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?!

Christmas Cards

Since buying the set of 3 little Gel Press plates I have become rather obsessive about them and have made a huge pile of prints and a stack of card bases. Some of these have finally become Christmas cards - I had to stop when I realised I had more than enough for this year! So, the rest will become birthday cards at some point.

All of these ones in this photo are made using DecoArt Media Acrylics, I like that because they are so highly pigmented you only need to have a very thin film of paint on the Gel Press plate which lets the underneath design show through well. Some of them have more paint because I wanted a bolder look.

And a closer look ........

I did also make some using inks rather than paints and they turned out really nice but were far more subtle. Unfortunately I have already sent those off to people so can't show them here. 

Having been relatively good posting for Blogtober, I have become rather lax at posting anything during November so far, so I had better put that to rights.

I made this ATC for a swap where the theme was to print using fruit or vegetables. I chose to use onion which I must say was incredibly smelly! I brayered red and yellow and a tiny bit of black acrylic paint on my gelli plate and then used the cut onion to lift paint off of the plate and printed it randomly onto a clean sheet of paper. By using the gelli plate it was easy to keep moving the paint around. Once dry I cut the paper into ATC sized pieces and then stitched around some of the onion ring designs followed by added white highlights. Finally I stamped a flower onto another piece of gelli printed cardstock and finished off with a button.

Blogtober - the final post

Something a bit different for my last Blogtober post.

Going back to March, my children bought me a voucher to attend a glass fusion workshop with the lovely Claudia Weigand of Oh My Glass which is in a little village near Worcester and I arranged to go in April. What a great day! Hubby and I drove up the evening before and stayed in a beautiful little old fashioned pub nearby called The Boot Inn (the food was amazing).! On the Saturday I attended the course and hubby entertained himself in the rain (we actually woke to snow but that soon turned to rain). I think he spent most of the day sitting in his car reading.

We made three items, the first a wall hanging - I chose to do my birthsign:

This is clear glass with an embossed design.

My second piece was a different wall hanging where we made a design laying pieces of coloured glass over a long plain piece. The idea (in my head) was not to have everything in line - I like the more random edges. I tried to depict sunset over a beach.

My last piece was a candle holder - the idea was to make something that 'drooped' (I can't remember the correct name for it!). The design is fired flat at first and then it is fired a second time over a form and it then takes that shape. I used pieces of copper (the hearts), foil and wire to make the design.

I really loved doing this and it is definitely something I'd like to do more of ..... one day!

So it is now the end of Blogtober - thanks for taking a look at my posts. Hopefully having been kick-started into resuming my blog I will now keep it up.