Catching up again!

I have to admit I have struggled to find inspiration for my calendar page this month, but a visit to my Mum's garden gave me the push I needed to get something on paper. Her garden is a riot of daffodils, tulips and grape hyacinths, and the combination of colours is so cheerful, I thought I should try and capture it. My attempts to draw and paint the hyacinths however, were pretty rubbish, so they didn't make it onto the page! She and her neighbour have an ongoing joke where they hide a garden gnome around the outside of their houses to make each other laugh, so the little Stampotique character had to sneak in too!

Things here are as hectic as usual - the building work continues with the constant demand for tea,coffee and decision-making - I always thought of myself as a pretty decisive persion, but I am becoming seriously decisioned-out! Hopefully it won't be too much longer until the builders are done, and I will share my new studio with you when it is ready!

Mary-mare has settled in well and is now well and truly part of the family. I still have to pinch myself from time to time to believe that something so beautiful is mine! We have had some great fun together, and I have realised a long held ambition to jump the hunt jumps in the woods near us, much to both of our excitement!

My first art teaching experience went well, in fact so much so, that a second date has been discussed. They were a lovely bunch of people and I have heard from several of them who are now committed journalers!

I have just come back from a weekend away with my friend Nicky. We attended a two day course on glass fusion with a lovely and very talented lady called Genevieve Thompson of Wicked Gen Crafts is her blog, but she also has a website here. It was very exciting and there is more excitement yet to come, as my final pieces have yet to be fired and so I won't find out how they have turned out until next week. I'll tell you more about it next time, with pictures too!

The cat that got the cream

Although I have about a million things I should be doing at the moment, such as finishing my teaching models for my art journaling course at Artison on Friday, I spent last Saturday afternoon at the Great Northern Papercraft Extravaganza in Harrogate, so that means new rubber! Purely in the interest of research, I have obviously had to have a bit of a play! This is one of three stamps I bought at Art from the Heart from Octopode. After some really tricky times last year, this year is definitely going our way, and I do feel like a really rather naughty cat with a really large pot of cream, especially since so many people around the world are having such a horrible time at the moment. A member of our family lives in Lyttleton NZ, and has all shades of carnage surrounding her, and a really good friend of mine in Japan has survived an earthquake and a tsunami, but now faces radiation from the Fukushima leak. It's hard not to feel a bit guilty, but equally, I think some of the events recently just reinforce that you have to live life to the full and seize the moment. And, on a lighter note, who could be downhearted in this beautiful weather!

Catching up at last..

Phew! I am, at last starting to catch up with things. Had an enjoyable couple of hours putting this together yesterday, in between doing the Brownie run and cooking and washing - does the pile ever go away? The stamps are from Claudine Hellmuth, and although I have had them for a couple of months, this is the first time they have been out of the packet. I decided to go with fresh, springlike colours, as the weather here has been be-au-ti-ful, until yesterday, when the fog descended and since then we haven't seen the sky, just grey, grey, grey. I figure if this weather continues, at least looking at this page everyday will cheer me up!
I'm always intrigued with some of the things that people blog, especially the what's on your workspace type thing, as I am always pretty ashamed with the state of my desk when I am in the groove, and certainly wouldn't willingly share unless I had had a bit of a tidy up first! However, yesterday our cat decided that my painting water was more appealing than his bowl of water (probably full of brick dust and cement, like everything else in this house at the moment!), and I couldn't resist taking a picture.

Long time no hear!

I know I said that I might be offline for a bit, but I hadn't anticipated it being quite so long! Lady Mary has settled in well, but in a busy life, a new demand on my time takes a little adjustment. Anyway, I now have her settled in at home and we have been having a fantastic time enjoying the spring sunshine and watching the little lambs over the hedges.
Mr H and I have also been skiing (our annual week of married time, no kids!)where we had a great time, did LOTS of skiing and even got a suntan. In the meantime, the building work at home continues apace, which is exciting, but not always in the right way...This week we have had high winds and driving rain at times, which compared to things happening elsewhere in the world, isn't worth mentioning, but at the moment we have no roof on half of the house, which makes for refreshing temperatures, intermittent electrical supplies and some interesting night time noises! It will all be worth it in the end, but the inside if the house is in turmoil to say the least. Each time I try to create anything, I have to search through boxes of stuff in at least three rooms to find what I am looking for.
As I was so behind with the 365 challenge, I decided to have a make a kind of summary page of February. it's not exactly true to the spirit of the challenge, but I hope that the other participants won't mind.. March is in progress, and I am keeping a note of the events of each day ready to put into my squares once the page is finished. To those regular visitors who have been asking when I was going to start posting again, thanks for waiting!

New addition to the family!

Big news of a new arrival later, but the journal page above is something I did a few weeks ago, but it turned out to be strangely prophetic. The quotation is from Dyans Downloads and the image is, I think from Crowabout (I often spend my evenings watching tv with a pile of download sheets and a pair of scissors, so that I just have to delve in my box of images when the creative mood strikes which makes it easy to create, but not necessarily easy to attribute the images to their source). The quotation refers to a kind of pleasure/pain process I have been through this past few weeks. All my life I have wanted my own horse, because although I have ridden almost my whole life, and never been short of horses to exercise, it's a bit like borrowing someone else's car - convenient and cheap but ultimately not what you really want! Anyway, I have been looking off and on for the past two years, but I never found anything I liked enough to make myself cash and time poor for the forseeable future! Until now. Meet Mary:

Now, whilst Mary is not only beautiful by nature and looks, her owner was a nightmare to deal with! So, whilst the overall outcome was positive, I feel a bit about horse-buying the way some people feel about house-buying.

And this is how a horse looks when it is let out for the first time in at least a month:

Tomorrow we are off to get fitted for some tack, and on Saturday we shall be venturing out on our first ride together! There might be a bit of lull in the creative flow whilst we both get used to each other and get fit!

happy days

This is one of the pages I started last week when we were away. I love orange on the page - it is so vibrant and happy. It's a colour I would never wear, but I can't get enough of it when I am sitting at my desk, it's just one of the paints I reach for first - that and pink.



This is a page I did yesterday. My Mum wants to start journaling too, so we spent yesterday splashing paint about, drinking tea and chatting. Not only was it fun, but while I was out today, she delivered a giant Toblerone as a thank you - not great for the post Christmas, pre-skiing abstinence, but who can resist Toblerone!

Thanks to everyone for the good wishes - I feel like a big fraud, I've only had the flu bug that everyone else has had, but cheers guys, nice to know you care!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone! We just got back from five days in the rural idyll that is the cottage in the Lake District. Fully restored to health, I not only managed to reach my feet (no mean feat given the amount of eating and drinking I have done since I gave up running in favour of being ill) for long enough to tie my laces and do two little runs, but I also managed to do four (yes FOUR) journal pages! So here for starters is my January page for Kate's calendar challenge. I always find the letters for the month a bit challenging to come up with, so this time I borrowed Kate's idea as seen in last months Craft Stamper Magazine. The past few years, the weather here has been very cold and snowy in January, so I decided to make my page cool in colour and with a background of snowflakes. The bird images are from Dyans Downloads and they are singing the song that we traditionally make a total hash of on New Year's Eve in the UK.

This is another page in my tiny journal. The background is painted with Dylusions paints and then oversprayed with Dylusions spray inks. The image is from Divas D'este and the caption from Dyan's Downloads again. A conversation this weekend about New Year's resolutions made me think about how we are always looking at our negative points rather than emphasising the positive, so this is to act as a little reminder about self-confidence.

Hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year and look forward to a creative time ahead!