A little book of Alice ......

Earlier this month I attended a workshop run by the very talented Mark Gould of DecoArt at Let's Be Creative, a gorgeous venue at Rogate, between Petersfield and Midhurst, owned by the lovely Brigitte O'Brien.

I'd attended a workshop with Mark before so knew it would be a fun and interesting day and it certainly was. We used a different background technique on every page and then used stamps/images/paints to complete the pages. The covers used prints of images from Salvadore Dali's illustrations of the Alice in Wonderland book and these were transferred to the board covers. The stamps were from a variety of companies and all paints were DecoArt.

Starting at the front cover, here are the pages of my book, not necessarily in the order I have them because it would be too easy for me to work out how to stop the photos jumping around the page on their own, wouldn't it!! I've cussed at them enough and whilst I still can't get the page with the splashes on to go central at least you can get to see the pages:

This one is on acrylic so the image is stamped on the back and painted in reverse.

Yes, I know, I painted the heart and spade the wrong way round - hey ho, I like to be different!

This background was done using embossing powders - possibly my least favourite look but it was a different technique to use.

This one was painted with chalkboard paint and cut to look like old slate. I'm going to go back in to this one at some point and add something at the top.

Hopefully I will manage to get to Let's Be Creative again before too long (they hold some amazing workshops) and I'm definitely going to stalk Mark and go to more of his in the future. 

A couple of ATCs

I am one of a group of 9 ladies who each month makes 9 ATCs, the subject decided by the hostess that month. We each send our creations to the hostess, she divvies them up and then sends us all a full set.

For September the theme was Trash Polka; having never heard of Trash Polka before I had to resort to old faithful Google and found that it's a style of tattoo. So here is the ATC I made for everyone:

In retrospect, and after seeing everyone else's, I would have been better off not crackling the background - after all, you don't often see people with crackled skin do you?!

I did enjoy this challenge and would definitely like to do something else along these lines in the future.

For October the theme was Crows - at least I know what they are!! I wanted to do something a bit different and knew about this image of a crow with a saying by Sadako Sadaki on his wings so went with that. The background was done using Distress Oxides and the 'world' is part of a circle cut from pages of an old National Geographic magazine which had been subjected to CitraSolve in the days when that was the thing to do! I have quite a stash that I'd forgotten about until I went hunting for something suitable for the world image so it's good to have had an excuse to actually use some of it. 

Thanks for taking the time to look - hopefully I'll be back with some more offerings soon.

A bit of Paint Pouring

Over the last few months I've become rather addicted to acrylic paint pouring. I spent several weeks watching YouTube videos, buying supplies and trying to catch up with other commitments so that I could clear some space in my craft room and get ready for action.

Here are the photos of the first few pours I'm willing to share (yes, there were some disasters!). This one is a swipe -

Another two swipes - both of these were still wet when I took the photos but they dried nicely and kept their colours and are now ready to varnish.

(The white at the bottom left is reflection, it is really black!)

I've learnt a lot from doing these, and from following Deby Coles website, Facebook group and YouTube videos. There are many people putting up videos and it's worth watching a selection as everyone has a different way of doing things. I have started off with PVA glue as my base but if I ever want to do more with my artwork (like selling it) then I would need to look into using more expensive ingredients as PVA glue can yellow over time. But, it's good enough to practice with!

So that's it for today - already a third of the way through October and I've managed 2 posts - I'd better buck up my ideas!! See you soon :)

And somehow it's October again - which means Blogtober 2017 is upon us!

So, having not blogged since August I felt I should up the mojo and have agreed to take part in Blogtober again.

To start with, since I don't really make cards these days (although I seem to have made several over the last few months!), here are a couple of quickie birthdays cards made for ladies in the About Oriental Stamp Art group. Again, images by Vera Lane, the backgrounds are done using Distress Oxides.

Thanks for looking; I'll be back with something other than cards very soon!

And yet another birthday ........

And today, it's Karen's birthday so I can finally blog her card! This card is along the same line's as Wendy's card in my previous post, just a different Vera Lane digi image. I do so love these images - I don't usually do 'cute', preferring grungy and messy playtimes, but these images have an quirky edge to them which I like. Again, I used a couple of my own hand made stamps to add extra dimension to the card.

That's it for birthday cards - I don't make many these days, possibly just 4-6 a year as I prefer to do more in the way of ATCs or canvases. So next time I'm here I promise to bring you something a little bit different!

Thanks for stopping by.

A birthday card .....

Today is my friend Wendy's birthday so I can finally blog the card I made for her :) As seems to be the case with most of my cards at the moment, I used a gelli print for the background with some additional stamping using one of my hand carved stamps. The image is a digi image from Vera Lane, coloured with Pro Markers and the sentiment was printed using the Dymo machine.

(Apologies for the wonkiness of the scan, I didn't realise it was quite this bad at the time I scanned it!)

