Tree Nymph

Tree Nymph

Hand carved relief print using MasterCarve. This carving has been printed on to white cardstock using Daler Rowney black blockprinting ink. The carving was then masked, and colour sponged over the top to create the background effect.

This is an old carving that I revisited this weekend and had fun printing out some more copies. This carving dates back to 2000, when I had 9 carvings displayed in a juried art exhibition in Bishop Auckland. The theme I chose for this exhibition was “The Life of John Barleycorn”, with 8 carvings centered around the eight festivals of the wheel of the year, and the ninth being John Barleycorn himself. This particular carving represented the Autumnal Equinox. It’s always been one of my favourite carvings, and the time of year it celebrates heralds my favourite season.

November 09 calendar wallpaper

The November 09 calendar wallpaper is of Hags Head Tower, County Clare, Ireland, and is available to download to your desktop from this page. Play nice and just use it for your desktop, any other application is not allowed, unless you receive express written permission from me in writing. If you’d like to let others know about this calendar file, then please send them to the blog, rather than email the file along to them – thanks!

This tower was one of the many wonderful places we visited whilst on honeymoon in Ireland, in the month of November, which is why I’ve chosen it as this month’s carving.

Happy Hallowe’en!

Happy Hallowe'en

All images in this postcard are hand carved from shop bought erasers, with a watercolour pencil background.

Hallowe’en is one of my favourite days, having a Celtic background meant that we celebrated it all through my childhood. I have very happy memories of this day. It’s also a very special day for my hubby and I, being our wedding anniversary A time to take stock, a new year, new beginnings.

crafty party

One of the things I love to do is craft with others, it’s always a great opportunity to swap ideas, inspiration and chat, of course I’ve been on holiday for the past fortnight and have been out and about crafting with others on several days during my time off work, attending groups that I never get a chance to visit otherwise, so it’s been a really rewarding holiday. I’ve also had plenty of time to potter about in my studio and create, it’s been a lot of fun

I had five friends over to my house last Saturday for a crafty party, where many crafts were represented: spinning, knitting, crochet, hooky mats and I introduced some of my friends to Stampbord too.

welcome to the party (My 11 o'clock shot for the day!)

My guests were welcomed with a stack of cupcakes, and I had plenty of tea and coffee on tap to keep everyone going. I served my hearty home made winter vegetable soup for lunch, together with home baked buns, and then more cakes magically appeared in the afternoon The day lasted from 11am to 6.30pm, but just seemed to fly by, I had a great time looking after everyone.

Many of my friends are fibre artists, so Kathleen and I introduced them to something new, and showed them how to make pendants from Stampbord. Here are a few photos of the items they created – this was the first time that my friends had used Stampbord, and for one of them, the first time she had ever used rubber stamps, so you can see they did wonderfully:

friends playing with Stampbord

friends playing with Stampbord

friends' finished Stampbord pieces

friends' finished Stampbord pieces

I think they all made amazing pendants, Stampbord is such a great medium to work with.

I had the open coal fire blazing away all day – and you can see the cats enjoyed their day too

I was over at my parents’ house on Sunday and mum and I did some crafting together too. Ten of her paintings are in an exhibition this coming weekend, but she wanted to make some small items too, so we had fun making paper bead necklaces together. Mum had already made the beads, so we sorted out the colours and strung them together with little wooden beads that she had been given by a friend. The photo isn’t very good as I took it with my mobile phone, but you get the idea.

Apparently she has made more since!

It’s been a wonderfully socially crafty fortnight – I definitely recommend these kind of breaks

The Postbox In Our Wall

I’ve always loved writing letters and decorating the envelopes to brighten up the recipient’s day – even when I was a child and long before I had heard of mail art! I like the fact that we have a very handy postbox in our wall, and practically every piece of post I send out goes from this postbox. So, for my third postbox carving, I decided to carve “ours”.

The carving about 2 hours in:

The finished carving with the print behind:

Close up:

The Postbox In Our Wall

I carved into PZ Kut and printed it out on Japanese simili paper using Daler Rowney water soluble printing ink.

