Christmas Canvases

Yesterday was a very full-on day for me. I taught my last atc class before Christmas, which was webbing spray, we also had a mini Christmas party during the class and the girls bought some very yummy treats to share! Who would've thought strawberries & marshmallows on a toothpick could taste so good!!!


Next up was the staff Christmas party at Natalie's house (the owner of the store) for Scraptivate, the most awesome shop where I work and teach here in Perth. We frequently get told by customers that we have the best and most unusual goodies in our store, a different range to all the other scrapbooking/papercraft stores in Perth AND we have the most helpful and friendly staff and teachers! Well, yep, I'd have to agree, we ROCK!!! So it was a delightful gathering of the staff/teachers and we had a Kris Kringle gift exchange. I received a fantastic mask from my pal Viv as well as some wonderful book pages with some "different" images and text that I'll definitely use on my canvases!

EDIT: This is the link here to the mask that Viv made for me...she did a great job photographing it and putting it on her blog so you can see how cool it is!!!


This is the canvas I made for Megan, who was my swap partner. From memory it's around 10" x 7" so it's a bit larger than the other 5 x 7's that I've done before. Still has the texture paste done first, then the Gothic book page added, then painted - Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold and a wash of Dioxazine Purple plus some Quinacridone Crimson for some added colour. Add an image, some German scrap, some stamping (Gothic large script from Michelle Ward's Printed Matter rubber plate), then finally some gold embossing on the small Gothic script from the same rubber plate as well as on the word "sanctuary".

After the staff Christmas party we headed off at 8pm to Elice's 21st party at a restaurant, Elice is my son Jarred's girlfriend. He and Elice are over here in Perth for a month as Jarred is in the air-force and lives on the other side of the country, he's based at Williamtown near Newcastle, New South Wales. Actually, on Wednesday nights on SBS at 8pm there is a new series called Top Gun Pilots (I think?) and there is a lot of filming done at Williamtown so don't know if I'll actually get to see Jarred in it but he did tell me they filmed them doing the stuff that aircraft technicians do - yep, he's what they call a "black-hander"....wonder why??? lol It's a 6 part series and last Wednesday (12th Dec) was the first episode. Check it out if you're interested...we obviously are!

This brings us to today....Sunday....I have another Christmas engagement in the form of a lunch at a restaurant with the girls from the atc/abc clubs (art tarts club and altered book club). We are also doing a Kris Kringle exchange and I'm going to risk putting this next canvas up here as I'm hoping my recipient won't read my blog before she goes to the lunch today! It's a smaller canvas, 4" x 4" and I used the wonderful Tim's Shimmer - well this is what I call it anyway. It's the potion that he posted recently on his blog during his 12 tags of Christmas instructions. The recipe is: one dropper full of distress re-inker (I used brushed corduroy), 1 portion of Perfect Pearls - the end of a pop-stick is used for measuring this (I used Gold P/P), 3/4's fill one of the Ranger Mini Mister bottles with water after first adding the re-inker & P/P...then shake and spray.....delightful......Tim's Shimmer.....definitely will be doing this in a class! This canvas also makes use of the inchies and has texture paste that the inchies sit into.

Long-winded post today, if you've got this far and actually read what I've written, gold star for perseverence! If you've skimmed and just checked out the pics, well that's fine too! ;-)