Multitude of Mixed Media & Skagway!

This post has, as the title suggests, a multitude of mixed media.....

First up is my book challenge page for the Creative Soul Retreat. The theme this month was "A few of my favourite things". Of course, I couldn't get out of my head the Gary Larson cartoon where (from memory) there is a couple of detectives in a guys house, he's dead on the floor, on shelving in the room there is "bright copper kettles, warm woollen mittens, brown paper packages tied up with string" and one detective is saying to the other... "These must be a few of his favourite things!"...... So what I did was to think about some of my favourite things (techniques) and I came up with this page.

Each square has a couple of my favourite things on it.

(top row, left to right)...

Old Germanic text and Micaceous Iron Oxide (a Golden paint - gorgeous!),

Gothic transparency image over foil tape,

Textured fabric with metallic thread wrapping,

(middle row, left to right)...

Canvas Paper with Rinse Aid Resist background & Metal wings,

Texture Paste and Silver Rub'n'buff,

Shrink Plastic with HIM stamp, Swarovski crystals and German Scrap,

(bottom row, left to right)...

Black Corrugated cardboard with black onyx mica glitter & embossed cuttlebug shape,

Foil tape and my tracing wheel to make the little track marks,

Webbing spray in both white and black and metal cogs.

Hmmmm.....the book page above looks suspiciously like the new inchie canvas class that I'm teaching in December at Scraptivate! Even though they may look similar, they are obviously different (to the trained art-eye!!!). lol The girls in this 4" x 4" inchie canvas class have a choice of doing either a Crimson/Black/Silver one, or a Blue/Cream/Burnt Umber canvas. Here's the blue one...

...and the crimson/black/silver...

While I was on an arty roll over the last couple of days, I also made a card for the Inkurable Stampers Challenge. This time the we had to use both a bottle cap as well as some beads in our project AND it was a Christmas theme. Well, you just KNOW that I have loads of Christmas themed stamps with reindeer, Christmas trees, Kris Kringle and the like.....NOT!

This was a bit of a challenge for me, but heck, that's what challenges are supposed to be dummy! (me dummy, not you dummy). Last month I was lucky enough to win a gift voucher from Barb at the Stamping Queen and I promptly chose one of the fabulous Stampotique stamps - Prom Queen. I already have Glimmering Hope and Girl with a Lunchbox so now I have a sister to join the other 2! Here she is in all her glory......warning....please don't take offence at the quote on the inside....it's something I have NO control over. I blame my Dad and my brother for my warped sense of humour. Definitely not my fault!

(see how keen I was to get this photographed? the glue under the crystal is not dry!!!)

I had intended to include some of my remaining mega-trip photo's but there just seems to be too much other stuff here...what the heck, it is my blog after all and if I choose to bore you with some pics, so be it! Skagway here we come.....

We had the 2nd big highlight of our trip in Skagway, a journey on the White Pass Scenic Railway, if you go to Skagway this is a wonderful train trip. It's also the only time I've ever actually been snowed on....and they DO look like individual little lacy things when the snowflakes land on you!!!! On the flats, not much snow....

a "bit" more snow....

Here we are at the end of the rail journey, ready to start the bus trip back. Beautiful scenery, yes, it was cold! From left to right, Mum, me, Ev, Pete and Joan, Grant was the photographer.

There was a fabulous building in Skagway that's being constantly repaired with driftwood, the way it was originally done. Wonderful! Do the 3 little pigs come to mind????

...and just in case you forgot how we got around on our mega-trip....

Some art, an award....and my Dad

I managed to get another 4" x 4" canvas done with some inchies on them - actually, they are 1-1/4" square as the inchies were a little small - nice to have a little more room to work on too! This time the colours are black/silver/white. I particularly love doing these in fairly monochromatic tones, think my next one might be frosty blue, silver and off-white....but maybe red, black and white.....oh the choices!!!! Onto some pics...

...some close-ups...

