Friday Randomness

Today has been a really random day. A strange day but a good day too. I was housebound today waiting for the UPS man to collect my boxes of class kits that I am shipping out to Holland. As it turned out, the UPS man was in fact a UPS girl and I was kinda worried when I saw it was a girl as one of those boxes weighed 30kg and I couldn't pick it up off the floor. Fret not, she was a lovely smiley UPS person with extremely good muscle power. That went in her favour as she didn't arrive til 4pm which meant that I couldn't go out to the studio today cos you can't hear the front door from there. Now there's another little job for Mark, rigging up the door bell so I can hear it outside.....wonder what he'll say when I suggest this???????

Anyways, it meant that I got all sorts of stuff done today:
Ironing - yucky job!
Made a choccy cake - Mark's favourite and a nice job.
Paperwork - still trying to finish up L.B.Crafts accounts.....long job!
Cleaning the house - not my favourite job at all!!!!

Having finished all the above, I started to get itchy fingers so ran out to the studio to grab a few bits'n'bobs to do in the house. Felt a right fool running like mad across my own garden but you kinda know that that's when the doorbell will ring.....right?????

First of all I grabbed the book that I am altering. I have spent a few evenings stitching and embellishing a fabric piece to fit the niche that I cut in this ginormous book, so I grabbed some adhesive too and set about gluing this in place.

This book is one of those ongoing projects but I'm kinda liking how it's coming together. I just need to pluck up the courage to journal over the blank area now.

So that took all of 10 minutes.....another mad dash across the garden and grabbed some fabric scraps. I had no idea where I was heading with my little left over bits from my fabric journal but I love the fabric so much, I wasn't about to throw them in the bin. After another cup of tea and a browse through a few magazines to find some inspiration, I decided that I should just figure what size I want thne overall piece to be and use my scraps to fill that space......voila!

OK so now what's my plan??? At that point in time, I didn't have one as everything is out in the studio....most frustrating. Third dash across the garden and I grab my printers tray full of embellishments.

This will now end up as a wall hanging of some description and whilst I found a few things that are going to become part of this piece, I decided that I really need to do this in the studio when I can have access to all my stuff so it was pushed to one side to be continued another day.

After yet another cup of tea, I made a fabulous discovery. I found a little bag of stuff that I purchased in America about three years ago and of course the goodies hadn't seen the light of day since I puchased them.....such a bad habit of mine!!!  Anyway, with time on my hands it was a good opportunity to have a little dabble.

What the heck is it, I hear you asking?????? Well, I can tell you that it was quite a splurge on my part....a very expensive bit of kit to sit in a bag for three years but it is actually a flower press. The idea is that you heat up this metal gadget and press velvet in it to make the most gorgeous blooms like these (these are the samples that came in the pack)

Well, like everything else, it's not as easy as you'd think.....here are my first attempts.

I haven't quite mastered the art yet. The sample flowers are all nice and firm where the nylon on the back of the velvet has fused somehow.....mine are all floppy!!!! No instructions in the kit, so now I'm wondering if I'm supposed to back them on to something. So if any of you lovely, lovely bloggers are also the proud owners of one of these babies and knows the answer, I could really use some advice!!  Was a lot of fun though and it passed the time until my packages were collected.

Well, this post turned out to be quite an epic....sorry about that. It'll be quiet on here for a few days now though as I'm off to the NEC tomorrow to help Mr & Mrs Paperartsy set up their stand at the trade show which starts this weekend. I'll be staying on for the three days of the show to give them a helping hand so I'll be back on Wednesday with all the news from the show.

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend,
Lin