On catch up again!

I cannot believe how fast this year is flying by. Since my last blog post, life has been a tad on the hectic side to say the least. First of all, it was school sports day, my grandson Ronnie is the cute skinny guy in the middle.

The ongoing saga of the bathroom continues but at least I have a working shower now which is just as well because it's more than a bit warm and toasty here in the UK at the moment!!

On July 10th, I taught a class at Birds In The Barn Summer event at the Marks Tey hotel. The lovely Janet had asked me if I could teach a class using some of my PaperArtsy lines, some metal work and of course Fresco Finish paint. It was such a fun event, with six tutors teaching over four days. Darcy and I were teaching on the same day which was lovely as we managed to get together with the rest of the PaperArtsy team for a lovely meal in the evening. This is the project I designed for all the fab people that took part in my class.

This is my class working hard on their metal flowers.

And Darcy's class in full swing.

I was only home for a day before hitting the road again to travel up to Skipton. I had been invited by the guys at Woodware (a large distributor of craft supplies here in the UK) to teach some metal working techniques to 72 of their wonderful customers at a retailer training event. The very lovely and extremely funny Michelle Johnson was my chauffeur for the trip as I knew my shoulder wouldn't cope with four hours of driving there and back. Although Michelle and I knew of each other, we had never really had a good natter before. Well, we soon put that right, I don't think we stopped talking for the four days we spent together and we had such a fabulous time even if it was completely exhausting. 

On Sunday I taught everyone how to make a card, using aluminium, Mercart tools and this gorgeous daisy stencil by Dreamweaver. Each class only lasted an hour and was repeated six times throughout the day.

On Monday, we painted a little papermache box and decorated it with copper coloured metal, again using a Dreamweaver stencil for the design.

Haha, I have just noticed my foot in this photograph, I really should go and crop it shouldn't I?

Jane Gill, Francoise Reed, Michelle Johnson and Fran Seiford from Stampendous were the other tutors at the event and we all stayed together in a beautiful farm house in Grassington. It was so nice not staying in a hotel, we all loved the relaxed atmosphere in the farm house. Grassington is such a beautiful place, I really need to go back and spend a few days there to explore the local area.

I'm home again now, my bags are all unpacked but I've got quite a few secret things that I'm working on at the moment. All will be revealed soon but in the meantime, working with metal on those two recent events has reminded me just how much I love it, so last night, I spent an hour playing with a very cute owl stencil by Dreamweaver and some aluminium and this is what I made.

I coloured him with Little Black Dress, Tango and Cinnamon Fresco Finish paint with a touch of Classic Teasure Gold.

He's ATC size so was very quick to make.

Phew, well I think that's all my news for the time being, am off to get yet another cold drink of water.

Lin