Twelve Days of Christmas

I think all participants in the 12 days of Christmas swap have opened their presents by now (those impatient ones amongst us did start early and finish on Christmas eve) so it won't spoil the surprise if I now share the fantastic work of my fellow swappers....

However I'm now teetering on the edge - and likely to throw a Pete Townsend type fit and chuck the laptop through the window - I'm so frustrated with my inability to get pictures to go where I want them in blogger! If anyone out there has any advice please do help.

For now I'm going to post with the pictures all over the place because I do want to share the wonderful creative gifts I received from clever artists.

On the first day Liz sent me a fabulous miniature book. It was wrapped as a teeny, tiny snowman and I couldn't resist starting with this one.

On the second day I opened and intriguing squishy parcel from Claudia and found an endearing little creature within.

And on day three Adrienne's parcel revealed some beautiful wearable art in some of my favourite colours - with apologies for the terrible photography capabilities in close up!


The fourth day brought Lyn's gift of a little memory album. The neatest, tidiest work ever and immaculately presented with credit for the original idea. I wish I could work so precisely.

On the fifth day I opened the present from Trish and found two gifts - a bookmark and this calendar which I think may go to work with me.

On day six I opened Annie's gift. As well as having an interesting textured lid, this box has a marvellous embroidered lining and it contained some chocolates too - but not amymore!

My surprise on day seven was a circular mini book from Elizabeth which she had cleverly wrapped by folding the paper origami style to create an envelope.

Day eight brought a dear little Christmas house from Mawgan and on day nine I opened Pauline C's gorgeous butterfly themed book of tags.




Nearly there now..... Day ten brought this watch with wow factor from Pauline H. I think the strap is made from grunge paper decorated with lovely pearlescent paints. She had wrapped this in an organza bag in lilac (another fav of mine) which she had stamped all over with a swirl design.

Day eleven's surprise was another useful item - one for the shelf by the phone - a post it note book. Yummy lilac and turquoise again with a friendly plastic butterfly embellishment courtesy of Wendy.

And finally (how lucky am I? this was all in the run up to Christmas eve) more wearable art in the form of a delicate pendant presented in a tiny decorated box from Annie.

Thanks again to all those talented artists who so generously share their knowhow and their work at UKArtswaps.

I'll leave this post with pictures of the gifts I sent. I'm off to the home for the technologically challenged now.

Ice Birds

Having at last managed to set up a blog, I've made a little canvas with the themes of white and dangly bits for the Graphicus December Challenge. Whether I can work out how to link it will be another matter!

I started out with a 4x4 canvas and stamped a background pattern with gesso to get a bit of texture. I then used a baby wipe to apply white acrylic paint over the canvas. The background is completed by some patches of Ranger Rock Candy crackle paint with white rubbed in the cracks and a smear of Stickles for icy sparkle.

I stamped the birds onto Ten Seconds Studio metal using StaZon ink and went over the stamped lines with a teflon tipped tool to indent them. Then working from the back I embossed the bodies using a paper stump. I've added a little icy blue colour with sharpie pens and then swiped with white acrylic.

The stamps are from an Elusive Images Curly Birds plate, as is the bird cage which I stamped three times onto frosted shrink plastic using white Brilliance Ink. (I learned that direction matters when doing this. Images stamped across the plastic shrink in different proportion to those stamped lengthways, but you probably knew that!). I punched holes for threading before shrinking the plastic. The birdcages are threaded with beads onto nylon thread and hang from rings screwed into the bottom of the canvas.

The First Post

Well here goes with my first post....

I had decided to enter the November challenge on the Graphicus blog to make something with a resist technique and/or metallic colour theme. Then I read the instructions and discovered I'd need somewhere to post a picture of my entry, hence this blog. Needless to say it has taken me ages to get to grips with creating a blog - I've spent far too long playing with the layout and colour options in Blogger - and so missed the challenge deadline and never even finished anything to enter.

My namesake at The Kathryn Wheel has recently posted about making an Art Calendar. I think I'll start one for 2010 so hopefully I'll have something to share soon. I've just to tidy the mess in the kitchen left from making 12 gifts for a Twelve Days of Christmas swap before I can start. We're opening the presents we swapped one per day from 12th so I'll have to keep them secret until Christmas as I don't know what day everyone will open my gifts.

So I've got something to show meanwhile here are my first attempts from a couple of years back at altered book pages for round robins run through the sadly now defunct AlterNatives group on Yahoo, with apologies for the poor quality of the scans (digital photos are something else I need to learn how to do)...

A page for a green themed book.

And a couple for alphabet themed books: