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.

Artful Splodger Blog Candy

Pop over here http://artfulsplodger.blogspot.com/2011/03/shop-opening-giveaway.html for some lovely candy - open until 18 April !

April Calendar

Another month has flown by. So its time to make my Art Journal Calendar pages for April. First I painted the background in watercolours, then painted squares for each day.

As the Craft Stamper magazine stamp for April was a butterfly I thought I should do some delicate pastel pages with fluttery butterflies. So it s a bit different this month. I painted my background with watercolour paints, instead of acrylics, but they came out a bit darker than I had intended. Then I painted the squares for each day in watercolour, quite dark. And stamped the butterflies using dark Distress Inks, and added a few stamped & heat embossed onto dark vellum. I like the effect of painting the squares directly onto the background, rather than sticking patterned paper on, and will probably try doing this again later in the year, but the finished pages are not that good. I should have redone the backgrounds and restamped the images to get a better finish, but ran out of time and energy. I took a picture after I'd finished painting, and then scanned and photographed the finished pages.

Another great stamp from Craft Stamper, and next month should be good too.

Artist Trading Club ATCs for March

Finished my finger painted old book page background ATCs today, for the Artist Trading Club swap this month. I painted an old paperback copy of "Othello" which was falling apart, using some lovely bright acrylic paints. Then I stamped black swirls and text - very, very similar to my easel ATCs, I realised, too late. And added stamped, heat embossed vellum flowers with big bright brads, and a few words from the book to finish them off.