First Lino Cut!

Clearing out some boxes in my study I found some lino and a box of cutters. I bought them years ago but totally forgot about them.

They've been sitting on my desk for a few days and then I had an idea.

I took a small drawing my son Koby has made and traced it onto some lino. It was quite hard as is was a rather small drawing and some of the elements had to be reversed.






I added a little heart as he loves drawing hearts on things and it balanced the cut out nicely.

I didn't have the printing ink so I used a ink pad that I normally use for stamping, I think it doesn't work so well but I was left with a reasonable image.











I was wondering what to do with it and one of my kids asked was I making a card, so that's what I did.

I cut the image out and mounted it on some silver mirror card and then on some black paper. Whilst clearing I had also found some nice black and white paper so I used that for the background. I added a small rectangle with the words You're purrfect and there we have it, my first lino print card. I'm sending it to my mother, she will be thrilled with a piece of her grandson's art.

T52MMMC

"What is that" I hear you say. Well it is a challenge I have accepted. I'm trying to make one new thing each week and share it here on my blog. If you look in the side bar of my blog you will see the button for T52MMMC, and join if you so wish.

This is what I have made this week. I love embellished fabric covered books and decided to try making one myself. I bought a small notebook, covered it in funky fabric and then embellished with contrasting fabrics, beads and other pretty things.

I started out cutting the shapes with a Quickutz and used my new spray-glue to stick these on my felt rectangle. It says on the tin that the glue doesn't snag the needle and it really is great!

I stuck all the shapes down and stitched them and decorated them with beads and tiny sequins.



I stuck the rectangle onto my fabric to cover the book and stitched that on the cover fabric. I added a ribbon as a book mark and lined the inside cover pages with some pretty matching paper. Here are the pictures of the finished journal.

What do you do if it's raining?

Well raining is not the word for it, it's more like a deluge most of the time, only stopped in the last half hour or so. The answer to my question is: make cards! So that's what I've done and here are some of them. I put them for sale in my Folksy shop.
It was even hard to get enough light to take the picture for some as it is so gloomy outside.


Of course I get help from cat beast, usually in the form of jumping up in the table just as I have arranged all the cards and scattering them all around the table. Or he chews my backing paper... Why I don't know, I think he doesn't approve of the paper as he leaves the fabrics alone.
If I shoo him away he decides to dig through my stamp drawer and beats my tiny stamps under the desk. Who needs this kind of anarchy?



And just as I thought that it couldn't get worse my 5 year old son decides that he needs to remind me about housework and brings me various cleaning materials and plonks them on my desk. Grrr, it doesn't really make any difference if I clean because within 5 minutes it's a mess again anyway...especially in the holidays and they're stuck indoors. Never mind I better go and push the hoover around a bit and decide what I'm making for dinner.

And the winners are:

Here we are, my daughter and I in Astrid's Garden (the real one) pulling two names out of the bag. The winners are ....... BEADDESK and GEMMA.
Congratulations! Please contact me with your postal adress and your prize will be in the post asap.
By the way, my daughter is wearing her number 9 (van Persie) Netherlands shirt and she will be cheering the Dutch team on in tomorrow's World Cup final (and so will I)

This was real fun to do and I will repeat it as soon as the followers reach 100. You all will still be included for the next go!

50 followers reached!

I will be drawing the two winners tomorrow. Keep watching this space as I will be announcing them here. Thank you all for following, I will do my best to get some interesting creative stories going and hopefully feature some fellow artists and crafters work soon.

Blog Give-away!

These pairs of earrings are for two of my followers, randomly picked, when my blog gets 50 followers. All you have to do is to follow my blog and as soon as the number of followers reaches 50 I will pick two names out of a hat and I will post the winners on here.

A-level exhibition

Just a quick post. Tonight we went to an A-level exhibition of the local schools. The work there was remarkable, and one of the artists was my daughter, in the picture here with her self-portrait in the style of Lichtenstein. She was most annoyed that her name was spelled wrongly again, but otherwise very pleased with the fact her work was featured. She has worked incredibly hard on all her subjects, so is now awaiting her exam results. I'm sure we will see or hear more from her in the future. She's a star, but then I am biased!