Assorted work - canvas, card, atc's & how to track your blogs!

At the end of this month (August) I'm going to be teaching an inchie class using a 4" x 4" canvas as a base. As inchies are notoriously small I've decided to cheat a bit and make mine 1-1/4" in size so I can fit 9 of them onto the 4 x 4 canvas. We have an absolutely wonderful example of a MEGA-INCHIE canvas in at the store (Scraptivate) that just shows how fabulous a whole lot of little inchies can look when all grouped together. It was put together by Audrey after both she and I had participated in an inchie exchange with another online group. I have yet to do anything with mine as I'm a little over-awed at how Audrey's has turned out, a hard act to follow! I'll take my camera to work to get some pics and post them soon....promise!!!


In the meantime, here's some shots of my smaller canvas. If you're in Perth and want to learn how to make one of these using all sorts of techniques, give us a call at the shop (9444 6626) to book in!

The whole thing with all 9 of the inchies...

These next 2 are raffle atc's for a couple of previous classes that I forgot to post earlier. First is "Regal" for the Textured Backgrounds class - Svetlana "won" this one.....hahaha....sorry, private joke. ;-)

"Serene" was won by Mel at the Faux Tin Type class last week, yay Mel....she pulled her own raffle ticket out! No, not rigged at all, just a lucky pick! That's our story and we're sticking to it, right Mel??? I've used the Ranger Crackle Paint in Tattered Rose on the background of this one.

I've been lucky enough to be the recipient of several on-line awards recently, so I'm going to list them all here together. It's very, VERY hard to narrow down single blogs for awards so I nominate everyone who's listed in my favourite blog lists to the right. I learn something from virtually every blog that I visit and I think that it's important to remember to share, share, share what we learn. Kind of a "pay it forward" type thing with our collected art knowledge travelling the globe and infecting (in a good way!) other unsuspecting blog surfers who stumble across our sites with the love of art in all it's glorious forms! Man, what a long sentence!

So a HUGE thankyou to the following talented people for bestowing these awards...

Thankyou Audrey and Jenny (Crozza) for the Brilliante Weblog Award...

Thankyou Nancy for the Kind Heart Award...

and Sam for the BFF Gold Card Award...

On another note, I've had several conversations with friends about the unfortunately demise of Blogarithm, a neat little program that helped you keep track of all your favourite blogs and sent you a daily email when they updated. Alas, it is no more. Darn it when they try to fix something that isn't broken and then it's REALLY broken for good!!!

So now I use bloglines. You simply input your favourite blogs, then you can keep track of who's updating easily on one page. The easiest way I've found to do this is by adding your bloglines page (after subscribing, so it links to YOUR bloglines page) to your links (in favourites), then when it opens up it has a list of your blogs you've subscribed to and if they are in BOLD, then that blog has been updated. Click on the blog and it'll open up on the right hand side of the screen and if you want to leave a comment, simply open the blog by clicking on it from this right hand side. I've also added a "sub with bloglines" link to my links bar so if I happen to come across a blog I really like, within a couple of clicks I've added it to my bloglines list. Easy! It's actually easier to DO than to WRITE. Confused? Questions? Ask me and I'll try to be a little clearer.

Onto more pictures...my cousin Corey and his wife Kellie are expecting their first child. I attended Kellie's baby shower last weekend and I made a card for her. As you know, I'm not really a card maker at all, I tend to just try to think of them as BIG atc's. I used a picture of an unborn child and printed it on transparency, xyroned (that must be a word!) it, also printed the quote on transparency and gave that the same xyron treatment and attached them both to some nice pale green paper. I also used a couple of cuttlebug chipboard corner embellishments which I painted using the new in at our store Twinkling H2O's Radiant Rains in a dauber. The colour was Olive Gold (I think? it's the only olive green one), beautiful olive with a sheen of gold shimmer just like the fabulous Twinkling H2O watercolours but much easier....dab, dab, dab. Here's the front and then the inside with the quote.

The West Wing is about to start....bye....