The Good stuff

Good fun

These colours make me happy.

I love hearts and spirals.

Good things at the Palmertson North City Library : this was a good read.

And there is a new Palmerston North City Library email newsletter service - once you subscribe you can get newsletters that inform you about good books to read, movies to watch, and events to attend at the library. Check it out here.
Then for something completely different, check out some lovely felt flower bouquets
And Roben-Marie's handcarved stamps with links to some good tutorials here.
Next time I post it will be Spring!...now that will be really good :-)

More spray play and some quilty blog love

Another file folder from Roben-Marie's course...
Stage one

Stage two

Still loving the shimmer but have just ordered a few new Adirondack colour wash sprays (Butterscotch, Cranberry, Stream and Lettuce) so will be fun to try a different look. The  dark purple below is an older Adirondack colour wash : Eggplant. The flowers on the right are gesso.

Although I am loving the sprays, I am feeling the lack of taking some time to stitch...only a month left on my contract working at the library :-)
In the meantime, I have been inspired by some of the photos on recent blogs sharing the Festival of Quilts 2011 in the UK.
Linda Vincent took some lovely close-up shots and directed me to Maggi who has slideshows here and here 
Pam Holland did a number of posts with fabulous photos of quilts, and good commentaries too. This is the link to Birmingham Day 3 but you must move back and forwards to other posts of wonderful inspiration on other days. I picked this day for my link because I was very taken by the quilt called Ammonoidia by C June Barnes - also shared by Borderline Quilter
Carolyn Saxby always inspires, and this post is not exception.
And there are a lot of beautiful photos here on this facebook page by Sally-Ian Farquhar.
Hoping there is something there to inspire you too. Enjoy your weekend.

3rd File Folder

From Roben-Marie's Mixed Media Mayhem online course
In 3 stages again :

Sometimes it's hard to know when to stop!

More Mixed Media Mayhem

My second file folder from Roben-Marie's wonderful course.
The beginning

Not finished but happy so far

Gesso, stencils, sprays (mainly starburst sprays - love that glisten), and the hearts are done with lumiere metallic paint.
Have a good creative week :-)

Roben-Marie Smith

I am a really big fan of Roben-Marie Smith's art: click here to go immediately to her blog.

Roben-Marie Smith's blog header.

I love her free instructional videos on Vimeo and her beautiful mixed media fibre creations, as well as her use of sprays and stencils on many of her journal pages.
I have been tempted by her online Mixed Media Mayhem workshop for some time, and have finally joined up.

Have a look at her promotional video for the online class here and check out the flickr group photos from participants doing the class.
You might just fall in love too and join up with me!
These are my first efforts. We are working on manila folders which will eventually become pages in a journal.
The beginning of the page (click on any image to see it larger)

Stage 2

Stage 3 - but still not finished.

Having fun :-)

New stencils and stamps

The food, sunshine, and lovely motel was only part of the story at Napier...I made some purchases too :-)
Liked the look of these Lines and Dots stencils from Nellie Snellen.

They are designed to be used with Distress Ink and pressed through a Cuttlebug but I like the idea of spraying through them

or sponging ink through them works well.

Got this cool wee pad of Tim Holtz Reinforcers

- close-up of what's inside here.
Bought some lovely stamps too. Can't wait to try out these gorgeous big flowers.

This lovely swirly tree stamp will be useful for Christmas, but not exclusively so.

And I'm thinking this tree will be fantastic to use as a mask

Blog love for the week :  if you are looking from some new inspiration for your stencils : Kenner Road has some very cool examples of what you can do with stencils and modeling paste that I really would like to try.

Jacob's wintery birthday

Our Jacob turned 11 years old today.

He had a good day at school and we had a family dinner tonight - but the most memorable thing about today is going to be the snowfall!

It started off slow and the boys rushed out to have their photo taken because we thought it would probably stop quite quickly and not come to much...

But it didn't!

My 'spring' tulips are a bit shocked.

We don't usually get snow in Palmerston North so this was a stunner.

Will be especially amazing to our northern hemisphere friends I imagine :-)

High Tea

Hope you have had a wonderful weekend. We have had a lovely time with visiting family, and this afternoon I had lovely tea, cakes and bubbles with some fabulous friends. Had to share the deliciousness here.
The spread

Serviettes folded into hearts

Gorgeous homemade cupcakes

And the piece de resistance!

Cheers to those girlfriends who make life lovelier :-)

Weekend in Napier

Photos of Napier - beautiful weather, lovely food, great hotel, lots of creative inspiration. Especially loved Birdwoods Gallery.
See close-up shots in my napier set on flickr 
Create a mosaic like this here

August goodness

Recently I've found it restful at night to simply glue down papers and images to make base art journal pages for this journal.

In this post back in January, I altered the cover and made some inital pages.
Maybe next year instead of the calendar challenge I'll use these pages for art journalling and I can share them again in their completed state.

Here's some bloggy inspiration for this month :
Another gorgeous calendar for your desktop from Geninne - scroll down to her 1 August post.
If you are like me and want to try making different kinds of books, but don't have a subscription to Cloth Paper Scissors magazine, you might be interested in this free e-book.  
Alisa Burke has a new book due out at the end of August - she has a promotional video which talks about the book and her whole creative process which I found really interesting.
Cynthia Schaffer was the artist featured on the cover of the latest Art Quilting Studio

I looked up her blog and found all these great ideas by searching her Mixed Media category 
Have a lovely weekend - I can feel spring in the air....

Calendar challenge : July/August

August is here, and with it the sharing of the next month's calendar challenge. I enjoyed my July pages. There wasn't much on them when I showed them to you at the beginning of last month.

We are in the middle of winter now in New Zealand so I wanted to reflect that pretty iciness in my pages. I decided that I wanted to continue incorporating stitch on the pages, so did a little experiment with metallic thread, organza and paper which led to these embellishments on my page

I love Anahata Katkin's work, and one of my birthday cards this year included this lovely image of hers, appropriately called "Snow Hat".

Tried to do the journalling with icy colours too, and earlier this week my boys went to the snow - so the snowflake embellishments turned out to be perfectly appropriate :-)

(click to see bigger)

I love to see how each month brings an opportunity to try out something new. August's pages are inspired by a Cloth Paper Scissors article from Jan/Feb this year about making a folder journal.

Folder journal by Karin Winter

This is an example by Karin Winter, one of the article's authors. Click here to see more examples of her journals, and here for a youtube video showing details of the folders that were used to illustrate the article. I really want to make one. If you do too, and don't have the magazine, there are very detailed instructions in this blog post.
Back to the calendar spread! I had these really pretty 7 Gypsies "Conservatory" papers that I had been dying to use.

They were an easy option to make most of the background. 

I managed to add a little bit of stitching on the background, the August label, and to make 3 pockets on the bottom of each page (you can click on the picture if you want a closer look). I then made some tags

I inked lines for journalling, sprayed them with walnut ink, and then added the butterflies. There is one tag to journal on for each week of August.
At first I wasn't sure what would go in the first pocket - I figured inspiration would strike...and it did.

It contains a tag I will use for my "Try something new for 30 days" challenge.
I am really looking forward to filling in my pages. I enjoy the prettiness of them just as they are :-)

If you want to see what other calendar entries there are for this month go to The Kathryn Wheel and don't forget the flickr group
Happy August everyone :-)