A Video Tute (hopefully)

This maybe helpful especially if you have been following Tim Holtz 12 tags of Christmas. Some great ideas.

Heart Art

Here's a journal page I did yesterday. The journal itself is an address book that I picked up at the op shop awhile ago. It's a fairly modern book but with an oldy worldy look about it with quite nice script in it. I'm not usually a 'heart' person, but listening to the radio the other day I heard a line from a poem that struck a cord. It was written by a guy named Barry Dickens after suffering with terrible depression. He'd had such positive feedback from many listeners that he wrote a poem expressing his gratitude. I don't normally drive around in my car listening to poetry either, but I just happened to catch this particular programme and thankfully I've never suffered with depression. The quote is "the oddness of an extra heart".

I used a couple of different shades of acrylic green, smooshed and blobbed on, then blobbed and smooshed and wiped off yellow for the backbground. Some heart stamps around the edge and cut two hearts from different papers. The heart with the words has drizzles of glue with gold Fab Foil over the top. Edged the hearts with watercolour crayons.

Arty Girlz Challenge

Well I decided to join a challenge. It's the first time for me and I came across the Arty Girlz blog and their theme for the challenge was something you can display in your home. Well last Sunday I decided I would make some Christmas flags to hang across the window in our family room. I decorate the "kippers" lounge room with the Christmas tree and lots of little bits and bobs all around but tend not to do much with our lounge room. Seeing as we were having Christmas lunch here with my mum and sister and my inlaws I thought I would do something creative and the flags popped into my head.

It was a bit of rush job and I would have liked to add a lot more embelishments to them and poor old "Merry" didn't even get made, but I was reasonably pleased with the way they turned out.

Just chipboard covered in Christmas theme scrapbook paper, some chipboard letters painted in gold and silver then embossed with a cuttlebug folder. I pulled apart some old decorations that haven't been used in a few years and attached or glued them to the bottom of the flags and also edged them all with various patterned German scrap that I smudged with rub & buff.
So head on over to http://artygirlzchallengeblog.blogspot.com/ and have a look at some of the other participants.

I'm Pretty Jazzed

Well here she is.....my new car!!! Isn't she gorgeous? My brand new......brand new........did I tell you it's brand new? Honda Jazz. I picked it up yesterday afternoon and it's so good to drive. My most favourite part of the car is the icy cold air con, in the succint words of Andy ,"no boob sweat" for this girl this summer, but I love the power windows and I also love the central locking and all the gadgetry on the dashboard. It was a bit scary driving home especially along Leach Highway amongst all the huge semi trailers and then onto the freeway with all the peak hour afternoon traffic. I had my sister in law with me and if you knew her you would know what an excrutiating ride home it was for her. (she drives a zippy little mazda sports car and just between us......well think demerit points and loss of.....and a slight lead foot). I drove very slowly and very carefully and didn't get out of the left hand lane all the way home.

Ahhhh!!!!! The smell of a new car.

In the Pink

Not a colour I use all that much, but I had some paper I had torn out of an old, what looked like a computer programming book and it had all of these weird patterns in it, various colours from pinks and mauves through to oranges and greens and quite a few black and white. It was a book that I found at the local tip. Great treasures to be found there!!!

These are only small, about 10.5 cm x 15cm so they don't take very long to do. Unless you're like me and procrastinate and keep re-arranging and trying out various things on scrap paper. But that's the fun part I guess. I've been making a few Christmas tags as well just using cardstock, glimmer mist and fab foil, if they look ok I'll put them up tomorrow.

Russian Dolls and Clay figure ATC's

I've be making a few ATC's over the last couple of days, now I'm sort of retired I have a little bit more time to play.

The first two are some clay figures that I made with air dry clay and some moulds. I painted them with Folk Art Metallic Sequin Black, it's a great colour because it dries shiny, almost as if it's had a gloss varnish applied. I then smudged some gold rub and buff over the raised areas. The backgrounds are crumpled tissue paper with various colours of paint smudged over the raised areas and then edged with german scrap. It's a little hard to see the definition of the faces.

I came across some DCWV cardstock stacks that I forgot I had (lord knows what else I might find that I've forgotten about, tucked away in a cupboad somewhere) one of them called Far East, so I've used these papers to make these little "Russian Dolls"

This one I put several layers of UTEE clear embossing power over the body and then while still warm stamped the butterfly with black staz-on ink and left it until it had cooled then pulled the stamp off.

This one is mainly paper with a photo of me as the face and a metal embelishment that I painted black and glued to the body.

Here I've made another clay face, the wings are chipboard from the Collections range that I've painted and smudged with about ten different colours until I got the colour I liked. If I'd been able to scan these I think the colours would have looked a lot better, but because they have a bit of dimension (and don't scan well) I had to photograph them. Just can't seem get a good photo of them either. Using the macro always seems to leave them looking a bit convex, if that's the right word and I can never get them straight.