2015 A year to remember and a year to forget

Hello my crafty friends, you've not heard much from me in 2015, I'm very sorry about that.

I didn't lose my mojo or anything, I lost my Mum and it threw me for six. :(

But when one door closes another door opens and I was blessed with a beautiful granddaughter in June, called Autumn Rose. She's wonderful and she makes me smile lots. :)

So here's a round up of my crafty year, with many things that didn't make it on the blog.

Lots of painted driftwood

 

Painted wooden plaques

Driftwood Seahorses

I belong to the sea Canvas Class at Art from the Heart

Crackle ATC's playing with DecoArt Crackle Glaze

July Tag class at Poppy Rose in Stockton-on-Tees

25th July Seahorse Canvas at Art from the Heart

23rd July day out to York with Crafty friends :)
Mell, Kate and Gemma x

Gelli Plate beach huts, just playing in my craft room :)

19th September Cherry Blossom Canvas at Art from the Heart

4th October Cambridge, Mixed Media Fest, at It's Crafting Time

7th & 8th November Coventry.
DecoArt & Tando Creative classes The Beach Hut box
I'll do a separate blog post about this class :)

15th November Seth Apter class
I will do an update on this project when I finish it :) x

There are other things which I'd like to write a blog post for, but I'll put them on soon. xx

I hope you all have a fantastic 2016!

I'm starting the New Year as I mean to go on....with painty fingers!

Michelle xxxxx

Aged Decoart Crackle on ATC's I've missed making ATC's

I forgot just how fun and quick making ATC's were.

So had a little play yesterday with my Decoart Crackle Glaze and Antiquing Cream.

I just love all those aged crackles :)

Here's how its done :)

I bet you've seen these before?

I've got lots of them, just waiting to be used on something like this.

I stuck down a few papers and an image with some gel medium on a ATC. Be sure to cover the top with a layer of gel medium too, this gives a good surface for the crackle glaze to adhere to. Dry with a heat gun.

I like to use strong not bendy ATC's. Stick some mount board on the back or buy the thick ATC's, they don't buckle or bend when you use the heat gun on them and the crackle glaze works better on the firm card. 

Then I used Faber-Castell big brush Pitt pens to create the shading.

I have used distress inks in the past around the edge, but they don't work well because they are water based, and the crackle glaze is water based too and so the ink runs into the crackle. This is not good, and you don't get a good crackle either. 

The Pitt pens are indian ink and won't run into your crackle glaze. 

You can rub your finger on the ink too and it moves it around to blend the shading. 

I used the black Archival ink around the edge of the ATC.

I used a wide flat brush to brush on the crackle glaze. Take care not to over brush it. Load up the brush and brush one or two strokes over the same area and move along. You get a better crackle the less you work it. The glaze is self leveling so it will even out when you leave it. 

Leave it for about 4 hours and you get this gorgeous effect!

and no leaching of the ink.

Then rub in Antiquing Cream with your finger or a brush.

The antiquing Cream will fill in the cracks and is non permanent, so you can wipe off the excess when you're finished working it into the cracks.

And Voila!

Two fab aged crackle effect ATC's :)

Now what else can I crackle?

Have a good weekend peeps, the sun is out and I'm going to the beach :)

Michelle xx

Love is in the air with Creative Expressions

Love is definitely in the air as Valentines Day approaches, and in keeping with the romantic season I've made this love ATC which could also be used as a tag on a present, or just a little love note with a poem on the back.

The gorgeous heart stamp and the sentiment is from the wonderful Hearts Entwined stamp set from Creative Expressions 

 For the heart I stamped it on chipboard then cut it out. Then I pressed the heart shape into a Ranger's Perfect Medium pad and shook some Blue Raspberry Aurora Cosmic Shimmer Embossing powder over the top and melted it with a heat gun. I repeated the process again with another layer of the Blue Raspberry Aurora embossing powder. 

Then I repeated again using an ultra thick clear embossing powder this time. While the clear embossing powder is still warm ink up the heart with black Archival Ink and press it into the melted embossing powder.

