The past few week since my last blog post has been just a bit busy! 

The weekend after my trip to the NEC I was at Dragons Paper Crafts in Rugby run by the lovely Hazel & Paul helping them celebrate there 2nd birthday. I had such a great day playing with Gentle Blends, Buff It & Glitter Paste from Pinflair. Here are some pics from the day:

 L to R : Me, Hazel & Paul

This was at the end of a very long and enjoyable day!

The following week was strange, back in November I was havingtrouble sleeping and was waking at 3am/4am so I was getting up and going to work - the first train out of Tunbridge Wells is at 5.20am which meant that I was getting in the office between 6.30am and 7.00am. This carried on through to January by which time my body clock had adapted so it has carried on - last week I think it finally caught up with me and I felt totally drained! On Thursday evening I was in bed by 7.30pm - did it make a difference? Nope, I felt just as drained on Friday morning when the alarm went off at 4am!

Anyway, last week was also time to make samples for the Clarity TV Show - sometimes I pick up a stamp or print off some stuff from a CD and look at it and think "what the hell am I going to do with that!" last week was one of those weeks! I picked up the stamps, I put them down, I picked them up again and put them down again! So out came the A4 copy paper, black ink pad and I stamped them out randomly to see if anything jumped out! Well lets just say that the Dolphins jumped off the page and straight in the bin!!! I think there was more paper in the bin than there was on my work space!

For some reason, April is a quiet month in relation to demos/workshops for me - maybe because of Easter being in the middle of the month. Anyway, I had a free Saturday, so thought I would pop over to Oyster Stamps in Rochester to see my lovely friend Martine. I emailed her to check that she was going to be around and was delighted to hear that she was running a workshop, so I booked myself in! It is strange being a pupil and not a tutor, but with crafting, you are always learning whether you are the teacher or the pupil as people can be given the same products, but come up with something completely different! This style of crafting is not normally what I would do, but sometimes, change is good as a rest - so they say!

This was my effort, all made from 1 sheet of 12x12 Heartfelt Creations paper, 1 sheet of A4 vellum for the flowers and 1 sheet of A4 white card

This is what some of the ladies on the workshop came up with:

This is what I came up with for the Clarity samples - I was not exactly happy with the result, especially when I see what the rest of the design team come up with!

This one is very basic, but incorporated my love of pattern building 

This was my favourite - I love the fact that you can bend the words from the word chain sets

This design was popular with lots of the design team and I obviously had to use the new Tangle stencil!

Plain and simple, quick and easy

This card was a happy accident - it was not what I had planned! I loved the technique that Barbara had used on her blog with masking tape to create texture - the original plan was that the technique was going to be used on the tag to create ocean waves and for the dolphin to come splashing out! As you can see, not a dolphin in sight! Once I had added the colour, it looked more like hills that an ocean so I had a look at the other stamps and this was the result!

I really liked the outcome, so I think I will do a step by step on my blog later in the week!

Happy Crafting

Paul x