Printer's tray

I received a Seven Gypsies printer's tray for Christmas and this week I got round to filling it up. I sprayed the tray with Heirloom Gold Perfect Pearls (present from Tim at the Artsycrafts day!) and used Basic Grey Scarlet Letter papers for the backing and then I just added lots of bits and pieces I had previously made, stamped, embellished etc. but never found a home for.  I made some fresh pieces too to fill up the gaps and I'm really thrilled with the result.

April calendar page

I also finished my April calendar page today, in plenty of time and without an apple in sight.

Tulips this month, one of my favourite flowers, and the polka dot stamp over the background - using it on everything at the moment.

Apples

I'm a bit obsessed with apples lately since I bought a Nestabilities apple die set.  I used them in this month's calendar page here and I zentangled one while listening to The Count of Monte Cristo on the radio:

 I scanned the picture and it's come out quite large but in fact is only about 5 inches square.
Then I used the smallest apple in the set to cut a stencil from acetate and stencilled some black fabric with Stewart Gill True Colour paint which covers dark fabric really well.  When dry I overstamped polka dots with chestnut metallic paint. This is the finished piece:

I had some paint left over on my palette so found a scrap of calico and stencilled a few more apples to use up the paint.  Then I decided to use the scrap piece to try out stitching etc. to see what worked.  I also used the nestabilities to actually cut out a couple of apples from the fabric and the Cuttlebug handled that very well.  I liked my efforts on the scrap piece so ended up finishing it off as a very mini quilt, about postcard size:

 If I'd planned the piece I probably wouldn't have done 2 red apples on the top row, 2 green on the bottom, but that was just the way I did it and I like the overall finished piece.  The apples have stem stitch round them and the border has French knots. Now I've just got to get round to doing something similar with the main black piece.

Calendar 2011

Last year I saw the fabulous calendar that Kate made over on the Kathryn Wheel and thought I'd like to have a go, but I probably wouldn't have got round to it if I hadn't then seen it in Craft Stamper Magazine.  So I have started this year and so far have kept it up - not only making the pages in time for the beginning of the month but actually filling in all the squares! So here are the first 3 months.  I tried photographing them both indoors and outdoors, Jan is actually purple but came out blue indoors and pink outdoors, and March doesn't show the true green either. Ah well.

Artsycrafts with Tim Holtz

Oh dear, my blog is sadly neglected.  Partly because I don't have a camera at the moment (had to borrow my daughter's for this post) and partly because I haven't really been doing anything very productive.

However, I was lucky enough to go to the Artsycrafts event last Friday for a wonderful class with Tim Holtz and another wonderful one with Lin and Leandra. I went with my daughter and we had a lovely, very full day which really lived up to all the anticipation.  And here is the Configuration box I made in Tim's class, finished off at home with a few extra bits and pieces added.

It's crammed full of goodies, most of which we got on the day, as well as the box and a pile of papers we had a bag full of embellishments and a selection of Ranger products.
And here's the little house we made with Lin and Leandra, also good fun and much messier than Tim's class (the white paint on my black jumper hasn't come off....):

So sweet!  So many people put so much work into making the day go without a hitch and making it something really special which I think everyone there enjoyed.