Nature's cathedral

I have had a lovely week. It included a visit to the Chelsea Flower Show on Thursday when the weather mostly behaved itself thankfully. My favourite garden was the Massacheusetts Garden inspired by the work of Emily Dickinson. Those applique panels at the back were gorgeous, as was the planting.

Irises had to be my flower of the show, I love them, here is the real thing, alongside the applique panel.

The great pavillion also offers some real gems, like beautiful auriculas.

As well as delicious roses, this one has got to find a home in my garden very soon. The deepest red fades to purple, it is truly delicious! I took the label so I could hunt it out!

Back at home the weather has been so much better than first anticipated over the weekend. Inspired by Chelsea, I have been busy in the greenhouse with my seedlings and in the veg patch clearing the huge number of weeds! Yesterday afternoon though, I made time for a little crafty session and first of all was testing colours of my different paints and inks ready for a mini on line art journalling course I have signed up for.

When I finished these, I realised I had quite a bit of paint and ink on my palettes and not wanting to waste them, I had a play with a page in my art journal. Now I do wonder if my art journal is quite the right place for this kind of work. I don't like my writing so rarely do freestyle writing on my pages anyway. This is what I ended up with.

I treated myself to some new masks this week, including the fern and the stained glass window. I was musing as to how I could incorporate both in the same design after laying down the background colours in my Moleskin watercolour book, when I came up with the thought of nature's cathedral. I used another birch tree mask for the trunks and another with different sized leaves for the canopy. The nice thing was while I was working on this, the sun was coming through the leaves outside the shed, making watery patterns on my page.

All the inks are Distress or Adirondack, added with sponge or brushes. The words are a little hard to see, but are added with a set of stamps that I bought second hand on E Bay from a very talented stamper (I was hoping some magic might rub off I think). They look like they are carved from stone so seemed appropriate.

I am off to pack for a few days away for work, and to see one of my special crafty friends, so I am pretty excited about that (well not the work bit obviously!).

Hope you all enjoy the rest of the lovely long weekend.

Elaine x

A sympathy card

I have been working with the new Chocolate Baroque Artist's Bauble set of stamps. As well as the baubles, this set also includes a cross, some corners and a classic motif. The cross is useful for sympathy cards and for Easter too. Here is a sumpathy card I made, with the addition of a little splash of yellow. I think I was feeling inspired by spring finally blossoming when I was making this card.

I stamped the cross in black Versafine. I recently treated myself to the Spellbinders Radiant Rectangles set when I went to Ally Pally. I stamped the sentiment from the CB With Sympathy set and then used one of the dies to frame it, inking with Memento London Fog before taking it out of the die. I cut one of the other dies out of black card to mount the sentiment. I finished off with a selection of flowers in shades of white, lemon and yellow, including the daisies, one of which was added to the centre of the cross.

Thanks for popping by! Hope you have had a good week.

Elaine

Artist's Baubles

Some more lovely stamps have been released over at Chocolate Baroque - Artist's Baubles.

 

This set brings together some old favourites, reflecting the styles and designs of some major nineteenth century artists including some of my own favourities such as Morris, De Morgan Mackintosh and Klimt. Originally, these stamps were issued as separate sets, but they were such old favourites, they have been remade as a sampler set and are sure to be really popular. I have been having a play with these stamps, while my DT colleagues have been working their magic with Punky Flowers.

 

 

These stamps are great, each with a distinct style of their own. I chose the Mackintosh bauble for this card, embossing in a dark metallic EP, before colouring with Distress Markers and a water brush. To frame the image I cut thin strips of black card which I added to reflect the style of Mackintosh furniture. I added a black ready made sentiment high on the card, again to reflect a feature of Rennie Mackintosh chair designs.

 

I rarely get my Distress markers out, but they worked well on this design and I must resolve to make better use of them.

 

Guess what I spent an hour tidying my craft shed today. I am really determined it is not going to get the better of me again - how long will this new me last I wonder?

 

Hope you all have a great weekend!

 

Elaine x



New stamps and tidy crafting space!

There are new stamps launched this week over at Chocolate Baroque a great set of quirky designs called Punky Flowers.

Head over to the Design Team blog to see some great projects that my team mates have been working their magic on.

I have been really busy with my massive craft shed tidy. Spring finally arriving got me motivated for a very overdue massive tidy. Plus I ordered a new drawer unit to help my organisation. This is it.

It is a Really Useful product and I am delighted with it. I already had one 11 drawer unit which I had put through its paces, so I was confident it was going to work really well for me.

This was my desk when I started this blog in August 2009.

 

It has gone through various changes!

 



This didn't last long - much too cluttered and my working space was too restricted!

 

 

This was another try, but still not right!

 
Below is what it looks like now! My collection of wooden cassette racks for my ink pads has grown for one thing! My lovely OH found another one for me yesterday in the charity shop. My collection is growing ever upwards and is now topped off with my kilner jars of ribbons sorted by colours.

I also have what I call my messy bench where I do painting and more mucky jobs. It's quite tidy for a messy area at the moment!!!

While I finished off the inside of the shed, my OH was busy clearing some fallen trees outside in our woodland and making a log pile as a bug hotel, so this is my new view out across the garden. The daffodils in the picture are just going over now. I always feel sad when they go.

My main task now is to make a supreme effort to be much tidier to avoid the need for such a major tidy again, but also to use more of my stash and stop buying so much until I have used some of it up!

Hope you are have had a great bank holiday weekend, we had some amazing sunshone, although it is raining this morning and we have been trying to catch up on gardening as our patch is constantly trying to revert to nature, it is always a bit of a tussle, but only a very gentle one on our part!

Elaine