Beautiful Sunny Autumn Day

Well yes, its the dreaded Xmas word and although its only just October we will have to start planning our collection of jewellery and crafty ideas.  We are always designing and creating new ideas for that little something different and even more so for Xmas.  The gifts have to carry affordable prices for all, something for children to give at Xmas  - to the something special gift - and everything in between.

As promised last week these are some photos from the Feltabulous wet felt workshop with Alison Bunning.  I have seen examples of Alison's wonderful creations but never had the chance to have a go, so I joined in the fun.  Miraculously we all made beautiful flowers under Alison's expert guidance and all impressed with what we had all achieved.  So much so that we have two more dates booked for her to come and teach us what else we can achieve with wet felt and needle felt.

When I was on my last travels to the Isles of Scilly I picked up some sea glass on the beach, I  had a little try at wire wrapping some as pendants, they are my first efforts.  I'm not sure if too much wire takes away the effect of the glass so I'm going to try to using less wire to see if I can capture their unique beauty and also use some smaller pieces with resin.

Right, got to get on with preparing our next workshops where we will concentrate on some fun pendants and earrings. We haven't done this workshop before so it will be interesting to see what results we come up with. The great thing is everyone mostly chooses their own gems and findings on our workshops and so the results are always personal and have great variation, which I love.
Daphne 😎

Catching Up

Well, here we are, officially in Autumn and I have to kick off the season by apologising for being a tad rubbish at posting over the summer. It was a crazy couple of months , both craft wise and work wise ( as you can imagine, the 6 weeks school holidays is my most busy period as a childminder). I am back with a vengeance though, and ready to get a grip of being organised with blogging more I promise.

I thought I'd start  back with a quick post about my weekend. I had the best time visiting Alexandra Palace in London with my youngest daughter Emma, and my crafty pals Erika and Debbie.  It was such a good fun day. We didn't do any make and takes, but had a great time shopping, chatting and watching demos. Emma was really in awe of all the amazing samples on display and it's definitely fired up her creative juices. She took great delight in buying her very first rubber stamp ( definitely a proud mummy moment!) and spending her own pennies on a mermaid light box kit, which she decorated eagerly the next day.  I think she did a fab job!

Talking of samples, it was so nice to see my own samples made for Luv Crafts up there on display on their stand. What a buzz!

It also meant I finally got to meet the lovely Jo from Luv Crafts in person, as well as having a long overdue catch up with my dear friend and fellow DT member Denyse. Obviously there was more shopping to be done on the stand too and I bought some awesome new stamps from Studio Light so I look forward to sharing my makes with them soon. 

At the end of the day we set off home weary, spent out but very happy. just to make you drool here's my total stash. 

I can't wait to get stuck into this lot properly! Unfortunately Sunday was spent finishing some more DT samples for the next Samantha K show on Hochanda so I didn't get much time, although I did manage to sneak some stamps into a project for it so here's a peek

I'm off now to break out the ink as those new stamps are calling rather loudly. 

Back soon ( honestly!)

Lynda

xx

A Spot of Upcyling

One of my favourite creative things to do is to find unloved items and give them a new lease of life and when I saw a Facebook challenge last week on Junk Journals and Mindful Mixed Media Art's page  with the theme ' Alter Something' I had to play along.  A quick trip to the charity shop provided some perfect items and I was soon up to my eyes in paint, glue and ink doing my thing and I was so pleased with the results that I thought I'd show you what I got up to. 

The first thing I chose was an old oil lamp with a glass base. I love oil lamps, there's something special about cosying up of an evening under the glow of one, and Autumn will be here soon enough for me to enjoy just that.

I really didn't like the glass base, so the first thing I did was cover it in layers of tissue to create some texture, and over that I then used layer of Golden Crackle Paste. Once I was happy it was thick enough, well cracked and thoroughly dry,  I applied a thick coat of black gesso over the top. While that dried I I got to work on the glass shade, stamping a moth from Visible Image all over it , then carefully painting in a splash of colour. I won't lie- that bit was a total faff as it was such an awkward shape to stamp on, but I persevered and am glad I did! With the gesso dry, I was then able to add some colour, which I did with a combination of High Flo acrylic paints and Indigo Blu Luscious, dripping it down from the top until I was happy. 

I absolutely love it lit!

My second charity shop find was a (quite frankly rather hideous) clock. I do like a challenge though, and as soon as I saw it I envisaged a steampunk type timepiece so I parted with my pennies and brought it home. 

I wanted to create layers of depth, so I used air drying clay to create cogs to overlay on the front, and added some paper flowers and a metal butterfly, then went to town with the gesso all over it. 

