A new creative outlet (and passion...)

EYES

I admit it - I'm pretty hooked!  Given my addictive personality, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise, really...  I've just completed my FIRST EVER art journal page and I LOVE IT!

I'm about to embark on a year-long adventure through mixed media and art journalling, called WANDERLUST.  It is an online adventure over 50 weeks in 2016 starting on 1 January.  There will be a new video each week detailing different aspects of this amazing creative outlet, including videos on products and techniques from 2 resident teachers, as well as videos from 24 guest teachers (each one downloadable and with PDF instructions provided).

I can't wait to get started!!

D.xx

The Caring Hearts Card Drive 2016 ~ Wrap-up

Well, the Caring Hearts Card Drive is over for another year!  I've managed to collect a total of 380 cards from local cardmaking friends in Melbourne, and these have been packed up into deliveries to go to five different aged care facilities across the suburbs.  To combine these with the cards sent directly to Linda, that makes a total of 1,100 cards collected and distributed across 13 aged care facilities in Australia for 2016 - such a great effort!

For my own part, I've made roughly 200 cards for this cause, with over 130 of them being utilised in a mini-fundraiser at my children's primary school.  Below is a photo showing some of the beautiful messages written by the primary students:

They're so very colourful!  Here is a quick photo showing a group of different designs I made for the school:

This is such a fantastic initiative, and I hope to be involved again next year!!

Deb.xx

Pixels and Paper ~ December Challenge!

2010

WOW, I blinked and November was gone!!  What a busy month!!  Well, we're definitely on the downhill run now, gathering speed towards the festive season!  And Christmas time is exactly what I thought of when I first saw this month's inspiration photo at Pixels and Paper!

This image is so much fun!  I was firstly drawn to the beautiful bright green and red, and to the chocolate and the gingerbread.  I also wanted to incorporate the overall Christmas theme of the bikkies into my layout!  Here's what I came up with!

On a piece of heavy-weight white cardstock, I splattered some watered down 'Melted Chocolate' Dylusions paint and let it dry.  Next I used the Trees stencil from TCW and 'Cut Grass' Dylusions paint with a stipple brush to stencil the trees randomly on the page.  Again, after this was dry, I used 'Postbox Red' Dylusions paint and a fine-point brush to put red dots on the trees.

Next, I used two adorable little gingerbread people stamps from Imaginisce and stamped and white embossed them onto 'ginger-coloured' cardstock.  I fussy-cut them out and arranged them in pairs on the page.  I used my 'Little Numbers' dies from Stampin' Up! to cut out "2010" from the 'ginger-coloured' cardstock, and added some squiggly lines with my Versamark pen and heat-embossed with white.

I used a piece of candy-cane paper from a Kaisercraft paperstack to go under my photo.  I also distressed up some of the 'ginger-coloured' cardstock and put that under where the photo was going to go.

I matted my photo of my kids' Santa photo (from 2010) onto white cardstock and used the 'Postbox Red' Dylusions paint around the edge.  The photo was then popped up over the layers to give dimension.  I also used a diecut from the Kaisercraft paperstack (it was green [tick!] and had Santa on it [tick!] to journal the details of this Santa photo.

I was relatively happy with the page, but it did seem like it was missing something.  I used a mask of an ornament die by Nini's Things and sponged some 'Real Red' ink by Stampin' Up! over the mask and removed it - I did this randomly on the page and I feel it picked it right up.

I can't wait to see what everyone else comes up with this month!!

Cheerio!  Thanks for visiting!!

Deb.xx