Happy Birthday Sue

Its my lovely friend Sues birthday on Sunday and so a special card was in order. Happy Birthday Sue !! Hope you have a great day.

Travel ATCs

I treated myself to a tiny travel iron in M&S the other day to use as a craft iron, it was a bargain in the end as it was priced at £6 and when she put it in the till it came up as £2 !! It was packaged in a plastic see through box with text printed all over it, just right as overlays for travel ATCs. So I got to work and made these !

Friday challenge 2nd March

This Fridays challenge on Alter Native was to make a tag in celebration of world book day. The tag had to have words or letters as a background, use ribbon and display the given quote. I really enjoyed this one as I LOVE books !! So here it is

Friday challenge

Every Friday on Alter Native we are issued with a challenge to be compleated by the following Thursday. Last Friday the challenge was to make 2 ATCs using card for the base, which you must not be able to see and then use only fibre to cover the card and finally add a charm and give it a fancy arty name. One will then be sent to another artist who also took part in the challenge and I will receive another artists ATC. I had great fun with this challenge, both making them and thinking up the arty names with Andrews help. In the end we called the lilac one "lilac in a mellow tone " and the brown one " Nigerian sunset spirit "

I have just found out I won the challenge prize !! I'm so chuffed !!

ATC colour swap

I have just finished my contribution to an ATC colour swap on Alter Native. I chose to use the colour white, which in the end wasn't easy. I decided that for the design to stand out I would have to cheat a little and use a colour for the base, but to make up a bit for the cheat I covered the coloured card with white crumpled tissue paper. Then worked on two designs, white as snow and white as fleece. The sheep have baa written on them with beads. The white paper is my own handmade paper. I had to make 14 in total and am looking forward to receiving 14 different colours from 14 different artists in return.

My Valentine

Instead of a card this year I wanted to give Andrew something different so I drew and cut a heart out of grey board and then covered it with several coats of Blond Moments sweet ruby UTTE powder and on the last coat sprinkled in some of the Blond Moments savoury Autumn UTTE powder . Whilst the UTTE was still wet I pushed in my wing stamps, waited for it to cool the removed them, adding a computer printed "my heart " to finish

Austria in February

We love to holiday in Austria and go several times a year if we can, each time I like to make a diary to write whilst I am there, this is my diary for our week in February in St Wolfgang this year, a great holiday but a little green for the time of year . Great weather for walking though, which we did plenty off and to see a huge bank of Hellebore's that continued as far as the eye could see made up for the lack of snow. I did have a day in the mountains in the snow and built a snowman, so I was happy !

Home sweet home

Instead of a Christmas card for Andrew this year I used an idea I found in a back copy of Somerset Studio and created a little Christmas collage that he could hang up as a Christmas decoration. I enjoyed making it so much I made one for myself and then wanted to work on a larger size, the Christmas ones were only 4x4 inches, and different shape and so came up with this one which can hang in my craft room all year.

I cut a piece of grey board and then collaged book pages over the surface and painted using scraps of paper cut out the shapes needed for the house and ground, printed and antiqued the words using distressing ink then finished it off with a button cat and flower, added the wire ribbons and metal hearts to give it a folky look

Creative journey challenge 4

Back in August I joined a online mixed media art group called Creative Journey. It was the brainchild of a very creative friend of mine Laura and the group has grown and grown. The idea was we all chose a theme to explore through arty challenges which Laura releases each month. I chose "The golden age of travel "1920 - 1950 as I love all those travel posters and luggage labels of the era. This months challenge was to use polystyrene, the sort you get at the bottom of some pizzas, in a piece of art that fitted in with our theme here is my piece, the inspiration was an Imperial Airways luggage label, I made a stamp out of the pizza base then stamped it onto a painted background 4 times,then printed out the banner from the label.

Let it Snow !!!

Every year I wish very hard for it to snow, unfortunatly in Bristol it hardly ever dose. My addiction to snow got worse this time last year when Andrew suprised my on Christmas morning with a weeks holiday in Austria, we have been many, many, many times in the summer but never in the winter and as Austria had its best snow fall in 50 years we had a fantastic time. Ever since then I just can't pass a snowflake by and so when I saw these wooden snowflakes in my local craft shop I just had to have them. The plan was to do them for Christmas but now I have my own craft room I decided to do them and hang then from the ceiling with invisible thread and then I can have snow all year round !!

I primed and painted them all in 3 different blues, used gliter snowflake rub-ons on one then on the other two stamped them using alphabet and snowflake stamps then went over them with glitter glue to give them that snowy sparkle.

Happy New Year !!

Happy New Year and welcome to my blog. This will be a space for me to show you what I like to make and do and not my life story. I love to play with paper, paint, glue and scissors. I create a lot of altered art,altered books, collage, make ATCs and because I love photography, Scrapbook as well.

I am married to Andrew, a very patient and supportive man, who I don't think quite understands what I am up to most of the time with my creations but makes all the right noises at the right times! The other loves of my life are my 3 beautiful birds, a budgie called Barnaby and 2 young, very ,very tame Cockatiels called Herman and Benni, hense the arty parrot name, I am sure you will hear more about them along the way.Well thats me.I hope you will enjoy my blog and will come back now and again to add the odd comment.Thanks for looking.