A couple of oriental cards to share

Last week I made a couple of cards for friends in the Asian art group I am a member of, using gelli prints as backgrounds and Vera Lane digi stamps, coloured with Pro Markers. I've not used digi stamps before because I always felt like it was 'cheating' for some reason! But, I must say, I do like that you can print them out any size you like, there's no storage problem and you'll always get a perfect image!

I'm on a roll here - 2 days in a row :)

To be honest (joking!), I don't want to be 'told off' by Sy, Wendy and Karen (see Blogtober 2016) for not keeping up with my blog posts! They know me well enough by now to realise that I'm rubbish at blogging :) LOL!

So, what else have I been doing? Well, there are a small group of us ladies, just in the UK, who swap all sorts of artwork in swaps - these are a few of those from the past couple of months:

For this postcard swap we had to create a background paper using a specific set of rules -this was my end result - I may have gone a bit swirly and dotty happy but it was shiny and pretty :).

The spec for this ATC was 'dandelion'. I had the dandelion stamp but it looked a bit boring on its own so I thought a little Alice would enhance it, I mean, Alice enhances anything surely?  I quite liked the end result. The background was actually done on the gelli plate with some grasses pressed into the paint before taking the print, but it doesn't show well in the scan.

This tag was for swap in the same group - we chose a country and tried to portray that in our work. I chose Asia (OK, a continent but it meant I could use any of my Asian supplies!). I love doing grungy - this turned out maybe a bit too grungy for the recipient but they were kind enough to say they liked it!!

On the back I made a little pocket using one of the 1001 red envelopes I have and made a tag to go in it. On the front a design, on the back my details.

And, finally, these two prints were produced during the gelli printing course I did on line. I really enjoyed this course and leant so much but I know that I need to do lots more practicing .....!

At some point I'll go back to this one but at the moment I don't know what to add/alter. I quite like the dolphin 'talking' to the seahorse as well as the fish (large bubble wrap!) in the background but I do feel that it needs more attention ..... we'll see! It'll possibly find its way into the large pile of prints in my drawer!!

I think I'm about up to date with work I can share. Being in groups means I can't share as I produce work and that's possibly part of my problem with blogging - once I've finished a piece I forget about it!

Thanks for popping by and I'll see you soon :)

Catch Up Time

If I put up a post now it will only be 4 months since my last post! Just squeezing in here before August hits :)

Well, I have been doing a few bits and pieces over the last few months; some swaps, a handful of cards (I hardly do any cards these days) plus I took part in an on-line Gelli Printing course run by the lovely Lucy Brydon. I'm currently trying to get my August and early September commitments finished before we go off on our hols shortly so am up to my elbows in paint and glue and my craft room looks like a bomb has hit!

So, here are a few of the things I've produced (and am willing to share!!).

These 2 birthday cards were made for friends in an Oriental Stamp Art group, the backgrounds were actually brayer clean up sheets - often they give me more inspiration than the actual sheets themselves!

This card uses the small circle gel press plate (from the set of 3 - circle, square, triangle). I love playing with these, both with inks and paints and can spend hours just producing backgrounds.

This card is something totally different for me. For a swap in another group I had to do iris folding, something alien to me and something I really had no interest in, having 3 thumbs on each hand!. But, I persevered and once I got the hang of it I quite enjoyed it and 'may' do it again on a smaller scale one day in the distant future. (I had to do 9 ATCs of this design!). I made this card for a washi paper swap on the Oriental Stamp Art Group, sort of practicing for doing the ATCs.

And this one was a card for a 'dragonfly' card swap:

So that's just a few bits of what's being going on in the Dragonflywhisperz craft room. I'll be back very soon with some more :)

Thanks for visiting.

Alice in Wonderland trio of ATCs

One of the Yahoo groups I'm in had an ATC swap with the brief being 'Mixed media set of 3'. At the time I had minimal supplies to hand and was working on the kitchen table - that brought back memories of when I first started crafting; boy am I glad I don't have to do that these days! I found my old Alice book and AIW stamps, grabbed some gelli prints from the huge stash I seem to have accumulated and some washi tape and got going. This is the result:

I was really pleased with how they turned out in the end and was sad to part with them, but the recipient liked them which is the main thing.

Here I am, at last .......

We were away for the whole of January, visiting our daughter in Australia, so no crafting was done over that time. When we came home I decided to empty my craft room totally and redecorate. Hubby laid a new floor (getting rid of the rather smelly carpet we'd inherited with the house), I nabbed DS's desk that we'd been storing in the garage and hubby re-jigged the shelving. I got rid of SO much stuff - I can't believe I had so much total rubbish in there (well actually, I wasn't really that surprised!). So my room looked like this for a while - tidy!:

Of course it's not this tidy now! I'm now back in 'making a mess' mode; that has to happen if masterpieces are going to be created - right?!