Scavenger Hunt Sunday

Some tough ones this week, so off we go!


First off is "Yellow". On my first day back at school my class teacher presented me with thie beautiful bunch of yellow flowers as a late Easter gift.

"In the Sun"...Minnie was lying with her front end in a patch of afternoon sun in the doorway into the lounge. The dogs are only allowed into the lounge by invitation so she was gradually creeping in to be in the sun!

"Splash". I borrowed my friend's son for these shots! He loves to have a bath in the kitchen sink. Now I love the shot of his little hand in the water but...

...how could I resist showing you his cheeky little face and a bit more splashyness! 

"Something that made me laugh". Lots made me laugh this week, like a man whose umbrella blew inside out and a child saying "powl of borridge" instead of "bowl of porridge" but I couldn't get them into photos. So instead you get a v.v quick snap of my daughter Katy using my sewing machine. Now Katy is a very clever girl but she does not sew! She needed the machine for some school work so I had set it up on the slowest speed and she was managing fine until the bobbin ran out. I was in a rush so whooshed the speed to max to wind it quickly and then went back to what I was doing. She then used the machine, off it went at about 100mph and she was squealing and shrieking, trying to hold the fabric so it wouldn't run away and trying to find the button to stop the machine!! I guess you had to be there but we laughed til we cried!

Finally is "Ancient". I have this very old, velvet jacket hanging above my stairs. I know very little about it, my Dad gave it to me years ago and said it belong to a Persian Prince many years ago!

More art journal!

Yes I know, no journalling for aaaaages and then two at once, bit like buses really! However let me explain... When I scrapbook I have a bit of a thing about DLO's....all my pages are DLOs so they "match" and when I did the left side of my journal I found myself thinking that I should have spread it over a double page. I decided that the umbrella stamp was too small so I just did the one side. When I showed it to the children Jasper responded in his usual manner, with a useless piece of information, which was that rain falls at 7mph.

Ok I thought, a page round this idea would "match" my previous rainy page and so it evolved! I drew the raindrop first then used watercolour crayons around it, added some dictionary definitions of rain related words and some scraps of blue paper. I gessoed over the lot and flicked H2Os over it before writing in watercolour crayon all over it. The words are the lyrics to April Showers from the film "Bambi". I lightly washed over the words and finished it off by writing Jasper's interesting fact in the raindrop! 

Art Journal

Over the Easter hols it was Jess's birthday and she wanted lots of art bits and bobs for her Uni course. I drove to an Art wholesale place (Seabrights) and wow!!!! Lots of lovely books and pads and paints and stuff! So for Easter I bought all the children an A4 book to do things in. It would have been foolish not to buy one for myself....

....and now it is my art journal!. These song lyrics have been going about in my head for a few days. They are from the Rhianna song "Umbrella"...not that I like her version, I have been listening to a version by The Baseballs. I knew I had this nice umbrella stamp that I haven't used yet so off I went. BG is watercolour crayons, Distress Inks through a leafy stencil, rain cut from easter egg wrapper and flowers from scraps! Turned out to be quite a suitable page for our current weather!

Baking again!

I am really into my sour dough now! A week or two ago I set up a starter from a Herman cake I was given and I have been experimenting with various recipes ever since! I found a fabby recipe for sourdough cinnamon swirls. I made them on Sunday and they were DELICIOUS!!! All gone now though.

Altered ATC

Over at UKStampers I have just taken part in an altered ATC swap. We could use any material EXCEPT paper/card to make it so I used felt.

I started by stacking 5 colours of felt and drawing a simple design on the what will be, bottom one.

Then I machined round it twice to make it extra strong. 

Then I cut through the layes, up tight to the stitching to leave different colours showing from each layer. So on the first layer I cut pretty much all of it away to leave the black out line. Then I cut everything but the fin..

Gradually I worked through the layers until I had white showing just for the face and I embroidered an eye and mouth. This is called reverse applique and I have never done it before but once I worked out what colours I wanted between the top black and bottom white it was very easy.

Just a shot from the side so you can see all the layers.

Scavenger Hunt Sunday

Off we go agin with this week's items...

First up is "Transportation". On Tuesday I was taking Jess back to Bournemouth and we saw a fab Beetle all painted up like Herbie. "Quick" I shout, "take a photo for transportation". So she did and it was cool. But then  little further along the road we came across this HUGE lorry carrying a brand new infaltable speedboat. Once again Jess grabbed the camera and we managed to snap it before I overtook! It was then we realised that Katy had left the camera set to B&W. Grrrrr I thought but now I see the pic I think it works better in B&W. Hubby reckons these are destined for the Navy in Portsmouth....they certainly looked powerful beasts!

Less waffle for this one; "Grain". I took about 50 shots of hens and grain but liked the corn hopping off my hand and the shadow of Marigold's comb on my fingers! (Marigold is the hen, she is 6 and STILL laying for us!)

What could be more "Simple" than tea and a digestive biscuit?

"Stitch"; I finally got down to finishing off a quilt top that I started in a class about a month ago. Looks like my machine needs a bit of a dust and de-fluff!

Finally "bubbles". I struggled with this one a bit but Katy was desperate to do bubble painting so here she is making a right old mess! You would never believe she is 16! Again I took loads of shots but plumped for this one because I had caught her ring in it which looks a bit like bubbles too. We made a very pretty piece of paper from all the bubbles and no doubt I shall use it later for something!!

Another cushion.

A few weeks ago now I started another Union Jack cushion for a friends birthday. I did two sections but I think I must have been still feeling the after effects of the anaesthetic because I just found it sooooo difficult to work out the paper piecing and put it all away!