The magic with this kind or art really happens of course when the colours are added and it springs to life in front of your eyes. I opted to use Indigo Blu Luscious powders again, mixed with water to create a paint. I also used some Imagination Crafts Starlight paints. I dabbed away with various colours, creating an interesting mottled effect.  Once dry I used Metallic Magic waxes from Luv Crafts to add highlights, and adhered a painted sentiment from Samantha K on the front. 

The clock face itself was too stark, and I remembered that I have a lovely stamp from Sheena Douglass of a clock face. As luck would have it, it was the perfect size! I stamped, embossedand cut it out and added it inside the original clock face. It finished it off perfectly don't you think?

I was absolutely thrilled when the challenge closed to discover that I had won. I can't wait to receive my prize of stamps from Indigo Blu!

While I was in the altering mood I also had a go at some more home decor- a mirror for my new bathroom. These mirrors are cheap as chips from Ikea and so much fun to play with. 

I threw pretty much everything at this- rice paper, texture paste, paints, glitter, beads, rusty magic to name a few. I love these mermaids from Samantha K  and have already decorated a treasure chest with one on to sit in my bathroom so the mirror compliments it perfectly. 

Well that's just about it from me this week. In addition to my upcycle projects I have also done some crafty shopping- well it's my birthday at the weekend so it would be rude not to have bought myself a few gifts wouldn't it?! Maybe I'll share those purchases and my makes with them next week. 

Until then, have a great week. 

Lynda

x

Rising To The Crafty Challenge

So the last few weeks have been ludicrously busy in my little corner of the world and as a result the fact I forgot to post last Tuesday completely passed me by until Thursday. Oops! I am sure many of you with kids understand the end of summer term chaos, which I am using as my excuse, so do forgive me. I'd like to say life should get calmer now, but as a childminder by trade that sadly isn't the case but I promise to try to keep up with you all on here. It hopefully will provide me some sanity in a crazy 6 weeks! 

Amid the usual flurry of family life, I have also been very busy prepping samples for both Samantha K, and Luv Crafts as they have shows coming up on Hochanda this week. Here's a taste of the work I have done.  It's so much fun opening the boxes of goodies when they come, and putting my own spin on them. Sometimes it can be a real challenge to get the ideas flowing ( we all suffer the odd mojo slump right?) but not this time. I had a blast lost in my own creative little world for days.

I'll be popping more info on how I made some of my projects on my own blog over the coming weeks so feel free to take a look here and follow me if you are interested.

After such an intensive time making samples I don't mind admitting I was a bit lost briefly once they'd been packaged and sent, and couldn't decided what to do next as I had no purpose to craft. Do you ever get that way? When I do I find online challenges a great motivator. There's a big facebook event on a page called Junk Journals and Mindful Mixed Media Art at the moment with regular challenges and competitions running. The current one is to either make 5 artist trading coins, and use them in another project, or create 3 artist trading cards and create a way to store or display them. This gave me just the push I needed to get my stamps out and get playing purely for fun this weekend. Bliss!

For my Artist Trading Cards I used some uber cute unicorn stamps and made a triangular display box for them..  Anyone that knows me knows I am passionate about all things mythical, and love to bring this into my crafting so I couldn't resist using that as my theme for these competitions. 

I've never made Artist Trading Coins before, so that in itself was a fun challenge. I created a page in my art journal, focused around the magic of the forest using a variety of different media, stencils and my trusty Lavinia stamps. 

I'm not sure what my next crafty project will be yet, I am feeling the urge to go back to a bit of scrapbooking I think. Hopefully I will have something new to share with you next week. I promise to remember!

Have a great week and stay safe in all this sun we seem to be having. If it's too hot for you, just find a cool fan and craft by it ( just don't do what I did last week and use gilding flakes at the same time!).

