The Weekend

Last weekend was the Craft Barn Extravaganza. I hotfooted it up there on Saturday morning and stayed all day without even a teabreak ! I spent ages watching demos by Suze Weinberg, Jean of Crafty Individuals and Lin of LB Crafts, and ran out of time. I really could have done with going back on the Sunday to see more of the demos by Leandra of Paper Artsy, and the other demonstrators.

I was keen to see Suze demo. I love following her adventures on her blog, and I have a meltpot which I've used, but not used enough, to make beads and embellishments, and I'd never used beeswax. So much to my delight, I was able to watch Suze making beautiful little collage pieces using beeswax, and fabulous pendants using UTEE, and kindly giving these away to members of her audience. We had a fun time with lots of chat, humour, and questions.

Suze had said that wood was the best surface for beeswax, so when I got home I had a rummage in the shed for some offcuts of pine that I had though might come in handy for chicken shed repairs. However, I also came across some pieces of an old panel fence that a thoughtful friend had brought me to use as kindling for my fire. They were of a similar thickness to the wood that Suze had used, and I loved the shapes and weathered appearance, and the idea of recycling this into something I could put on the wall, so I sawed some lengths into smaller pieces.

I wanted to make something that would mean something to me, so I've used family photos printed on to photocopy paper. The first piece is of my grandmother at the time of her life when she ventured away from her home village to the big city. Apart from the collage elements and beeswax, all I have used is Perfect Pearls and green Inka Gold. I should have waited to get photos in natural light as the Perfect Pearls reflect and it's hopeless trying to get a good photo. However, I can't see myself having time in the daytime.

The second piece is a recent picture of yours truly (tee hee), and this time I've added some little pieces of swirly, coloured with distress ink and layered with flowers, and again there's Perfect Pearls.

I have more pieces of wood and more collage pieces ready to do more, and have also found a mirror with a wide pine frame (in a charity shop) which is just asking to be collaged upon.

Since Saturday have also made some cards with Crafty Individuals stamps and house shaped board. Jean also made some gorgeous tags stamping on tissue paper and sticking the images to the tag. The next thing on my list to try - between beeswax sessions.

At Lin's table I saw the wonderful treasure chest pictured in her blog post of 11 June and had a peek at all the treasures inside. As usual Lin had some new techniques to show, and I've already had a go at a die cut Paper Artsy bird cage under some metal tape with the bird cage stamp on top and workings with the metal tools to decorate. No hope of a pic of that tonight with the shine on the metal. Next to try will be using corrugated card as shown in Lin's post of 14 June.

Leandra was producing lots of different flowers using her PaperArtsy dies and stamps. I had made metal and tissue flowers at the Artsycraftsy weekend, but as usual Leandra has come up with lots of new ideas for different flowers.