Thankyou to Debbi Baker, Elizabeth Golden and Sarah Schwerin for bestowing this award on me. Gratitude flowing your way girls, it's nice to know I get SOME things right!!! lol

I'm not going to nominate people for this award, but I am going to recommend you visit the various blogs I have listed in my favourite blogs list down on the right. They all have something wonderful to offer, whether it's great inspiration, an insight into their observations of this arty world or fantastic techniques and awesome pictures.

These are a couple of atc's I've done for the previous 2 atc classes I've taught at Scraptivate.

Firstly, Fun Foam - and a little clay face added for good measure!

"Soul" was won by Karen in the watercolour techniques class, an easy watercolour (crayons) method and a more difficult watercolour (tube paints) method was taught in this class. Very difficult to describe so I'm not even going to try, suffice to say it takes a little practice to get this technique so YOU like what you've done! I'm sure the girls think I lie when I say I like their work, but it's easy for them to be overly-critical, I try to explain you are here to learn the technique, THEN go home and practice it....don't try to produce perfect atc's on a first-go!

I'd like to thank all the wonderful girls who've left me comments and emailed me privately about my Dad offering their kind words and support at this time of uncertainty. It's been 7 days since his operation and he is still in critical condition in the Intensive Care Unit at RPH. He is still on life support and tomorrow they will be performing a tracheostomy so they can remove the breathing tube down his throat and attach it to the front instead. It breaks my heart to see him struggle with this tube and he coughs constantly trying to dislodge the foreign object that is causing his gag reflex to kick in.

The nurses are wonderful, constantly monitoring, adjusting his medication and talking him through everything they do to him. He just wants to be left alone to recuperate....that's my theory anyway. We are just playing the waiting game, it's oh so hard to do but we hope each day is going to be better than the last and if wishing could make him better, he'll be well on the way to recovery soon. A nurse told me today that good things happen slowly in the ICU and baby steps is the way to go for him.

A blog that I visit often is Seth's, The Altered Page. He's just recently done a third round of The Pulse, a wonderfully inspiring line-up of all sorts of artists. I was blown away when Seth emailed and asked if I would like to take part. Check it out, there's bound to be some people you haven't heard of but will be glad to know! The link above takes you to the particular page with the list of artists, this link takes you to his latest postings.

More Inchies!!! (plus some atc's)

As promised, I took my camera to work and took some photo's of the large canvas that Audrey put together after being in a swap. Not this many actually got swapped, Audrey just wanted to do it large scale so made up the rest herself to complete this huge size! It looks awesome and everyone that comes into the store comments on how wonderful it is!

This is what it looks like sitting on our counter...

Here are a couple of close-up shots...

These next inchies are ones that I've made just yesterday. Addictive little buggers these things! You think, "oh, I'll just make a few", and before you know it, you've done more than a dozen!

My Saturday atc class just gone was on using the fabulous transfer medium, Sheer Heaven. It is a paper-like product that you run through your inkjet printer - and yes, any inkjet will work! Print your images (I can get about 14 for atc's onto one sheet), cut them out, spritz image with rubbing alcohol (NOT the 92% one, think it's around 70%???). After spritzing, lay down onto your absorbent receiving surface - watercolour paper, card stock, book page, scrapbook paper etc, burnish all over in circular motions with the back of a spoon for around 10 seconds, peel off and voila! A beautiful transfer! I usually use watercolour crayons to scribble around the edges in co-ordinating colours to complete this. This is available at Scraptivate.

So this first atc is using a Sheer Heaven transfer for the image on the right hand side. We also have new in at the store, mica flakes! This stuff is just beautiful....drizzle on some diamond glaze or glossy accents, sprinkle on the mica, shake off excess and let dry for a magical, subtle, sparkly effect!

Another new product we have in is Ranger Antiquities Frosted Crystal embossing powder. It looks like it's clear, but after it's been heat embossed it looks like frosted glass! It's what I've used all over the background of this stamped image below as well as on the little image up the top. That's the light reflecting on it that makes the little image glow so much. Also added a little mica flakes for her tears.

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....