Darkroom Door

Hello folks, it's been over a week since I posted and I just do not know where the time went. It must have slipped silently past me while I was concentrating on something else. So, time for a catch up now.

I had an email from the lovely Rachel Grieg late last night to say that she has now posted the first of several projects that I've done for Darkroom Door as their guest designer this month. I was very honoured and delighted to be asked, especially as I'm a huge fan of DD stamps. 

If you're lucky enough to have met Rachel you'll know why she's one of my favourite people. We only meet up once a year at the Stitches trade show, but we always have a lot of fun and she's a hugely talented photographer and designer. If you'd like to take a look at my creations, just check out the Darkroom Door blog. There will be more added later this week.

Meanwhile, nearer to home, I had a lovely couple of days meeting everyone at C J Crafts in Edgeley and at Card Crafts in Lancaster. Lots of familiar faces and, talking of faces, my friend Paul came along to see me and later in the afternoon he decided to do a bit of altered art on one of my photo cards! 

I love it and it's going into my new Smash album as a special memory of the day and my bonkers mate! Coincidentally, Rachel took the photo that PI used for my cards though she might not recognise it now!

Well, I don't have so many pictures of the weekend to share with you as I'd hoped because a/ I didn't have much time to take any, b/someone half hinched some samples (gggrrrrr) and, at Lancaster, just before I packed away I managed to spill water over a pile of my cards and tags completely ruining some of them......my lovingly blended skies ended up with giant bleached out clouds floating over them! Oh well, these things happen. 

Here's a card that seemed to appeal to a lot of folk though

 I used my new Winter Country Scene stamp to create the landscape with some masking and inking to make the evening sky. I used one of the little shrub images in the set to frame the scene - just stamping with Archival Coffee, adding red dots to accentuate the berries and finally dotting Diamond Stickles over to add a touch of sparkle. I placed the hills low down on the card so I'd have room for the main element which was created using the Tim Holtz Bigz Die "Hanging Sign"with one of my new Christmas messages stamped into the centre. I used black bazzil card spritzed with gold Perfect Pearl mist for the hanger and a khaki shade edged with Vintage Photo distress ink for the sign. 

As I was discussing with everyone over the weekend, I (yet again!) forgot about the distress ink coming through the white acrylic paint I added to the sign to represent snow! Even when I'd gone back over it with Enamel Accents in white and then more paint, the Vintage Photo crept through....it's darned good stuff! However, I have come up with a cunning plan to avoid this in future (it's not like I don't know it does this but I always get so involved in what I'm doing that it slips my mind every time) involving....Glue n Seal...what else?! Anyone who's seen my demos recently will know that I can't stop harping on about what a great and very versatile product this is. So, next time I will cut the sign out and then paint Glue n Seal where I want the snowy effect to be. Once dry I can then do my distressing around the edges as normal but I'll now be able to wipe the excess away from the Glue n Sealed areas so there will be no ink to bleed through the white paint - brilliant! (The Glue n Seal that is!).

Oh yes, I used four Idealogy jump rings and some brass coloured chain from my bits and pieces box to connect the hanger and sign. The hanger was attached with 3D foam and this allows the sign to "swing" below it - you could add another message behind the sign of course. I really like this die set...could make a nice pub sign for mens cards!

Monday was spent with Heather, visiting our mum and then having soup for lunch at one of the local garden centres which had their Christmas displays up....

 ....this was in the entrance.....the deer were animated, the lights were twinkling, the snow was glistening and, never mind the kiddiwinks, I was entranced! We both love looking at all the decorations and Heather likes to add a new bauble or two to her tree every year so we did quite a bit of oohing and aahing. I couldn't resist picking up a cuddly polar bear and trying out the Venetian mask though I evidently don't even know where my own eyes are!

Sadly, the polar bear didn't come home with me and, in fact, we both resisted buying anything....for now! 

I hadn't really ever done much decorating at Christmas (as an adult) till last year as there really wasn't room in our little flat for trees and such like. So I absolutely loved putting the festive touches to the house in 2011 and we got a second tree to add to the one that mum and dad used every year. I bought a few fresh decorations for the new tree and they will bring back some very special memories when I hang them this year. I think this is what makes these baubles, little figures and ornaments so treasured by us all - they each have a story to tell when we bring them out every year. I know there are some really old, battered and faded ones in the boxes in the attic, but they will take their place on the tree along with the sparkling new ones, each reminding me of Christmases through the years, from childhood to now.

Well, that was Monday and yesterday was a drawing day. Though at times it felt more like a blank paper day and the eraser was in use more than my pens. Still, I made some progress and the artistic equivalent of writer's block comes and goes. The trick is to press on regardless and work through it.

This morning I was up early to go for a blood test (nothing but water all evening and this morning - miserable!) and arrived five minutes after the start of the walk in session only to find the waiting room absolutely chock full of people. So I had about an hour and a half of hanging around before my two minutes with the nurse! Then back home to get on with doodling again before having this break to post here. 

So, having chatted about my week so far, it's time to feed my two tearaways before getting back to the drawing board for a while longer.

PS I seem to have more or less got to grips with daft new bloggery whatsit, but am still baffled by the text size. Even more so that one paragraph in this post refuses to stay the dark blue I use but keeps reverting to light blue even after several attempts to correct it, and is also, very bizarrely, the text size that I want - even though the whole post is done using the same setting! I give up.

PPS Of course, as soon as I added the PS, the rogue paragraph righted itself colour wise and went back to the miniscule text of the rest of the post just to make me seem like a mad woman.

PPPS!  More of my projects on the Darkroom Door blog now.