Ally Pally

It was so nice to see so many familiar faces at Ally Pally last weekend. Actually, it was also great to put faces to the names of many of our mail order customers too. I need to say thank you to each and every one of you who stopped by our booth and made it such a successful show for us. Recession....what recession.....I think everyone forgot about the recession over the weekend and for that, I am truly grateful.

It was fun to have Leandra working alongside me again at the show, she is always very entertaining and inspiring to watch. I have received many emails thanking us for our hard work and telling us that you find both our demonstrations inspirational. I must admit, I do find it hard accepting compliments, I just feel that it is only little ole me, doing my thing and it never ceases to amaze me that so many people love what I do. I have been told that I should just simply say "thank you" and accept the compliments, so here goes.....THANK YOU so much, it means a lot. Oh, and thanks to Leandra too, she is such a pleasure to work with.

Leandra has launched some fab new stamps. The first range she has is all about castles and all things royal. They came about because the last ArtsyCrafts event had a regal theme. Leandra came up with some super designs, I really like the crowns and Fleur de lys but the "build a castle" stamps are really something else. She came up with the idea of having bits of castles so that you can build your own. There are turrets, bits of walls, windows and archways....all very clever, they fit together beautifully. Then there is the MetalExtra range of stamps. I had this idea that it would be really cool to have some stamps that have large open areas so that you could use all the Ten Seconds Studio tools to emboss them. I hope to have these up on the website sometime next week, they are in stock but as you know, I need Mark to get this on the site for me as I'm completely useless at it!!

With all these great new stamps and new stuff from Ten Seconds, I thought it would be really cool to dig out the melt pot and use these with some UTEE. I was cooking clear UTEE and pouring it on to an unmounted stamp and also some of the TSS Moulds. You do need to either use a clear ink pad or Perfect Pearls as a release agent, but it was pretty simple to do. Just allow the UTEE to cool and pull it off. I also had some wicked new paints that I sponged on the the UTTE. Sadly, I gave away all the finished samples but here are some snaps of some of the pieces I made. Let me know what you think. As soon as I have a minute, I will make them into a finished sample, right now I am supposed to be finishing a masterclass article that I am writing for Craft Stamper and my deadline is looming soon!!!

Now I have turned the pieces over for a completely different look, not sure if you can really see in these pictures but now it looks like you are looking through a piece of glass!

We were asked so much over the weekend about the next ArtsyCrafts events. I can tell you the dates are 17th & 18th October 2009 and repeated on 24th & 25th October 2009. If you attended the last event, you will receive an email, some time next week inviting you to book your place, you guys have first refusal on the spaces for two weeks, after that the remaining places will go on sale to the rest of the world. If you would like an email with all the details, pop your name on my email mailing list, there is a button on the home page of my website for this, and you will automatically get all the gen in your mailbox.

Thought you might like to see a few snaps from the very busy Ally Pally.

This is my daughter Sarah and her boyfriend Chris, who manned the tills for the weekend. Chris is fast becoming a dab hand at loading our van!!!!!

I'm off to type up my article. Take care.

Lin