What's new, pussy cat?

A quick pic today - a pencil drawing of a lovely little cat. Sadly the circumstances behind the drawing are heartbreaking. I was asked to draw this by a lady whose daughter's cat was run over and killed a few weeks ago. Needless to say I wanted to draw something that would give her daughter some happy memories.

Colourful wooden beads for the summer

It has been rather damp here for the last few weeks. While the rest of the UK has been basking in sun, it has been dull and grey and wet in the Scottish Borders. The wet weather is taking its toll on my poor hands too. Usually I don't have to worry about my hands until late autumn when I start upping my use of cod liver oil. But this summer has been bad. As a result my paper bead making has been severely limited. So I have been painting wooden beads instead. As you can see, there is a summer theme going on. Bees, and ladybirds, flowers, lighthouses and starfish. It's a cross between summer in a country garden and at the beach. I wonder why? If you want to see more examples then you can find them on my web site.

Teneriffe at Christmas

Gina-B Silkworks has some new kits out for making Teneriffe lace including one with Christmas designs. They are really cute. You can make Teneriffe medallions with Christmas trees, bows, candles or reindeer. Due to work issues, I didn't get to make as many samples as I had hoped for this month's show but I did get this little box finished with the Christmas tree motifs on the medallion. You do need to buy some of the looms that Gina has as well as the Christmas kit but one loom and some festive designs can make a whole host of imaginative gifts and cards.

Another way of using Teneriffe lace is to add it to a canvas. This piece was made by layering lots of textures like tissue paper and cheese cloth onto a small art canvas, adding some Teneriffe medallions (including some of my early attempts that did not look all that great) and painting over it all with cream acrylic paint. I then added some pink and blue highlights among the textures and some gilding wax lightly over the very top. A few jewels, pearls and jewellery findings along with a short quote finished it off. Something a bit more modern using a traditional craft.

Ribbon flowers

I came across a lovely company the other week on one of the craft channels - Ribbonbox. They supply products to make your own fabric flowers but they are so simple and so effective that I wanted to give it a go. So I looked out my stash of wire edge ribbon and artificial flower stamens and followed along with the demos. 

The flowers in the photo below are the result. Really nice blossomy flowers, one anemone and one poppy. Bear in mind I did not use Ribbonbox's kits (they come complete with ribbons, stamens, leaves, etc) but they will definitely be added to my crafting wishlist.

The poppy was nice as a little addition to a birthday gift for my sister - a little pencil drawing of Indy.