Then you get this lovely 3D effect of the heart shapes within the heart.

Do you know any love poems that can go on the back of an ATC?

Naughty one's are very welcome too :)

Have a great weekend

Michelle xxxxx

Preview Day at AFTH and new journal

Art from the Heart (AFTH) is my favourite art shop in Harrogate owned by Dyan Reaveley the creator of the Dylusions inks, stencils and stamps.

I love it when AFTH have a preview day because there's such a buzz in the air. Lots of people and blog friends turn up and we all have a catchup and get inky. I really wish I just lived round the corner. I loved meeting up with Sandra aka RedKittyBcreates, she makes me laugh, and the lovely Ruth too, so pleased she turned up in between classes so we could have lunch together. Mel popped in to say hello too, nice new hairdo Mel.

We had our first class with Kaz Hall, she's such a great teacher. We made a calendar tag using Perfect Pearls mixed with Dylusions inks. I love those giant black Ranger tags......they jumped into my basket though naughty tags......... We finished our class by doing the conga around the shop! 

Our second class was with Kate Crane, with a brilliant idea of a ATC in an arty envelope, It's so gorgeous I love it. I made the big mistake of putting my Stickles glitter on my wings before I had cut them out! Kate rubbed it in because I was being cheeky in class, that's karma I suppose :-) . 

I was running out of time and I forgot to stamp my sentiment and the boy stamp that I wanted for the ATC...oops. So I improvised when I got home. Luckily I had stamped the cats so I used two of them. but added some angel wings to the cat with a heart and drew a tree for him to sit on. The expressions of the cats just make me laugh.

I also managed to grab me one of these!

So I had to get started ASAP, still a working progress though.

I used Kaz's perfect pearls technique on the stars.

I had a great day out again.  

Thanks xx

Preview day at Art from the Heart

Art from the heart
An epic inky, painty shopping session and I loved every minute of it. Got there at 9am, and left at 3.30pm! Everyone was so nice, lots of people and there was no argy bargy-ness. Perfect. The table was set out in the shop with the journals open again...I love it when they do that....it just makes you want to whip your journal open and start inking up a new page straight away. Art journaling is going a bit mental at the minute, everyone's talking about it and wanting to have a go. I'm enjoying the ride, just like everyone else.

Once again I took my camera and took only 3 pictures...what a fool I am!...... I really wish I had taken more, one pic was of me and Dyan and the other 2 were of me and Kaz...the pics of me and Kaz we weren't happy with because we didn't have flattering angles!....how vain are we? But if we don't look fab, they're no good, simple as that.  Here is the pic of me and Dyan. I'm a short arse so Dyan came down to my level...however I look a lot shorter than 5'4" on here! Dyan looks like she's practically on her knees. Fab and groovy red hair too, looks brilliant.  I'm on a diet so when I'm thinner I won't look as short...well that's my theory anyway...I'm currently being beasted into shape by my Jillian Michaels dvd too....she kills me on a daily basis.

I was lucky that someone dropped out of Kate's class at 10am, and I stepped in to fill their place.

We made a Stampotique card, which when I finish it off I will put it on here, tomorrow maybe. You can see a little bit of it on the bottom of the haul pictures below.

We all made a concertina card in Sandra Hall's class. Which you can also see at the bottom of my haul picture too

In Dyan's class we did a bleaching and layering stamps technique, very..VERY...funny class.....mental note.. ...must take hard hat next time as Dyan likes to take the shortest route possible when passing you items. She couldn't very well get up and pass anything anyway today because she was sat with her foot up on two boxes, she had broken 2 toes ....ouch!... The funniest story was how she did it. Apparently Dyan thinks its quite natural to walk down the stairs in a ministry of silly walks stylee and manged to smack her toes off the bannister! 

I came home with dirty hands again.

Here is the haul, vetted by the cat of course first.  Every time I whip the camera out she's like 'get me, get me'. 

