Ring out the old ...

Ring in the new! Here is the first card for my GG2009 collection. I love the way Sandy has caught the feel of the storm. A wonderful start to the year.

as a bonus it came wrapped in this great piece of vintage fabric.

And here is the Old Year, I have been wondering for some time how to keep and display them, and this is what I came up with. This is the cover, front and back


It is made from corrugated card covered in moulding paste, painted and gilded. The decoration is a collection of shrink plastic tags with the names of the girls.

It can be opened as a conventional book

or displayed 3D

and here it is in its full glory.

Thank you girls.

Wonders...

This arrived for me today, I have been picking it up and peering at it, running my fingers over it and just gazing in pleasure.

This is my last card of the Calendar Girls 2008 challenge from Lynda of Purple Missus. It has been a wonderful year of learning and sharing and I feel priviledged to have been part of it. If you haven't looked already give click here you will see that a couple of the girls have already completed January.

This year instead of working from one calendar for the year we have each made a choice and each month it will be a different calendar. For January Debbi chose Australian artist Shane Pickett, I knew nothing about him so did a little research and found a link here and here Wonderful stuff. The picture we are to work from is called "Wanyarang Storm Against the Wind. I looked up Wanyarang as I thought it must be a place, but no, it means Autumn and this (confusingly was April and May) Traditionally was a time when "those who have recently matured to adulthood pair up and prepare their homes for courtship. Meanwhile, nature prepares itself for the next cycle." This information found here and this is the picture.

Fabulous but help!!!!!


This wonder came from Russia found on a via a link by Ullabenulla just look at the wonderful details both inside and out here


Last of all don't forget Cyber Fyber and Lynda and Carol are running Fibre in Form, Textured Surfaces again on Friday.

My Calendar year....

These are the cards that I made for this years Calendar Girl 2008 swap, it has been great fun and I have learned a lot but most importantly I have made new friends. Thanks girls.

Sunshine in November....

Here is my card for Sharon for November, not a stitch on it!!! I wanted to something different. At first I was going to try the some of the techniques of the http://www.fibreinform.com/workshop and then when I was messing around with Molding Paste this happened.

Something cheerful for a grey November.

October Calendar Girls....

This lovely card arrived from Jenny, it has a wonderful depth to the background.

and this is my offering for Susan
This was the calendar picture

I used the text and used the alphabet on my machine to put "old friend" on the gold and "new friend" on the silver. I printed the blue tulip, which I particularly liked, onto shrink plastic mounted that with silver and gold threads and finished the edges with silver on the gold and gold on the silver. The thought was the mingling of old and new friends, (not always an easy task)

Is it August or November???????

Hard to tell at times..... Galvanised by the arival of this great card from Susan

I buckled down and finished my card for Carol
I took the August picture
and printed bits of it onto cotton, I then assembled crazy quilt fashion onto a piece of craft vilene. Mistake...it made it too stiff to embroider in the way I wanted so it is not as embellished as I intended. The centre panel is padded with wool tops which I let escape a bit so that it is touchy, feely.

Challenges....

I blame it on our lack of summer sunshine but I have been feeling really lack lustre, however I have finall managed to prod myself into activity so here are my submissions Calendar Girls 2008 and TIF

My card this month was for Carol and I wanted to do something metallic and funky but it just wouldn't come so I played with the original calendar page,

printed it onto cotton and added french knots and beads.

Still determined to get some metal in there, I added the three beads.

Hibernation.....

is something I am seriously considering This should have been written about four days ago. Blame our disgusting weather for robbing me of the desire to do anything but curl up with a book!! If this is summer roll on winter...Enough!!

Last weekend was terrific. I have to congratulate the organisers of the EG Eastern Region, Regional Day. I had a memorable day, no little thanks to the company I was in. The speakers were Diane Bates and Jean Littlejohn and Jan Beaney.What can I say about the famous duo. It was fascinating to listen to there different approach to the same subject. Listening to Diane's Northern accent and humour made me quite homesick and I just loved her outlook on the work she does.
The exhibition had some beautiful work, there were a couple of things I wanted to bring home, one was an artists's box and the other was a stunwork tree which revealed more the closer you looked.
The highlight of the day was being told by Lynda of Purple Missus that I had won the draw for her quilt,(thank you Will) I was so suprised and thrilled. It looks really good against my new grey walls so I am just trying to find the perfect place. This is Lynda's photo I hope she doesn't mind.
Another delight arrived on Monday, my post card from Carol See how pretty...

My last little happiness was to see a picture of my Cyber Fyber card, I lost the original picture when my machine crashed. Just look at all the other cards, what a wonderful exhibition this will be, I wish I could get there. Wouldn't it be great to have it at the Knit and Stitch next year.

June Calendar Girls 2008

I only managed two cards for Debbi to chose from this month. The first one was made using this
I had taken a photograph of my own hand and I added it to the print, printed on cotton it lost a lot of its vibrancy but I padded it and machine stitched into some of the lines. I added a little tag which said "hand of a friend"

This is the card that Debbi chose

Using the photograph of my hand, again, I altered it in PSP and printed it onto cotton. I added a tiny touch of gold foil from Fibre in Form and stamped the word "friendship" and added the ribbon. You can see the rest of the girls cards here

Meet my girls........