I thought that I really had better finish it off seeing as her birthday was in March! Once again I forgot to leave a seam allowance on the four quarters so I had to stitch them to the centre panels with the teeniest seam allowance ever! Maybe if I do a third one I'll actually get it completely right!

Disappearing nine patch quilt

Some weeks ago I went to another quilting class with Janet of Sleeping Bear.

Here are all my assembled squares laid out on the table before stitching...


...and today I sewed them all together and added the borders and corners. This quilt design is based round a charm pack and I chose one from Moda called Ruby. Quite a different colourway for me but I love the springlike colours and am really glad that I made the effort to track down the matching Ruby fabrics online for the borders.

My little fur babies!!!!

I have done a bit of making things but one is an altered ATC and I can't show you that until the person I am giving it to has got it! I planned to sew this evening but instead I ended up helping Katy with prep for her photography GCSE! I have been taking lots of photos recently tho...

This is Minnie; she is a "Sprocker" which is a cross between a Springer and Cocker Spaniel although she is more Cocker as her Mum was a true Sprocker. She is going to need a hair cut soon; those white bits of fur grow vertically up in front of her eyes eventually, like tufts! She is very dizzy and excitable but also quick to learn and is now seven.

This is Old Man Max! He is 11 now which is a good age for a Labrador and he is starting to get rather grizzled around his muzzle. He really should be called Tim......nice but dim, bless him! He is very lazy and a right old softy but he can also be dead grumpy. He is a real Daddy's boy and they go out working together in the winter, picking up game and beating and my husband swears he IS clever! Hmmm I have my doubts but I still love him to bits!

An Altered sick bowl!!!!

Some of you may know that I recently had a small op from which I am all recovered now, but on the way home I felt a bit queasy so brought home several of these papier mache sick bowls.

Needless to say I didn't use them but couldn't bring myself to throw them away! Jess has asked me several times for a bowl to put her bits and pieces of jewellery in when she takes it off at night so this seemed like the ideal thing to alter!

First I trimmed off that rim then I found the scraps of fabric left over from her cushion and chopped them into bits before glueing them all over the bowl. I covered the whole lot with lots of PVA.

It took ages to dry but once it was, it set really hard and she has now taken it off to Uni with her!

Creations of an edible kind!

April is a month of birthdays and celebrations for me. On the 3rd Jess was 19, and on the 4th Ken was 45, then Easter and on 28th it will be our 22nd wedding anniversary. So the begining of the month is just full of cakes! Eliza made Jess's; a three tier lemon cake which we ate before I took a pic.

For Ken, who rarely gets his own cake, I decided to make a cake from the rather luscious Hummingbird Bakery book. I came out HUGE, it is three layers of cake which is a bit like carrot cake only with banana, pineapple and walnuts in.

The icing is a cream cheese frosting and not only does it go all over the outside, it "glues" it all together too!
Sadly with six of us in the house these things do not last long so this is just a memory now and we are onto the Simnel Cake!!

Scavenger Hunt Sunday

This is the 3rd week I have taken part and it was a bit trickier this week! To add to the fun my camera has also decided not to work so I need to tackle that after the weekend. I therefore resorted to my trusty little pocket Canon instead of the Eos.
First this week is "Life". What more can I say; we saw this chap being born and this is one of the least yucky photos!

Next is "Obvious". This was a hard one but there, all of a sudden, outside the back door, was this HUGE moon. Can't get more obvious than that!

"Pink" is this one; I was trying to be all clever and find something that wasn't flowers but in the end I plumped for this Vibernum Bodnantense Dawn that is about the only thing in my garden to survive the ravages of the hens!

"Fragrant" was quite an easy one this week. I have made 2 birthday cakes, a Simnel cake and this batch of Hot Cross Buns. Sadly they weren't made in time for Good Friday but we are going to eat them in a minute for our Easter breakfast! They were certainly deliciously fragrant when I opened the oven door.

Last of all for this week is "New". I wanted to show a picture of my newly decorated kitchen and utility room but just could not compose it into an attractive picture. So instead I took my camera this morning as I walked the dogs and snapped this tiny new bluebell that is just a hint of the blue carpet to follow in a week or so.

I am still loving the challenges and thank you for looking at my efforts!

The last page of that CJ....

You remember I was doing a CJ with friends? Yeah you do, the one where one went off to South Africa? Well this is my entry for the last one. Sharon had included a stamp of Allium and we had to use Queen songs as our inspiration.

I didn't pick one from her list but decided to use The Bicycle Song so included some lyrics on the first page.

So then I wrote my memories of learning to ride a bike,

Between the two I added an extra acetate with a photo my daughter took of bikes in a rack in Brighton. This CJ had me scratching my head many a night but when it finally came to it, it came together rather well!

My new CJ

And we are off again with another CJ! I DO love a CJ and this one is on UKStampers and is an Art Journal CJ. Not sure how you define an Art Journal but I'm going with the "anything goes" idea!

This is my opening page and as you can see my theme is "Queen and Country". As it is Jubilee year and we are surrounded by all things red, white and blue I felt everyone would have something to say on this theme! I am happy for people to be as "outside the box" as they like; crowns, country music or Queen the rock band would all be fine! My only rule is that I would like people to use at least TWO out of those three colours in their LO. For this page I used a paper napkin left over from the Royal Wedding last year and painted the Queen's profile on it.

This is my LO. More paper napkin but this time I used gesso over it, image transfers of the Queen, embossed  crowns (I discovered embossing goes all bumpy if you do it over an image transfer!) and some journalling.

This is the sign in page; well there had to be bunting somewhere didn't there?

And here is the front cover, all ready to go. You can't see it very well but there is a really cute piece of ribbon with little guardsmen on it tied to the ring! I have posted it off on it's way and I hope to see it's safe return in 9 months or so!