A Card for my Mum

It's mum's birthday on 7th November so I made this card for her. The paper is from a Laura Ashley block.

A Junky Card

I am a member of a local craft group where we have a competition at each monthly meeting. The October competition was to make something using junk. After a quick hunt around I decided that the junk I had most of was wine labels, corks, foils etc (hic!) so I set to making a collage. It needed something to finish it off and I found the perfect thing on a visit to a pub in London - they had postcards advertising a make of rum and the bottle was just the right size to sit neatly on the edge of the card. (My son did query why I was hiding a stash of postcards in my bag! They were free .....!). Tying some shrink plastic tags around the neck of the bottle finished it off nicely.  OK, so I didn't win the competition but I am really pleased with the way the card came together.

Carrying on the Catch Up

A couple more swaps I've taken part in are ......

...... an ATC wap with the theme 'Women'. I chose to do a grungy background and topped it with a Mona Lisa image stamped on vellum. The braid and flower with gem were added to give a more feminine touch.

The other swap was with the Oriental Stamp Art group, I decorated a plain notebook, inside the covers as well as outside. It turned out really cute - seemed a pity to give it away!

Mushrooms and Citrasolve
Last month I was asked by one of the ladies in the Hearts in Touch group how I used citrasolve with the National Geographic pages. I need to mention that it was Adrienne Goodenough who first mentioned this technique on one of my groups, and it's a great one. I added my own twist by gently scrubbing off some of the colour with a small stiffish paintbrush and then adding shading and colour using watercolour markers.

I didn't actually need to do much to this to make it look like a woodland scene; the path (or I guess it could be a river with reflections in) and the white 'rocks' were already there as was the 'fallen log' in the background. I shaded the base and underneath the mushroom caps then ran a bit of brown up the left side to look like a tree.

Catch up Time!

How did it get to be October, and the middle of it no less? I think it's time to do a bit of catching up. Although I haven't actually done a vast amount of art work over the past couple of months I have had a few sessions playing around with various background techniques, throwing paint and ink around and generally making a mess (no comments please Karen, Sy or Wendy LOL!!).

One project I took part in earlier in the year was a calendar to be sold in aid of 'Go Red for Women' an American Heart Association initiative. I am a member of the Lost Art Creations Yahoo Group and Terrie, the owner, organised this. The rules were that each calendar page had to contain at least one image and one 'pretty bit' from her Etsy shop and have a heart somewhere on it.  I made the page for March:

Terrie has printed and bound all the calendars and they are now on sale - I am proud to be a part of this, and excited to think that a piece of my artwork may be gracing many walls during the month of March 2011!  Many of us are raffling off our original artwork for this too, with all proceeds going to the charity.

A couple of months ago I took part in a gothic arch swap where 12 of us made double-sided pages to be made into a book. This was good fun - I got lovely and messy with the blue and black inks (which stayed on my fingers for a good two days, despite all my attempts to get it off, I think there was just tooooo much of it!).  There were some absolutely gorgeous pages made by others taking part - mine is below:

Front.  The gravestone flap folds down and the verse behind it is:

Step into the darkness

Say goodbye to the light

We live in an eternity

Where every day is night

I can't give credit to the originator of the verse as I found it on the internet - but I did think it went particularly well with the theme.

Back

Oh to have some Copic Markers - I had one tiny Sharpie in the right colour purple/blue and wore it out doing all the pages, and the colouring in leaves a bit to be desired - it shows up worse on the photo than it did in real life!