Bon Voyage!

The day has finally arrived, we leave tonight for our 5 week trip to far-flung places. I have all good intentions of blogging a couple of times while I'm away so hopefully I'll manage to get around to actually doing it! What with cloud-walks through rainforest in Costa Rica, shop-til-you-drop at market stalls in Mexico, helicopter flights that land on Glaciers in Alaska.....who knows if I'll have the energy to pound my little fingers on the key-board! lol

I have pre-prepared some pages in a journal all ready for adventures to be written up, tickets to be stapled and stuck in, my twinkling H2O's & aqua-brush will be coming with me so I can decorate my written journallings (is that a word???). I couldn't possibly go without SOME sort of arty stuff to do and I hope to collect some goodies while I'm away......I DO have an extra 10kgs worth of space in my suitcase that I can add so all is good with the World! ~grin~

Be back in Perth around the 21st May but hopefully will blog before then......I couldn't possibly post without a picture so here's a pic of my girlfriend Joan (the one who's coming on the trip with us) and myself....taken a few years ago now and a little blurry....or was that a soft-filter effect???? lol

New Collections Products, Faux Leather & Textured Paper

Well, Julie van Oosten from Collections has done it again! She has produced a wonderful new range of products with birds, new 6" x 6" papers, , flowers, butterflies and lots of other new stuff - but my most favourite would have to be the new windows that are perfect for atc's as they are 2-1/2" x 3-1/2" and mini doors/windows too! Here's an atc that I made using the Limited Edition range of black windows. This was included in a $50 Collections products raffle pack that was recently run at work, Scraptivate. Congratulations to Suzanne McMeekin for winning this fantastic pack and I hope you like the atc!

Last night I taught the Faux Leather Technique class to the Tuesday group of atc girls. Such a great technique and wonderful for making use of the fantastic Golden paints, though Jo Sonja paints also made an admirable impression as well! I don't have a scan of the raffle atc as I only finished it half an hour before the class started but I did make one in the class, strangely enough not using the Faux Leather technique. It was just a muck-around paint job on a piece of white cardstock showing the girls how impressive the Golden Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold colour is. Natalie challenged me to make an atc while the class was going on so of course, you can't say no to the boss.....it needs a couple of brads still, but oh how wonderful this colour is! I only used one drop of the Nickel Azo Gold and a paint brush dipped in water and smooshed the paint around on the card, added a little more on my "transdermal applicator" to rub around the edges, dried it, added a little Micaceous Iron Oxide for shimmer and an image, some text paper, some thread around the image, a crackle stamp, some corrugated black card and one of my clear words on a piece of sharpie-coloured chipboard and it was done! Janick won this as a "second-prize" in the raffle that I got conned into doing!

Last Saturday's atc class that I taught was called Textured Paper. Take some cardstock, some scrapbook text scraps, book page scraps, tissue paper (printed and/or plain), some thick gesso, slap it all down, let dry and you have textured paper! This was the raffle atc.

In the last post I mentioned that I was doing something for a scrapbooking magazine. Here are a couple of ......I'm not going to say sneak peeks......"limited views" of the canvas. I won't be able to post the whole thing until after I come back from my holiday (8 sleeps to go!!!).

A big thanks to Jacky for including me in the "5 blogs I love to visit" award....I'm sure in some illustrious company with this one! Visit Jacky's blog to see who else she nominated. I'm not going to nominate for 2 reasons, I have done numerous blog nominations before and it's just too darn hard to narrow it down to 5! But I thankyou anyway Jacky for reading my blog. ;-)