October 09 calendar wallpaper

The October 09 calendar wallpaper is of Whitby Abbey, and is available to download to your desktop from this page. Play nice and just use it for your desktop, any other application is not allowed, unless you receive express written permission from me in writing. I say this, as I know my cupcake one was used for other purposes, tut, tut.
If you’d like to let others know about this calendar file, then please send them to the blog, rather than email the file along to them – thanks!

ETA: October is done and dusted!

what’s in the box?

This book-shaped box, approximately 14.5cm x 8.5cm x 3.5cm, was bought a few years ago from Lakeland, although I don’t think they have them any more. I painted it with silver and copper metallic paint, and then added torn pieces of paper over the top, that had text printed on them – I think these were from a K&Co 6″ x 6″ paper pad. A coat of varnish was added when the paint had dried.

The box contains another hand-carved alphabet – this was actually the first alphabet I carved. These are carved in shop bought erasers. They were carved whilst I was doing a carving demonstration, so I moved quickly from one letter to another, therefore I didn’t clean up the carving lines at the time. I decided to leave them in afterwards, as I quite like them. Each letter is about 1.5cm tall.

I printed out another alphabet exemplar last night, I think the carving lines give a lot of energy to the letters and numerals.

Alphabet Exemplar 3

alphabet exemplars

Whenever I get a chance to see Somerset Studio magazine, I always turn to their “Art of Lettering” section to ogle the latest alphabet exemplar sent in by a reader – as a font freak I just love this section!

Last year I carved a couple of alphabets, and I decided to make a couple of exemplars this evening:

Alphabet Exemplar 1

Alphabet Exemplar 2

All the letters are carved in PZKut, and printed in dye ink onto BasicGrey paper.

I like the first one enough to put on our wall, the second needs a bit of tinkering around with until I get a pleasing placement, although I am really pleased with the actual letters. I have carved a third alphabet, including numerals with that one, so there’s another exemplar project for another day

I shall be using these alphabet letters in my sporadic journalling project, “11 o’clock shot”. Last year a friend challenged several of us to fill up a notebook she sent us, so the project I gave myself was to take a photo every day at 11am of whatever I was doing, no matter what I was doing (this included having to take a photo whilst visiting an art gallery – tut, tut! But I managed it without getting thrown out!). I journalled the photograph in a notebook, and continued until the notebook was full, filling up the pages of the notebook with other photos and observations that took place that day, tickets, receipts, etc. This combined photo shows the cover and a couple of the pages.

11 o'clock shot 2008

The dots on the cover of the book are original to the book, but to echo those dots on the inside pages, and get over that “how do I fill up this blank page” feeling, I carved a few dots, and covered each page in those to make a background. I had so much fun, I’ve decided to revive it again, and started again this week. This time I’m using an old diary of the year 2000 – I picked up about 10 of them in 2001 in a stationery shop for about 10p each – thinking “they’ll come in handy some day…” I’ll be posting the occasional page up here

September 09 calendar wallpaper

I found this fun application on Big Huge Labs and thought I would create monthly desktop wallpapers of my carvings, and make them available for you to download.

ETA: September is over and done with!

more cupcakes

I carved this mini cupcake this past weekend (it’s just under 3cm tall), basically a smaller version of the carving I made last month, modelled on one of my hand-baked cupcakes.

I’ve put it together with a little inkpad and a pencil in a handy Moo card box, and this will be my portable letterboxing kit. What’s letterboxing? Well letterboxing.info will tell you all about it, it’s basically a kind of treasure hunt and involves rubber stamping once you’ve found your treasure I shall be setting up some letterboxes in the local area for people to hunt, I’ll post more information when I have done so

I’m definitely addicted to baking cupcakes at the moment It was Vicky’s birthday recently, so I made some cupcakes and took them into work for everyone to enjoy, and they seemed to go down well

Help yourself to a virtual cupcake – the virtual kettle’s on too for a brew