Following!

At long last (yes, I am not the quickest off the block) I have added the Follower widget. If you want to follow my blog now you can just click the button on the right hand side of the page, below the blurb about myself and my web sites. Thank you to all those lovely people who have signed up to follow me already.

Font of knowledge

I came across a new (to me) font site the other day filled to the brim with beautiful fonts. Of course, being Halloween obsessed I had to look at their horror fonts and downloaded seven new spooky fonts, a beautiful fancy one and a set of stunning ancient history dingbats. I have included an image with them on 'cos they are just so wonderful and I have loads of good ideas for their use. The name of the site is DaFont.com so take a look and you might just find something to make your text look even more beautiful.

Challenge Gillian - June bust

I cannot tell a lie. Finally, after six months of producing a piece of art every week, I have fallen by the wayside. No art. Not one completed piece. I have started several pieces but none of them were finished. Now, I do have a reasons for this. Multiple reasons in fact. I had a number of swaps to make stuff for, I was preparing art for the local exhibition and framing them myself (this is the first time I have done this myself and thankfully hair pulling was kept to a minimum), not to mention a very hot week where I just turned into a slug and got nothing done.

Having said that, July has been much more productive and I have already got two pieces done so it's looking good for having pieces to show you next month. With all the gales and rain we have been having since the start of the month there hasn't been much else to do so plenty of time for art and no excuses.

Buried treasure 2010

As many of you will know, Seth from The Altered Page is running Buried Treasure again. This is where we get to pick our favourite posts that we have put on our blogs. Last year was pictures from my nature notebook (still my all time favorite post) so what could I pick this year? Well, as it is getting closer to October (yes, I'm looking forward to autumn already) I thought I'd pick my Halloween post from last year. Entitled 'Halloween treats' it is full of the creative goodies I made for last Halloween - my favourite celebration. I hope you will all enjoy looking back with me.

As promised here are some Halloween goodies that I have been working on. Tim Holtz in his 'tricks & treats' blog post gave some great ideas for creating wonderful arty pieces and Ten Two Studios has some instructions on using matchboxes in the 'project' section of the web site. So I took my lead from those ideas and here they are. Some have been swapped out for group or one to one swaps but all of them were fun to do.

Just a quickie

Just a quick update with a few things I've been doing over the last couple of weeks. The cards with the chickens on are recipe cards. As usual I forgot to photograph the other side of them with the recipe on but apart from being very pink it was just a recipe for chicken chow mein. The background paper is watercolour paper, coated in a wet wash of acrylic paint, sprayed with Wild Plum Color Wash, then sprinkled with coarse grain salt. I light spritz of plain water over the top just moistens up the paint enough for it to pool around the salt and it gives that great mottled look when it dries. It is important to leave the paint to dry completely without moving the salt otherwise the technique doesn't work as well. I use this technique so often. You can use it with any colour combination you like and never get the same effect twice. I have also made some bookmarks with this technique but I'll be posting them later.

The greetings cards were made for my sister's birthday. I tried to make them bright and breezy and notice that pink appeared again in the second card. Considering I HATE pink that's quite a feat for me.

Strawberries on the 4th July

In honour of the fact that this is the 4th July I downloaded some free US style strawberry packaging from Seneca Pond Crafts. SPC often offers great freebies via the web site and her free newsletter and it's always fun to give new things a go. Just download, print and cut out. So here are my strawberries soon to be filled with gummy bears and shared with my family. You can find the free download in the What's New section of the store. I can highly recommend all of SPC's printables. They always give a great printouts and there are some lovely and unusual things for every occasion. The Halloween printables are to die for - just do a search for Halloween if you can't find them.