, but watch this space!!)   :)

 My sewing machine has been working overtime :)  I've been sewing on both paper and fabric..

...and there are works in progress, and finished pieces...

So why not head over to Kristin's new blog and wish her a very Happy Birthday, and check out  the others on the senior creative team here [did you know blogger now has a page feature?  check out the pages at the top of Kirsten's blog!] or via their individual blogs :)

Amy Anderson

Carol Carter

Barb Kirkwood

Julie Ranae

Tammy Tutterow

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter!

I rarely talk about my religious views, but I saw this this morning and just wanted to share it as I found it very moving.

Happy Easter!  Have a wonderful day :)

art journaling weekend near Oxford

Next weekend, 10th/11th April 2010, I'm teaching my art journaling 1 and 2 classes at The Stamp Attic, which effectively means I'm teaching an art journaling weekend!!  How fab is that?!!  I'm so excited.  I love teaching workshops, and I love teaching them in different places as I tweak them according to the shop I'm teaching at and therefore the supplies available.  [And I get to visit with my friend Wendy and spend too much money in her yummy shop lol!!  She's got Tim's butterfly die in stock - I can't wait!!!]

What always remains the same though, is my emphasis on using your rubber stamps in your journal.  These are images you've bought because you love them, yet when do we stamp them up and look at them ourselves?  They'll mainly be used to make cards for other people (unless we take those cards back lol I've done that with my Mum and know I'm not the only one  ;) )

So if you fancy taking some time out for yourself (which is very good for you!) we have a couple of places left on Saturday 10th April at The Stamp Attic where you'll be introduced to art journaling and go home with a few pages started and at least one page completely finished.  We'll be colouring our pages with paint, stamping, masking and stencilling, and learning funky writing styles and then binding our pages together with a bind it all.  In fact, plenty of 'moodling' :)  As far as I know, AJ2 is full, but speak to Wendy and just check if you're interested.

PDCC #23 Singing the blues

[Sorry, I really couldn't resist that April Fool 

(scroll down to the next post to see it; the posts were scheduled minutes apart)]

Blue has been my favourite colour since primary school but funnily enough I rarely use it in cards.  It does mean it crops up a few times in my colour choices for challenges though ;)

 I noticed that for all the other play date challenges which strongly featured blue I have crocheted or sewn, so this time I decided to challenge myself to make a card.

I still had to get my paint out though as all my 'blue' inkpads lean towards teal.  However, it was only this week that I discovered that some people didn't realise that you could use paint on stamps.  If you've never tried, why not give it a go? 

 I used a piece of cut n dry foam to apply a baby blue and a bright blue to my stamp (just clean fairly quickly with a babywipe),

 then added layers to my card and finished with some stitching and braid.

Thanks so much to those who entered mixed media entries to the play date cafe challenge this week.  Any regular card makers fancy the challenge of using paint this week?

And don't forget to visit all the other designers to see what fab cards they made too! You can check them all out here but it's so nice to visit their individual blogs and let them know what you like about their cards.

PDCC #22 1/2 all for lop!

My turn to choose the colours again this week and since it is still Spring, despite what the weather appears to think, I thought it might be cool to repeat those lovely yellows we had.

Don't they still just make you think of daffodils, lemon and sugar on pancakes, or even marks & spencer lemon torte (that really is the best!!).

Or maybe even just aPRiL FooLS Day ;)






Sorry, just couldn't resist this cheeky post.  Hope I didn't give you a heart attack Julie.  Correct post will be along shortly.

thankyou everyone

There's just something special about having 100 followers so I  wanted to say a huge thankyou to all those who follow me, and those who leave comments.  It really means a lot :)

Our playdate numbers are growing and there were 4 of us in total at Sue's this week.  Sue had to go out unexpectedly and not knowing where she kept her crafting tablecloth, we got stuck into a clean activity - zendoodling!!!

Having completed Milliande's challenge and created a large circle of doodles in my journal, I continued in some smaller ones.

There's still more to do on this page but I'm loving how it's turning out.  Despite it being such a clean activity, we seem to have made enough mess on Sue's table lol

What was fascinating about this activity though was that we'd see a doodle someone had done and replicate it in our journal, but they still looked so different as we all had different pen thicknesses, size preference and a different way of working.

I've got some photos to share with you from my busy weekend (teaching for the first time at the Cubby Hole - fab, and a visit to the NEC) but as I have a four year old nephew hanging around my neck I'm going to leave you with this journal page which is a result of my demo at the Cubby Hole.