My Blog is One Year Old Today

I can't believe that it was a year ago today that I started my blog. Where has the time gone? I already had a website and couldn't understand why I would want to have a blog as well. However, nothing ventured I thought. My first post read "Today I started my blog....". I thought I would be struggling to say anything in future posts and I thought "who would be interested in all my experiments anyway". Blogging has helped keep me focused. I am quite sure I have achieved more than I ever would have by having my blog.

I have learned so much in the past year about blogging and all sorts of different techniques by visiting other blogs. I have made lots of new friends. Thank you for dropping by and taking the time to post a comment, I appreciate each and every one of you. Thank you also for sharing what you do on your blogs so that we can all learn.

This past little while I have been busy playing with the computer and trying new things on my blog. I have also been tying up loose ends and catching up on course work. I can now relax and get back to playing again.

When I was clearing up the studio, the log cabin outside where I do all my painting and dyeing, I found my sketchbooks from the recent C&G course - Creative Computing. I thought I would share a couple of the pages with you. I am amazed at how much work I have done. I guess I was so busy enjoying myself I didn't realise just how much work was involved.

I was playing with different types and makes of paint with these two pages. I also tried stamping with different paints/inks, embossing fluid and powders.

These are some more paint effects with stamps using the embossing fluid and powders.
I used watercolours (left) and acrylic artists ink (right) on the paper and then stamped using an impress ink pad.
The left page has a piece of lutrador laid on top and then painted with gesso. I left it to dry and then painted it with acrylic paint and stamped it - the ink is very faint. The page on the right was first painted with Golden Gel medium (with added fibres), left to dry and painted with Artists Ink. I used the same stamp to make a design from water soluble paper (when the paper was wet I added some silk paint). I left the water soluble paper to dry and glued it to the page and finally used treasure gold on the paper.
This page was first painted with a very dilute watercolour wash. The design was painted on using Stewart Gill Filgree Fluid. It's a bit like Xpandaprint but a little thinner in texture. I used various Stewart Gill paints - Galactica, Metallica and glued on some mico flakes etc. This was an experiment to see how the different paints looked.

My apologies for the quality of the picures. Some things just don't photograph very well.

To celebrate my Blog Birthday the first 6 people to comment on this post I will send one of my fabric postcards.