Crafty As L

Next week is the end of term prize giving for our art group competition.   I’m heading up to Oswestry for another free-motion embroidery course later today so I shall miss it but I’d procured the prizes for the event so I wanted to make some tags for them. Looking through my stash, I could find no stamp set more appropriate for an art group than Color My World by Colorado Craft Company.   I cut two strips of kraft card 2¾” wide plus a tag and stamped them with the various paintbrushes. I coloured them in using my Faber Castell Polychromos coloured pencils. For the bottle tags, I punched a circle from one end and scored a line across.   For the smaller tag, I used a tag-topper punch to trim the fancy top.   To finish them off nicely, I used a corner rounder punch on all the tags.   I decided to add first, second and third to the tags and die-cut the number from glitter card in gold, silver and bronze, backing them with an offset black die-cut. Here are ...

This past week, I’ve not been making cards but have been trying out different art media.   I've only really done watercolour painting so when I saw this  acrylic workshop run by Charlotte ,  to create a contemporary seascape, I was interested to see how to use acrylic paints.   Plus, I love a sea scene! The first painting was done using a paintbrush to blend the colours, starting with the sky. Then the sea and the beach were added. Finally, clouds were added using a palette knife.  One of the beauties of acrylics is that you can just paint over the dry paint if you want to add more to the painting. For the next masterpiece, we used the sponge side of a scouring pad to blend the paints for the sky and sea, then used a brush and palette knife to add the details.  I really enjoyed this workshop and would like to try more acrylic painting now. The second media new to me is pastel pencils.   I’d watched Jason Morgan’s YouTube  video ...

According to Google, string art first started in England in the late 19 th century but became popular as hobby items in the 1960s and 70s.   I was too young for it then but my husband bought me a string art kit for Christmas and I’ve only just gotten around to doing it.   The kit came with a thick booklet with about a dozen or so designs in it.   I was torn between the bee and the lion.   I opted for the lion, despite it having the longest list of instructions – 3000 of them!   The first job, which wasn’t that thrilling, was to position 180 screws into the canvas.   This took me almost an hour to do. To make my life easier when reading the many lines of numbers, I made a windowed slider that slid around the edge of the page to hold it in place.   As each line was completed, I moved the slider down to reveal the next row on numbers. There was a plastic thread holder in the kit which made it much easier to get the thread between the screws.  ...

I borrowed the title of this post from Only Connect, a UK game show that in our house is addictive but largely impossible.   We get very excited if we get one question right in the entire show!   I bought the Heart of a Lion pattern for this quilt from Etsy and it was my first go at a Foundation Paper Piecing.   It was a baptism of fire and I had a few moments when I thought I’d just chuck it into the UFO (unfinished objects) box, never again to see the light of day.   However, I persisted, finding a way that worked for me, and I’m so glad I did. The pattern came with three size options so I chose the largest as I though that would be the easiest for a beginner.   After printing out all the pages on thin paper (I found this  paper on Amazon and the reviews said it was perfect for FPP), I then trimmed and assembled them.   I used the guide sheet and coloured pencils to indicate which colours were applicable to each section. Each section is num...