Lynda

xx 

Community crafting and planning

Morning,
Apologies for the lateness of catching up with a post, it's been a whirlwind of a few weeks...
In brief I've been planning and booking new workshops and classes and preparing for my next session of demo's, I have also just had a weekend away in Daventry with AFCI UK.
The association for Creative Industries, a Trade association for the creative, craft and hobby industry.
They hold an annual event called the One Big Show which allows the members to socialise and most importantly network, learn and discover through a whole host of seminars and activities laid on throughout the weekend.
It was held at the Mecure Daventry, funnily enough I stayed there 3 years ago when I was invited to hold a workshop there, another great weekend.
I've been very conscious of keeping my planning up to date as so much has been happening and planned that I worry I'll loose track!
It's actually helped a lot and sounds obvious but we don't always plan efficiently, well I have been guilty of this but it's had to change as things have progressed and developed.
My basic planning consists of having a list on my phone that I update and work through daily then each evening I update it with what I've done and what needs doing next and prioritising what's most important.
I can then have more detailed planning for specifics.
My "To Do" list is never ending but it is in an order of priority now and that's helped enormously with an increasingly busy schedule.
I then go to bed with a clear head and not stress about everything I have to do.
It works for me! Sounds simply but it's take me time to get this working right for me.
I wanted to just share a bit about community crafting and crafting for therapy which is something I'm absolutely passionate about. While I was away in Daventry I had a conversation with Dan Bancroft from Create and Craft about this which was really interesting and I'm so glad I could share how I feel about craft with the their team.
I'll finish this post with a bit of an insight into a new venture for me which happened quite by chance!
We very recently had a new micro pub open locally, it's an amazing space and all about community so very much on point with my focus on craft. Think local village pub but micro style!
I've started holding craft sessions there which in itself is a challenge for obvious reasons, like most of us I'm not the tidiest of crafters, so scaling things back to delivery craft micro style was a challenge but it absolutely works!
I'll leave you with the evidence.
There's also a picture of an altered paint brush I decorated for the guys at The Cotton Mill.
Back soon, crafty hugs...K x

Bye Bye Christmas, Hello Summer!

 Hello there! Before I start my weekly waffling about all things crafty, let me first apologise for not stopping by to post last week. My head has been in an absolute spin lately and by the time I remembered I was due to do my Tuesday post, it was actually Thursday. Doh! 

So, what have I been up to? Well, I have been frantically working on my Christmas samples for upcoming shows for both Luv Crafts and Polly Allsorts on Hochanda. I still can't get my head around the concept of Christmas in June/July time but I guess when you are a retailer that's what it's all about from now until December. Fortunately I love to break out glitter at any time of year so while it threw me a little, I soon found my festive groove.

A sample for Luv Crafts

Yesterday I packed up the bulk of the samples ready for collection today, and my thought's turned more to Summer. It seems to be here in full force this week, and what better way to enjoy it than sat outside while hubby cooked a bbq tea with some stunning flowers, a glass of prossecco and my watercolour pens. I had a blast- well, until I started getting hounded by a wasp or three and we realised the pesky little blighters have set up home in the strut of my pergola. How rude of them!  Fortunately we found a repellent powder in the cupboard and I am hoping that was enough to evict them. Time will tell.

With my flowers coloured I dusted off my art journal and made a start on a summery page.  I'm not sure if it's finished yet. I'll review it another day. 

I also managed to make a couple of cards yesterday so thought I'd share them too. 

While I was busy at the craft table my daughter decided she fancied doing some creating of her own- in the kitchen this time. She's started doing food tech at school and is turning into a pretty darned good chef I can tell you. This rainbow cake was so epic that I felt it definitely deserves a mention here on the blog. I hope you agree. Not too shabby at all for a 12yr old. My diet was definitely abandoned but it was worth it. 

Well, that's all from me for now. I will have to set myself a reminder for next weeks post to be sure I catch up with you all again. I am planning a very crafty week, keeping myself cool in the shade of my work area so hopefully I'll have lots to share.

Have a lovely week.

Lynda

xx

Making Time for Magic

Thanks to the lovely Karen for stepping into my spot last week. Life is incredibly busy right now and I didn't even have time to post let alone craft. What a sad state of affairs! 

Life is still crazy but I wanted to be sure to share a little magical project I have made with you all recently. This free standing unicorn is by Samantha K and is just stunning. I literally squealed with delight when I opened the box and first glanced it.  I have a real passion for all things mythical so it is right up my street. 

I wanted to make it colourful, and once I had put the pieces together and sprayed with a primer and them white acrylic paint, I set to work on painting the mane with glittery paints. I won't lie, it was a bit fiddly, but so worth persisting with don't you think? It's hard to tell from the photo but I also sprayed pink glitter spray all over it for some extra magical sparkle. It has yet to be named thougj- any suggestions?

Talking of magical sparkle, take a look at this wonderful pink horse that one of my 3yr old charges made. Luckily for her I had a spare piece of the unicorn, minus it's horn,  so let her loose on it and she created a magical beauty all of her own. I love to see kids being so creative. It took ages to dry as there was so much glitter glue on it! 

Before I go I'll just share another little project I managed to make at craft club last week. Finally I got to unwrap my new Lavinia stamps and have a play. The beauty of craft club is that it allows me to actually make the time to focus on inky play at least once a fortnight- a blissful 3 hours tranquility among like minded folk in hectic times. Perfect!

I've also been getting busy working on some , dare I say it... Christmas projects. Yes I know it's only June , and I am usually the last person to be breaking out the glitter and end us rushing my cards in December, but when you do design team work it seems Christmas definitely comes early.  I'll share some sneak peeks of what I have been making soon!

Have a great week

Lynda

x