ArtyFartyAnnie

Hello Fellow Deskers and Bloggy Friends, I've missed a few weeks of What's On Your Workdesk Wednesday - life getting in the way again :o) but I'm back! Join us over at lovely Julia's Stamping Ground and show the world what you've been up to in your creative space this week. Most of my crafting at the moment is being done at the dining table in between Other Stuff, so I'll show you that, as it's more interest than my actual Workdesk ... I've been totally obsessed with rolling old newspapers into tubes. There are some wonderfully inspiring tutorials on YouTube showing you how to weave these into baskets - you can see my very first attempts here. I have a LOT of practising to do before mine look anything like the amazing ones I've seen on YouTube, but even these first efforts are actually useful containers for my craft room. The colours you see here are just as I found them in the newspapers - you can roll towards the unprinted edge to ...

Hello Everyone, I'm loving Wanderlust 2019 , enjoying all the different teachers with their varied styles and approaches and learning different techniques and ideas with every lesson. This month, the theme is "Faces". For some reason I jumped in and did Week Six with Marjie Kemper straight away (see the post immediately before this one if you're interested), then went back to Week Five with Kasia Avery. I will come back to this again but here's how it looks now ... Kasia showed us how to start by sticking down a face cut from a magazine, then painting over the top. Here's mine before I started painting the face ... After a coat of clear gesso, I worked with gouache, mixing all the colours from a very limited palette, which is something I need to practice more. I love gouache, to me it has the translucency of watercolours combined with the body and vibrancy of acrylics. I did use some white acrylic as well, then did the lettering with paint pens...

Hello Everyone, I've been catching up on my Wanderlust 2019 pages. Week Six was a lesson with Marjie Kemper which was lots of fun, really encouraging me to get out a few supplies I had not used in ages and just enjoy the process. At first it felt like I was just making a very colourful mess, but I was happy with the page that eventually emerged ... I enjoyed using sprays and then stencilling with inks in the same colours to create layers and I loved how the sprays worked over stencilled texture paste. Marjie's idea to use tags to create little pockets to hold secret messages was really cool. I didn't have a glamourous face stencil or stamp, so I used this skull, as a reminder that life is not a dress rehearsal :o) The next day at work, my hands were still black and blue with ink, but it was SO worth it!! Thanks for popping in today, see you again soon. Love Annie xxx

Hello Bloggy Friends, You know how it is when you're looking forward to something for SO long and then it whizzes by and in the blink of an eye it's all over? That happened to me last weekend when my good friend Trina and I went off on a GoGoGetaway - two whole days of scrapbooking classes just flashed past. As always, we came home with loads of goodies and kit leftovers and mine are still unpacked - here they are sitting on my workdesk ... We got to take the handy carry case home with all our kit leftovers and UFOs inside, as well as the very very cute bamboo reusable coffee cup which I love, and some chocolates for doing the feedback form. I was also very lucky to win the challenge - the prize was a pack of Lawn Fawn goodies which are spread over the top of the storage case in the photo. The challenge was to make a page inspired by a sketch - I made mine a week ahead but forgot to bring it with me, so had to ask DH to take a photo and send it to me so that I coul...

HI everyone, The February Case Files have been released over at CSI: Color, Stories, Inspiration - you can find all the details and check out pages made by the CSI detectives and guest designers over at the CSI blog, plus daily inspiration and ideas on the CSI Facebook page. There are LOADS of fab prizes to be won, three different Case Files to choose from and you have until the end of the month, so why not give it go? You can now enter by sharing your pages on the CSI Facebook group so it's easy for everyone to join in. Here's Case File #272 ... You can either draw your own inspiration from the image, or you can follow the traditional clues which you can find if you scroll to the bottom of the February Case Files blog post. I always enjoy following the clues so that's how I solved this case ... I love this happy photo of me and my mate Maggie taken in Cornwall in around 2007. We were gin connoisseurs long before it became fashionable as it is today...

Hello everyone, I can't believe it's Friday again, a new Wanderlust lesson just came out - better quickly post a pic of my effort for last week, when Kasia showed us how to start with a collage and then add a soft cloudy effect with acrylic paint to create a backdrop for our chosen word of the year. It was so much fun making the clouds that I got a bit carried away and covered up most of my background papers, but you can still see the focal images which came from the gorgeous printable ephemera collection put togetherby Eliza Trojanowska for Wanderlust 2019. Anyway, here's my effort, featuring my word for this year ... The scribbled text reads, "What do you really want? What do you really need? What will the consequences be?" which is my mantra for 2019. Thanks for stopping by today, see you again soon! Love Annie xxx

Hello Fellow Deskers, I'm slightly late to the party but better late than never :o) Somehow it got to be Wednesday again already so it's time to link up over at Julia's Stamping Ground and see what everyone's been up to this week. Here's my desk this morning ... I'm between projects, so it looks kinda tidy-ish. From left to right, you can see my iPad (essential for binge-watching, currently Les Mis on BBC iPlayer), some new stamp and die storage folders above that, my just-finished page for this week's Wanderlust 2019 lesson, a curious little book I found yesterday in a charity shop and my habitual black coffee. The book was a real find, here's a closer look at the cover ... One of the pages at the front was missing, so I went online to see if I could find out what it said. I didn't find the missing page yet, but I did discover that this was a collection of "found" photos from photo booths, put together by an artist called Di...