Craftbubble Craftathon 2012

If you've stopped by here lately, I apologise for not having posted for quite a few days.  I'm recovering well from my recent surgery, but the whole house is totally disrupted whilst the builders are refurbishing our ensuite shower room and fitting a new kitchen.  The work should have gone ahead before Christmas, but when I got sick it had to be postponed.  I'm at the stage right now when I wish we had never started it, but I can see the kitchen coming together at last and I know it will be worth it once it's finished.  They've been working on the two rooms for the past 3 weeks and I'm finding it so difficult without cooking facilities except a microwave.  Beans on toast for dinner for us this evening I think!  We have dined at our local pub a couple of time, but there aren't too many interesting items on the menu sadly.

I spent last weekend in Bristol meeting up with some of my lovely crafty pals who are members of the Craft Mad and Loving It group on Craftbubble.  Thanks to the tireless effort by my pal Kathy, the whole weekend went really well.  We all met up on friday, everyone arriving from various locations throughout the country and at different times but all able to get together for dinner on friday evening at our hotel.  The pic on the left shows us all unpacked and raring to get crafty in the hall we'd hired for the weekend.  Who would have thought that so much stash could come out of the relatively small amount of luggage everyone (well most of us!) brought with us. 

During the weekend we all created a canvas (thanks to Clare who brought the necessary supplies and gave us lots of helpful tips); coloured seam binding, buttons, dominoes, old CDs and glossy paper using Alcohol Inks (thanks to Kathy who is our Purple Princess of AIs); diecut and coloured shrink plastic and turned it into jewellery, phone charms etc (great job Cherry! your Art Journal is sooooo fabulous Dahlink!)  In fact we all had a huge amount of fun. 

I demonstrated the techniques I use with Copics and Promarkers to colour images, and in the background we had a couple of  DVDs on Art Journalling running and projected on to a screen.  I think we all learned a great deal from these and from each other and the different techniques we use and love. 

Here's a close up of my canvas, I used my lovely new stamps from Chocolate Baroque, stamped the images using Rich Cocoa Memento ink and coloured with Copics.  I distressed the edges with inks and after sticking on to the canvas, I applied Crackle Glaze and rubbed over gold wax medium to emphasise the cracks.  The other elements were added using stencils, stamps, copper and gold paint applied using the edge of a piece of plastic and old bottle tops in addition to the stamps. 

I hope you've enjoyed seeing my canvas, thanks for dropping by to check out my blog today.