August Calendar

Scanned images above and photo below.

Another month is here and I've hardly had time to blog, but I have made my August Calendar pages (and finished writing up the July Calendar). Another great stamp from Craft Stamper magazine which gives me my pink, blue, green colour scheme and floral decoration theme for August. I painted my pages with acrylic paint, and I've put the journalling squares directly onto the page, painting them with a bit of pearlescent white here I thought they were too dark. Not sure how it will look when I write on them, but I like my multi-coloured pages now. I like drawing the doodle-ly squares straight onto the page. I coloured the stamped flower images softly using distress inks.

July's ATC swap theme was "Jewels" so I made one with pink pearls
and one with jewellery on black velvet paper.

My July Calendar pages

Long time no blogging, due to busyness at home and then holidays. I did do a bit of Art Journalling on holiday - pictures later when I finish putting the holiday journal together. However, I have done my July Calendar. Yesterday I painted some patterned card in pink and pearlescent white, decorated it with the lovely Craft Stamper chandelier and a bird, stuck on squares using only two patterned papers, and used Distress Inks in Victorian Velvet and Frayed Burlap. I like this colour co-ordinated effect - less colourful than most months. What I don't like is having to stick all the squares on - there is a lot to be said for painting the squares when painting a background on plain paper !

June Calendar

Yesterday being a Bank Holiday Monday I was at home, so I painted some pages for my June Art Journal Calendar. I've gone back to painting the whole page in acrylic paint, and sticking paper squares on. I love these papers ! This is the first month where I have not used the 2011 Craft Stamper Free stamp - I decided I didn't like it enough, so I have used their black cat stamp from June 2010, which is great. Not sure it has come out that well on my pages, but at least I like the overall purple (and silver and black) effect. You can't have too much purple !

May ATCs and Tags

This month's ATC swap theme was Men. I made a vintage style ATC using bits and pieces from Creative Craft Cabin's bargain bundle bags. The blue one uses a football stamp I bought at Ally Pally, and some foam tool embellishments, also from Creative Craft Cabin. And I made some tags using chipboard tag blanks that I got from Capture the Magic at Ally Pally.

May calendar

Better late than never ! We've been very busy recently - Easter and lots of Bank holidays, which meant days volunteering at the Reading Beer & Cider festival. Great fun but also hard work. So I painted my May pages a few days ago, filled in some of the entries and finished the stamping yesterday. This month I did the pages with watercolours again, but I masked off the squares before doing the background - more or less - some of them are neater than others. Then I doodled edges and stamped with the Craft stamper balloon stamp. Today I added a couple of photos of the lovely balloon flight that was my birthday present a few years ago.

Sakura Pens Workshop

Fab workshop on using Sakura pens at the Creative Craft Cabin this morning with Michelle Johnson. Made two cards and several toppers, which turned into two ATCs, a pink topper for another card and some more left over bits that I can use later. Great fun, learned lots of techniques for using sakura pens, and I bought some more - gold, silver and sparkly.