a passion for journalling

***edit...bad Blogger has removed the last three photos so this is the happy smiling faces of the girls with their work earlier today...***

Well, I am battered and bruised this week. On Wednesday morning I stepped into the bath forgetting that Colin had just had a shower and my right foot slipped and my left leg hit the side of the bath with a thump - ouch! bruise about 4 ins long and 1 inch high and then following that I went for a blood test and the nurse took the blood without me feeling a thing - very unusual as they can't usually find a vein but no probs but then soon after this grotesque purple bruise appeared at which I have been asked numerous times what's happened to your arm??? and then last night going to the loo mid-sleep I walked into the corner of a table - another bruise this time on my right hip!

Anyway, injuries apart I have had another busy week. Unlike many of my UK counterparts I can't make a set of projects and decide on dates and then wait for people to book them - the good folks over here either live here all the time, live here part time or are just on holiday and so my ladies - and children for that matter - come when they can. It can make for huge headaches and so I just have to go with the flow. It's difficult to decide what to teach so I usually let the ladies decide what they would like to learn and work around that and with the children I think who will/might be there and do the same. Doesn't make life easy but then who said it was!

Last Saturday Becky had asked if they could do some more journalling so very happy with that I agreed and took a couple of pages from my journals and simplified them. I looked for pages where there were lots of techniques and Becky, Izzy and Charlotte were very happy. These are the original journal pages and the examples...minus the page I forgot to photograph! duh!

The girls scraped paint and stamped and gessoed and doodled.......and smiling faces were the end result with requests for more next week...

Bye for now

Sue

a bit of journalling...and a few other bits of what I've been up to...

This morning in between customers I decided to do a bit of journalling as I haven't done any for what seems like ages...so out came my lovely new-ish Crafty Notions spray inks and Crafters templates and away I went. Spritz, spritz, turn over...the template that is, not me.!!!.....in my A4 moleskine. Bit of Dina masking, a bit of Dabbing, a bit of stamping and then what to journal? I decided to take a break, put the kettle on, grabbed the newspaper and the ginger biscuits and as I read my horoscope it all fell into place. I have been feeling uncertain about a couple of things lately and as I read I knew instinctively what to journal. I am planning on teaching a class on making flowers in different shapes, materials, etc and so yesterday morning I got out some scraps of fabric - some man-made and some not (good job I have fast reaction times as a couple of pieces went whoosh!!) but those below made it and I am not too displeased how they turned out. Weird how Blogger manages to turn photos around though - this was landscape!! oh well! My good friend Molly,who makes the most beautiful albums from all sorts of recycled products, asked if I knew how to make an album from kitchen roll insides ....and I had been saving kitchen rolls for just that purpose... so I gave her a few and suggested she make an album and come and show the Saturday youngsters. She did and a couple of Saturdays ago she took the class. It took much persuasion on my part to convince her she could do it but she had them eating out of her hand. She only decorated the front cover to make them use their own imagination and she was surprised at their inventiveness and they loved her. All of the youngsters have been bringing in sweet wrappers, empty cereal packets, lids and other recyclable things and their challenge was to use any or all recycled materials as possible.
Below is the album I made and my flowers and heart are die cut from kitchen paper from the spray ink classes I have held many times lately, there are dried banana leaves cut into butterflies, leaves and flourishes, feathers from an old boa, and all pulled together with Distress inks, a few tags and ribbons and a piece of old lace.

I think it worked really well and the colours remind me of a bathroom we used to have that was avocado and for which I bought burgundy towels and a piece of Laura Ashley fabric in burgundy and green to make a roller blind. Ah, happy days!! ...and here's the girls last night busily heat embossing their already Distress inked kitchen rolls... Next week they will finish decorating them and bind them into beautiful albums.
These girls, of all the classes, embraced the recycling the most - perhaps its their age

Right, I'm off to bed so
Bye for now

Sue

Crackle glaze

I went to get my hair cut today and have a pedicure. Karen, the beautician said we have a new product in, it arrived yesterday, will you try it? When she said it was Crackle Glaze well I just had to give it a go now didn't I? I had quite a hard time choosing which colour to go for as there were some lovely colour combinations and in the end I settled on black over silver......

.....so what do you think??? Yucky feet I know but the nails look OK now all trimmed and polished. Karen applied two coats of silver nail polish, left it for 5 to 10 minutes to dry and then painted the black over and while we watched, it cracked!!! just like that. Amazing huh!
Watching it crack gave me a few ideas to try out on Monday when I have no class and time to play so

Bye for now

Sue

A week of repeats...

This is what I have spent my Sunday doing! Making air dry clay foods.......well it beats doing the ironing any day!!! The pizza and breakfast are unfinished - pizza has slices of pepperami on its base but no tomato or cheese and the breakfast tomato is unfinished - my red marker ran out- oh and the tomato on the burger isn't done either...but the cakes aren't too bad. This was my first attempt - well actually my second if you count the faces I made yesterday... so I am not too disappointed with them...

I made these when yesterdays class had left - the lovely Liz Welch had been using air dry clay on her blog and with a spare half hour to fill I made these gruesome offerings... I first taught this marbled paper years ago and was asked by one of the Saturday girls if they could do this... ... and here's the youngsters from Saturday with their marbled notebooks... This is a CD album project I first made last year and Barbara had seen it lurking in the shop and asked to make it -I didn't tell them it took five hours to complete.....

and here they are ... Friday's ladies with their CD albums... I took this into the light so sadly you can't see them too clearly but they are all smiling...even if just the bare bones of the project was complete -they will need to add the stamping and finishing touches at home...my lovely friend Norah (2nd left in the photo) is visiting Javea and came to class - she has been so ill and it is great to see her looking so well...

Celine has been asking for ages to decorate wooden boxes and so on Wednesday the girls sanded and painted their wooden boxes ...after unscrewing all the metal hinges and fastenings of course... Right, I have an iron getting hotter and hotter so I had better go and attack the pile - how come there's so much when there's only the two of us these days???

Bye for now
Sue