It's getting closer!

Hi everyone,

Today I got my Christmas crafting bag out for the very first time this year! I know I'm miles behind everyone else but I really just haven't felt in the mood to create festive projects - I think most people will be receiving bought cards this year at the rate I'm going!!

Anyway I used my Christmas themed Paperartsy stamps to create a hanging that was inspired by two different posts on the Paperartsy blog this month - firstly Jo Firth Young's canvas which can be found here and secondly by Emma Godfrey's canvas which you can find here.

So my hanging for Christmas is below - I'm planning on decorating our house in warm reds, browns and golds this year (it'll be our first Xmas in our new home so have changed from my usual blue/silver colour scheme!) so I wanted this piece to be in keeping with the rest of the house:

The light was fading fast as I finished my hanging so the colours aren't exactly true to real life.

I started with a piece of mount board and coloured it using these Fresco paints:

So it looked like this:

I added stamping using French Roast and JM06:

I used JOFY06 to stamp the dangling baubles in black archival and the scalloped border and sentiment border with perfect medium embossed with gold. I stamped the baubles again twice onto book pages and embossed with gold then cut out and added walnut stain distress ink before adding to the hanging.

The main sentiment is from JOFY26.

I used liquid pearls to fill in some of the smaller baubles and the 'happy' part of the main sentiment.

To finish off I added Renaissance treasure gold to the edges and added two eyelets and some twine to the top.

I hope you've enjoyed my first Christmas make of this year :-)

I really enjoyed creating it today - although I suppose I probably should have made some cards for people!

Thanks for stopping by, Claire xx

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France Papillion Workshop!

Hello - been a little while since I've blogged but today I went to a workshop so I wanted to share what I learned.

The workshop was with France Papillion - organised by the lovely Sue Tucker. France did three workshops over the weekend but the one I attended was called Art Jouranlling - Try Out And Let Go.

Art journaling is very very new to me but something I've always wanted to have a proper go at but I was never quite sure exactly where to start.

Well France was just so lovely, so easy going and funny. I was sitting with my wonderful friend Emma ( aka pink sparkle girl) and also Annette who teaches classes I attend and another lady I hadn't met before called Rebecca.

We started the day with a blank Dyan Reaverley journal - the smaller one, I think it's A5?

Our first lesson was learning what different mediums and various types of art materials do and how they make a difference to the look of your page.

So we tried out various different colours of gesso, then used different colouring techniques - the ones I tried here are pan pastels, dylusions sprays, colour bloom sprays and the luminarte silk paints:

Then we had a go with some of the new Finn products like her crackle paste, gel mediums, art sugar, glitter etc along with some primary pigments too:

Next we made our first real pages - but we had to work as a table, all taking turns to choose the next layer. I found this part so difficult! But the four of us got on really well and all our pages looked totally different. France was very complimentary about our table and said we seemed to work very well together. Here are my pages, I used Paperartsy Frescos, modelling paste, various stamps and stencils, glassine paper, plaster bandage stuff and some of Finns mechanicals which France had rusted for us - probably other things in there too but I've forgotten already!

Next up was a page made with prompts from France. It was based on Tim Holtlz tissue paper, silks, stamping, a doily, book pages, dylusions.....

Last but not least was our final pages, which France made us do in silence with some background music. We had to create pages which represented what we had learned during the day. This was soooo hard! I just didn't know where to start.....but eventually I got going. My pages are based on silks and I used various stencils, distress ink, book pages, modelling paste coloured with primary pigments, various stamps, the rusted mechanicals and some net type stuff:

I won a prize from Sue in the morning:

And bought myself a few goodies from Sues shop too, well it would have been rude not too!

So loads and loads of photos for you but it was a fabulous day and I would love to do another France workshop!!

Thanks must go to Sue for organising it all :-)

Claire xx

 

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Red and D Tag Challenge

Hello

Today I have a tag to share that I created to join in with the Dragons Dream Tag It On challenge blog HERE

This time round the challenge is to use red and the letter D - my D word is drip:

It's a big size 10 tag, coloured with various reds from the Fresco paints range - I think I used London Bus, Cherry Red and Claret.

The background is a Tim Holtz stencil sponged through using a mixture of Pumpkin Soup and Haystack.

The stamping was done using black versafine ink and the stamps are all from Stamps by Ryn, Effects 2. I added highlights using my white Sharpie pen then used glossy accents to make them look more like real drips and drops.

The letters are some Papermania stickers I found in my stash - I distressed them a little using Walnut Stain distress ink and also went around the tag edges with the Walnut too.

A little bit of black sketchy pen added around the letters and then some raffia added to the top to finish.

Hope you've enjoyed my tag today :-)

Claire xx

 

 

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