An extravagant weekend!

Hello folks, and sorry it's taken me a few days to upload my pictures and tell you about The Craft Barn Extravaganza last weekend. I travelled down to Lingfield, a pretty village in Surrey, on Friday, where I met my friend and colleague, Andy Skinner at the shop. We had a catch up and looked around the shop before having a stroll around the duck pond (complete with duck house!) and enjoying looking at the ancient trees. I was staying at a local Inn just nearby, so I then strolled back there in the glorious sunshine and had a wander around the nearby churchyard and adjacent lanes with their characterful cottages. It was a lovely way to relax before the busy couple of days ahead. Above you can see the Star Inn...much prettier than a Premier Inn or Travelodge!
Next day it was time to set up my table at the Community Centre - the Extravaganza weekend is held in three venues plus the shop itself. This year there were visitors coming from all over the country, but also as far away as France, Canada, New Zealand and Australia! Many of these ladies were members of a Forum who got together to enjoy the event together - what a looong way to come! That's what I call dedicated! Here are a couple of pictures of my table (you should be able to enlarge the pics for a closer look) complete with my favourite fruit tea of course! As you can see, I am still not quite over my purple, blue and pink phase, though I am trying honestly! There are some hints of orange, yellow and browns in there too. There was a lovely name sign on each of our tables as well as a beautifully wrapped bag of sweeties to keep hunger pangs and sore throats at bay. Altogether there were 24 different designers and demonstrators across the four venues. Look who was on the table adjacent to mine..... ....yes, the lovely Paula Pascual, who was demonstrating her favourite die cutting. Our styles are so different but we are a mutual admiration society! So it was good to catch up and have a smiling face nearby.
Here is a card that I made on Sunday, using a slightly different technique with Alcohol inks to create the background. As you may know, Blending Solution must never be put into a Mini Mister because, although it's a really safe product, if you were to spritz it, it becomes airborne as particles and could be ingested. I have wanted to create a similar effect that can be had when spritzing water into Distress ink backgrounds ie the faux bleach speckly effect and it came to me, in one of those "Doh" moments, that maybe Stazon spray cleaner would do the job. Well, the great news is that it does work, as you can see from this card. I'll show some more examples of it next week. I love finding something that I can do differently with a product and this technique went down very well at the weekend. This card and instructions will be going onto the Personal Impressions website very soon. The Butterfly and Keep On Smiling cards from my previous post are on there now if you'd like to have a go at making them.
I met lots of very friendly, excited and lovely people at the event, and special thanks must go to Stella, who presented me with the lovely bracelet that you can see here. Stella said that she had seen it and thought of me....it's really lovely as the charms are things like scissors, crayon, paint tube, stapler etc...just perfect! Stella also gave me the box of chocs to give to David - how lovely, especially as we have never met before. Thank you again Stella! On the left of them, is a gift that I was given by Glennis, who had come all the way from New Zealand. As you can see it is a handmade gift box that contained a bar of NZ chocolate...though it looks like a gold bar and seemed almost as heavy! Thank you Glennis, welcome to my blog and I hope you are enjoying all the lovely things you bought.
Next are some ATC's which were swapped with me..... .....clockwise from the top left, they are "Aargh! Who's drinking all our water?" by Connie, "The Witch's cat" by Barbara, "Time Flies" by Michelle and "Optique" by Maggie. I think you'll be amazed when I tell you that Michelle had never made an ATC but was so inspired on Saturday that she went home and made her first one ever and I was the lucky recipient. Well done Michelle, it's really, really good.
Andy had a really busy time at the opposite end of the room to me....we hardly saw each other until about 3.30pm each day due to having crowds in there all day! Here's just one part of Andy's tables of samples, complete with Steampunk Time Machine, tea caddy, altered calendar and much more..... ......and here's the man himself, surrounded by more fabulous creations. I know that Andy had a great time meeting everyone and his fan club continues to grow! You can see lots of his inspirational techniques on his blog or on the PI website. I used some of Andy's stamps for the projects which I created for this month's Crafts Beautiful magazine. I created a false lid in the box and filled it with tickets, shells etc. The paper that I used to cover the surround was stamped with various Andy stamps. I made this matching card using the same stamps and Distress ink colours along with the Martha Stewart PAOTP classic butterfly punch and some Idealogy items. Hope you like them! Well, that was last weekend, and I have another busy weekend coming up. I shall be demonstrating on Sunday at the Suffolk Papercraft show on The Stamp Hut stand. This is in the Leisure Centre in Bury-St-Edmunds. Hope to see some of you there - don't forget to say hello!
Welcome to new followers and readers of my blog and I hope that you will enjoy my ramblings.
I am going to sign off now as Thomas will be waiting to come in for his "7pm on the dot" dinner! It's a few minutes after 7pm now, so I know I will get grumbled at!