Lisa Vollrath's Original Printables Holiday Countdown!

The inspirational Lisa Vollrath has kindly created a Holiday Countdown offering a free downloadable page of images each day in December from 1st to Christmas Day itself. To download you need to add this special link on your blog. If you are not aware of Lisa (where have you been?!), check out her Go Make Something site which has loads of demos, hints, tips, free printables and musings on art and life.

Market Day

I made these for a swap-bot Market Stalls swap, the brief being to make three ATCs where the market stall had to cover the whole of the ATC so that the recipients could make their own line of stalls.

For the striped canopy and skirt I used Big Top elements from a circus-themed digital scrapbook kit . The tablecloth on the Women's Insititue's cake stall is a paper doily. The goods for sale were all googled and printed off as small as I could make them and still cut them out.

Jamming

Two posts in one day! I was waiting to hear that my friends, Piddawinkle and Flippinpest had received some ATCs I made them as part of a jam swap we've been doing. We each had to chose a theme and tell the others what it was. Then we all made 2 cards on each theme and sent them to each other (a total of 3 ATCs for each person). These are mine...

I chose Diamonds as my theme and these are the two ATCs I made:

The one on the left is of Syd Barrett, who lived in Cambridge, and whose life and art is celebrated through The City Wakes . The lyrics are from the Pink Floyd song dedicated to Syd: Shine On, You Crazy Diamond. The ATC on the right has no meaning, just a lot of diamonds!

Piddawinkle chose Letters and here's how I interpreted it:I've always like the aesthetics of Soviet propaganda posters ; using the Cyrillic alphabet was my twist on the Letters theme. Maybe I should have used a pic of Brezhnev, then I could have titled it Letter to Brezhnev! But Lenin makes a better image. Take a Letter... gave me an opportunity to use a groovy typewriter image and the fifties secretary photo I found on Google.

Flippinpest chose Shakespeare, which I initially struggled with (which is daft as I did tons of it at school!), but they ended up being my favourites.


The fabulous Miss Taylor as Cleopatra (Anthony and Cleopatra was one of my A level texts) has been manipulated in Photoshop Elements.

The second is inspired by Ariel's song from The Tempest, which I have seen several times (including the Derek Jarman film with Toyah Wilcox); most recently in the gardens of Downing College here in Cambridge. Here's the father lying 'full fathom five' with 'pearls that were his eyes'.

Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands:
Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd
The wild waves whist,
Foot it featly here and there;
And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear.
Hark, hark!
Bow-wow.
The watch-dogs bark.
Bow-wow.
Hark, hark! I hear
The strain of strutting chanticleer
Cry, Cock-a-diddle-dow.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.

Fun with Filters...and I Love Your Blog!

I have been playing with some amazing plug-in Photoshop filters from Topaz Labs. I downloaded the free 30 day trials of Vivacity and Adjust and am seriously considering buying Adjust while it's on special offer. Might ask for Vivacity for Christmas. If you click the link you can find out all that they can do, but here's a few photos I enhanced.

Singer Chris Cornell, who I used to have a popular web page for, before he started moving in musical directions I didn't much care for.

I visited the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall a few years ago, a truly magical place and this is one of the photos I took given the Topaz Labs treatment. I had to reduce the image size quite a lot (these filters tend to add megabytes!) but if you click on it you can see it a bit larger.


A photo I found on the Internet, given the Vivacity treatment. Don't ask me how I did these, I just moved sliders until I got the effect I wanted.

Now, on to my second blog award, this one from my pal Val of Flippinpest's Crafty Roll fame. Cheers m'dear :-)


As requested, I am passing the award on to seven more blogs I love....
Holly at Artykards
Vintage Bunty
Zuzu's Petals Stuff
The Jaded Plum
Barbara at Sun Catcher
Kris Dickinson at Nostalgic Collage
Ilonka at Kreativegeschwafel

The Joy of Swapping...

...is that, in return for your artistic endeavours, you receive some fantastic ATCs for your collection.

This is the first of an occasional 'Look what I got!' series of posts. Chosen totally at random, all the senders happen to be swappers I first met on the Trimcraft forum.


Clockwise from top left: Fly Me to the Moon by VanessaLouise; Fairly Fairy by Junemac; Oohh by Blondewitch; The Bouquet by FlissyG. Click on the picture for a better look.

My Squiggly Ink Booky Wook - and Kreativ Blogger Award

I've recently attended a few workshops at Blade Rubber Stamps (near the British Museum) and I made this booklet in Freyja's Squiggly Inks class last week. I had a lot of fun, it cost just £12 and I highly recommend trying a class if you live near London.




This week I received two blog awards from my Trimcraft pals, Jane and Val. Thank you ladies :-) As both necessitate passing the award on to a number of other blogs, I'll deal with Jane's now and Val's later in the week.

Here's my Kreativ Blogger Award from Jane at Jane's Handmade Cards:


My five inspirational nominees are:
1) Patty Szymkowicz at Magpie's Nest
2) Mandy at Mandy's Magical World of Art
3) My namesake in Australia, Debbi Baker at My Abundant Life
4) June MacFarlane at June's Arty Retreat
5) Pattie Bloomfield at Pattie's Art

Some of these blogs may be familiar, others a magical new experience awaiting you. Enjoy! Look out for 7 more blogs when I update with my award from Val :-)