The little square boxes are pill boxes filled with Perfect Pearls, many different colours. The bag of swirly brass things are swirly brass things!...erm paper clip type things. 

I managed to pick up a Halloween in Wonderland 8x8 paper pad for Red Kitty B aka Sandra (or the other way round..who knows), I think maybe the last in the country. I was really lucky it was there. Apparently Ben found it in the studio. I got some great thick ATC's, really excited about those.

I spy an old Tim Holtz stamp in the middle there. 

This is a mucky mixture bag of stamps, I love every stamp in it! You can see my new 2 Stampotique stamps in the corner, I have a plan to hatch with those tomorrow. It will be on the blog very soon.

And finally 3 racks for my dabbers, distress stains, Golden paints and Adirondack alcohol inks, I have no excuses now for being untidy.

I think you could safely say that I broke the bank!

Until next time.

Bye xxxxx

Morning world

A new day and a new computer! I went out and bought a shiny new laptop thinking my old one was running slow and I'd had it a while. Oh no it was my internet provider's network dying, and then going off for the last 24 hours. A blogger simply can't live without an internet connection for 24 hours! So I've been busy installing programmes on the new puter, and then did a sneaky ATC with my new Ranger canvas ATC's.

So this is what I thought this morning, "Morning World" hopefully we can get the internet back on, and sure enough it did. Phew no more internet dt's. 

I used Stampotique Stamp "In Prison"

Background is stamped with an Inkylicious 'Brick wall Stamp', dabbed with Aqua Adirondack dabber and a Dimension Stamp small 'Honeycomb stamp' with some gold acrylic paint.

I used a close squirt of Dylusions inks for the 3 circle sprays.

Golden Paints play day at AFTH

Well I've had the most enjoyable day today. I really had a lot of fun at Art from the Heart (AFTH), .... it should be dished out as therapy ..... I sang all the way home in the car on cloud nine! The paint-ier my hands (and face) got today the happier I became.  Kate Crane was of course on top form again drawing out the secret artist inside you. I'm always surprised about all the creative things I've made when I get home. If you've not been for a class there, then you should seriously think about having a go.

Here are a couple of pics of what we got up to today.  Here we are rubbing off our printed image transfers that we stuck to our tags. In the foreground you can see the colour swatches we made from using Golden paints with different mediums. Brilliant idea Kate.

Here are 2 journals drying on the end of the table. The blue one is mine, and the orange one belongs to the wonderfully talented Ruth.

Here are the tags I made and a little canvas board in the middle. Some tags are only a background for now and will appear on the blog later when I've finished them.

Here is the background of the journal pages. Not finished yet, it needs calming down a bit, but I love those Golden paints! 

Here are those printed image transfers. The one on the left we used fluid matte medium to adhere the print to, and on the right we used gesso. I rubbed more of the paper off around the face to give it a 3d effect of a face.

I love this background below. This was made using watercolour card, I sprayed it with water first, then painted it with some light blue paint, then dried it off.  Then I added a darker blue with a palette knife, oh and did a couple of circles with the lid while I was on. Then I added iridescent orange Golden paint....OH this is sooooo yummy! I NEED MORE.... finished it off with some splats of orange paint. Now I need to make an image to go on it.

I also managed to spend £68 while I was there too! My second haul of the week, good job I'm on a diet, they'll be no food shopping this week!

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On another note.

On Wednesday's post for WOYWW I promised I would put up the ATC's I received from the 3rd Anniversay swap. 

Trace's grungy steampunk from InkyPinkyCraft is full of wonderful layers, love those embossed rivets.
Jo's felt Dumfling from Twiglet is beautifully different, love this idea.

Rita from RMG creations produced this wonderful art embellished ATC.
Belinda from Belinda's Crafts gave me a marvellously inspiring quote, "Do small things with great love".

And last but not least Jo from JoZart made this fab colourful ATC dedicated to the 3rd WOYWW anniversary.

Thank you everyone for my smashing ATC's which are now on my wall inspiring me everyday.

Michelle x