Scrapping by the Sea

My sister-in-law said to me the other day "what did we do before sat navs?", well this weekend I found out! The car was packed up on Friday to head off to Linda's Just Scrapbooking Weekend in Bournemouth, I put the sat nav on and waited and waited, no signal could be found.  Now I know where Bournemouth is and how to get there but once there I had a few errands to run and find my friend's house which I have not been to before.  Luckily Mark had given me his ear piece for my phone so I had to call him and use the power of google maps street view to navigate from Poole to Bournemouth and then back again in time to meet up for lunch, thanks to him I made it, just slightly late but had a lovely lunch with Alexa and met her lovely little doggie Reeva and her puss cat Gus.

The moral of this story is obviously to remember the old days and carry a map with you!

The weekend was spent at the Ocean View Hotel in Bournemouth, it was lovely to see some old faces from other weekends and have a catch up and a few giggles along the way!

We had a play with lots of messy stuff, watercolours, acrylics and texture mediums, I managed to complete 7 layouts and 2 finished backgrounds to use.  Here are some photo's of the weekend.

The weekend group

The Saturday ladies

An amazing sunrise on Sunday morning

My finished pages

 

Airbrushed page just for you Linda!

 

  

Extra backgrounds ready to be finished

 

Thanks Linda for another great weekend, look forward to seeing you and my scrapping buddies in 2014.

What you can make with Junk !

Well it poured down with rain again most of the way to the Stamp Attic and my trusty elastic band still held in place on the windscreen wipers (if you are wondering what that is about check out my post further down!) Must get around to getting the new clip on!

Who knew what you could make with lots of junk, I'll never throw anything away again, as I am a bit of a hoarder anyway the house is going to get even more messy!

This is what you can make, Kate Crane showed us how to put together her lovely junk journal from all sorts of pieces of cardboard, old envelopes, music sheets, magazine pages, anything really.

I love the spotty binding, sticky back canvas painted black and spots added with a bottle top.  We also painted the front cover and added doodling and stamping.

Here's the finished journal ready to fill.

Hope everyone has had a good weekend.

Kate Crane Art Journal Weekend

The last few weekends have been filled with crafting loveliness, the last one was spent with Kate Crane at the fabulous Art from the Heart shop in Harrogate.  Kate was teaching us ways of adding lots of different layers to our art journal pages.

Ready to get going!

The first day was playing with Amsterdam acrylic paints, they are lovely thick paints and very easy to work with and blend.  Lots of doodling, stamping and sponging through stencils.

We also used some Deli Paper with the Geli plate, it's a waxed paper and great to use on your page or stamp onto and cut your image out, saves colouring in!

Geli printing onto Deli Paper

Kate busy teaching

 These are the painted pages from the first day.

The second day was all about getting very messy with inks, stamping and colouring!

Kate is a great teacher if you ever get the chance to do one of her workshops.  It was a fun, messy and very inky weekend with some new found friends, and of course some new supplies which just happened to fall into my shopping basket!!

Whilst I was still in the zone, here are some more journal pages.

Me with Kate

Mark came up to Yorkshire with me and we stayed in a little apartment in Knaresborough, we spent the rest of the week checking out the sights and eating far to much fish and chips!

The Shambles in York

Found this great little 50's American Diner in the Yorkshire Dales!  Amazing ice cream parlour!!

A photo with Blind Jack in Knaresborough.

Last workshop this weekend, Kate Crane again making her junk journal, a bit closer to home this time at the Stamp Attic.

JOFY

Had a much less eventual trip to The Stamp Attic on Saturday for a day with JOFY making cards with some of her new stamps.  That is unless you count Sarah trying to head for London not Bristol on the way home and reversing back down the slip road, luckily she hadn't gone up it very far!

We used a couple of her flower stamp sets, using paints and distress inks to colour them, these are cards we made during the class.

Had a play today with the stamps that just happened to fall into my shopping basket and came home with me!

Also some journal pages in my little journal.

These are great stamp sets, very versatile and they all mix and match check them out here. 

Happy Anniversary

Yesterday was our 14th Wedding Anniversary, how these years go by so fast!  This is the card I made for Mark, I used some tissue and collage items to build up the card.

A 14th year gift is Ivory, I found Mark a little elephant called Ellie, she came in a big cardboard box full of straw, wasn't sure if I had ordered a real elephant!  She did turn out to be stone though!  She's got a little spot on the patio, surrounded by cats.

Happy Anniversary Mark x

Scrappy Day

I had a lovely day yesterday at The Stamp Attic in Wantage, I met up with my friend Alexa, as she lives so far away we don't get to make mischief very often!!  The Stamp Attic is kind of in the middle for us to meet up, as well as a great place to shop, so we took advantage of Wendy's crop day, Penny Kafai held a layout class for a couple of hours, the rest of the day we could stay and play.

This is the layout we did on the day.

The rest of the day I worked on another layout and a journal page, plus some chatting and tea drinking!

The journey home however was a bit more of a challenge, after joining the motorway in the pouring rain, I was overtaking a lorry in the middle lane when the windscreen wiper on the drivers side decided to stop working, eek, it's only a small MG so I could kind of lean over and see out the passenger side. I had to pull over very near a motorway junction and phone home for instructions on how to fix it!!  Lorries were whizzing past very fast so I pulled off the motorway still leaning over to the passenger side and ended up on a dual carriageway, found a small driveway I could pull in to.

Got the bonnet open and the joint back together, as I was pulling out it broke again, fixed it and managed to get back on the motorway, it went again!  After phoning home for more help, I was told that a cable tie or elastic band would hold it, lucky I had my trusty crafting tool box with me and had a couple of elastic bands. Risking life and limb on the hard shoulder I finally managed to get the elastic bands in place all the while very large lorries were whizzing very speedily past my bottom which was sticking out from under the bonnet, I was pretty wet by now!

My trusty elastic bands did the job, only using the wipers sparingly I made it home, must remember to put my pink toolkit back in the car!!

Hasn't deterred me though, booked another class at the shop in September using the lovely JOFY stamps, looking forward to that one.

Watercolour Effects from Stamped Images

I spent last Saturday at a workshop in the Round Tower at the Black Arts Centre in Frome with Linda from Just Scrapbooking.  We had a great day with Linda playing with watercolour inks to make unique backgrounds, when these were dry we stamped images, again with the inks, Adirondak colour washes, watercolour crayons and even bleach (not a stamp pad in sight!!).  We used amongst others the Fred Mullett Nature Print stamps.  I used my book to put my fishy photos in, this is the finished result.