In the south east of England we are not having a good finish to Spring, the longest day is about two weeks away and we are having to put the lights on at 8pm. YUK. I hate grey, I would rather have storms than this dull, heavy, sit on your shoulders type of weather which seems to have been going on for weeks.

But today a couple of nice things happened. First a phone call to say that a friend of my husband's who had a stroke is now at home and doing fine and then there was my May Calendar Girls Card from Carol

The texture is wonderful and the flowers are like sunshine coming from behind a cloud(I wish). It is a geat addition to my collection.

So in the cause of cheering up.... Meet my girls! Inspired byJulie Arkaell I am in the process of producing these for my golf clubs.

When I showed them to my son he gave me an old fashioned look, "Well, they'll make people laugh" I said defensively....."Or step away" was his reply.
Fortunately they make people laugh, I think they have improved my golf and if not when I make a bad shot who gets the blame....?

Still catching up.....

Yesterday I posted my Calendar Girl 2008 postcard to Dianne. I had made three cards this month but Dianne chose the one that I made particularly with her in mind.

The fairy was painted with transfer paints and ironed on to dupioni. The flower and the heart was picked out with stitching and a few irridescent sequins were scattered around to suggest a little magic.

The other two cards were

flower made free hand on the embellisher and another fairy

stamped onto organza this time and applied to black felt with old lace. The hearts refer to the text on the calendar

A coffee, a tea and a hot chocolate.......

I had another good day on Saturday, when I met up with Lynda and Sharon from Calendar Girls 2008. We met at Sharon's exhibition at the Frensham Rural Life Cantre. For me, conversation with two people who's work I admire was a great treat, here we are
. This photograph was taken by Sharon's husband Mike who had some wonderful wildlife photographs on show,you can see more here, take a look in his gallery and watch out for my favourite, the sheep.
You can't have a day out without goodies, this is one of Sharon's beautiful art cards

and this is a card from Shirley who was showing her beautiful lino cuts.She is under persuasion to start a blog.

It was a good day, I look forward to the next time we can meet and hopefully some of the other CGs will be able to make it too.

There's good news....

and there's bad news.......for me anyway. I have a new computer, with a wonderful 19 inch screen so that I can stop peering at a tiny screen. I had it built by a local firm Matrix and I am so happy with the service I received. The bad news is that they are having difficulty retrieving the data from my old machine but they have promised that they will keep on trying so I won't give up all hope for the moment.
The moral of this story is BACK UP, BACK UP, BACK UP. I was always promising myself to do it and I do have some things on disk but it is going to take me ages to do re-load it all. I have bought a USB Flash disk and promised myself that I will do it regularly but for the moment "My Picture" is completely empty...weird sensation.

Hopefully I can now play catch up, the decorating is finished and the new carpet is down, I have already said that I have whimped out and this is my April challenge for Sharon. Change!!! There is still my room to do, as this became the repository of anything I couldn't decide whether I wanted to keep or throw out.

Calendar Girls and Take it Further are calling me so hopefully by next week I will be up an running.

April Calendar Girls 2008.......

I wanted to do something special for the April challenge as my swap partner was Doreen who thought up the challenge in the first place. As I have already explained to her this immediately fried my brain, and that, and all the upheaval of the decorating (still ongoing) meant I just couldn't settle or come up with anything.

In the end I made three cards, this is the one Doreen chose


This is "paper" made from silk cocoon strippings and sprayed with inks.

These are the other two.

Tulips in March........

This was the Calendar Girls picture for March,
Lots to choose from. I had a play in PSP9. This is one I considered

but in the end I focused in on the tulip heads, altered them a little and then printed them onto cotton.
This is the first one which is on it's way to Jenny

Inspired by the talk by Carol Naylor we had at EG, see here
I decided to try some heavy machine embroidery.
This is my second take on the tulips,
just light FME but using the words alphabet on my machine, which I love.
Jenny mentioned that she had used the lilac as her motif, I had focused so much on the tulip I hadn't even noticed them. So thank to Jenny, this is my lilac done on the embellisher.

There is some stunning stuff on the Calendar Girls this month

February flys by....

I have managed to complete my Calendar Girls challenge for February. I couldn't help noticing that the petals on the main flower had a heart shape. To see this months picture (and all the other wonderful interpretations follow the CG link)
I made some material by melting a plastic bag and Angelina and then cut them into heart shapes and put them between irridescent film.
I represented the vase by painting blue material with white acrylic dots.
I stitched the "petals" to the background this is the completed card.
My second attempt was the one I have sent to Joanna

The background is a piece of old music I then made the vase and the flower on the embellisher and added them to the card,I was particularly pleased with the white dots. I covered the whole with a pink chiffon and resisted the temptation to zap it as I was afaid of taking it too far.
This is a paper card I made with dried flowers.
The white spots on the background are done with bleach. I made a mess of the s of "friends".

Good felt tutorials at Living Felt and felting with children at Deeply Felt Studios More interesting memories by Fiona at love Fibre
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