Good News!

Derrick is home from hospital!  He is still having some issues breathing, but the expert opinion is that it is not too serious, but is a combination of his general health problems, plus anxiety.

The other good news is that we have a toasty warm house again!  Just in time too as there is a definite Autumnal chill in the air.  We also have a working Aga again, so no more sandwiches and takeaways (well that was a treat for Adrian’s birthday actually!).

We still have a long way to go before we’re even close to getting the new kitchen though.  Next stage is getting the damp sorted out and after an interesting chat with the electrician yesterday, it would seem that we really should be budgeting for a complete rewire throughout most of the house.  We have a very sensitive trip switch which means there is an electrical fault somewhere in the house, and we seem to have a mix of very old cables and slightly botched add-on stuff.  Suffice to say that if we go ahead with the kitchen first, it will be halted as soon as an electrician takes a look at the board.

Another bonus of the last few days is that I have had a huge tidy up and clear out of my studio.  I was trying to get on with design stuff as normal, but it just hasn’t been possible with all the work going on.  So I spent the time really sifting through stuff and re-arranging my space a little.  Now I have a lovely clear space, but I’m in danger of not being inspired as I no longer have a pile of interesting craft clutter staring me in the face.

So, I’m off to make myself do something creative.  No idea what, but I NEED to get crafting!

Back on the merry-go-round

Following on from what I was saying in the last post – Derrick was admitted to hospital this afternoon!

Hopefully it’s just a short stay – his tests are all checking out fine, but the shortness of breath continues to be a mystery to the medical staff.  Some of it is probably exacerbated by anxiety, but it can’t all be down to that.  His heart, lungs and blood pressure are all as well as can be expected, but no one really can say why he is so breathless.

He was out buying Adrian a birthday card when he admitted defeat and asked Tracy to take him in.  So we’re hoping that an early release is on the cards as that would be the best birthday present Adrian could wish for.  Well that and a solution to his breathing problems of course.

So we left the boiler guys getting on with things while we went to see Derrick in Bishop Auckland General Hotel and things are progressing nicely.

Our house seemed to present them with a little challenge – the old pipework is too narrow, so a new set of pipes had to be run to the upstairs tank.  The kitchen and utility room are both single storey, the bathroom is a flat roof extension that isn’t directly connected to those rooms, so where oh where did the pipes run?  Answer, lift the carpet on the landing and take a peek under the floorboards … oh joy!

So this is progress so far.  Old inefficient gas guzzling boiler is gone to boiler heaven and the new super efficient oil boiler is in place, waiting for more tinkering tomorrow.

And in case you are remotely interested in how it all works, this should make it all clear.

Impressive isn’t it?  Actually, my dad is a plumber and he does this all the time, so I actually find it quite reassuring that Stuart used a time honoured method to explain what goes where to his younger assistant.  I think it’s also a time honoured tradition that the younger assistant is the one that gets the dirtiest jobs, like clambering through the impossibly tiny loft hatch to kneel in a carpet of mouse poop and lay the new pipes.

Well I think I better go and sweep up some of the huge amounts of dust that Basil is busy kneading into my new jeans.  Thanks Basil, brick coloured paw prints go really well with denim.

Wonderful Break

Well I’m back!  Did ya miss me?  Adrian and I took a few days off and went over to visit my Nanna in Carlisle.  She had a fall a couple of weeks ago and had to call for help because she couldn’t get up.  She seemed a lot older than she did just a couple of months ago when I saw her in July.  She seems to have gone from a fit, doing-well-for-her-age kind of 86 year old to a rather frail one and I confess to feeling a little sad about it.  I do wish we were a little closer to her so we could get over and visit more often.

From Carlisle, we headed round the corner and into southern Scotland.  We were so lucky with the weather – glorious crisp sunshine the whole time we were off.  While in the vicinity of Newton Stewart, we spotted this sign.

Well, we were very intrigued to know what had been taped over, but the other signs showed the same mysterious blank.  Hmmm, any ideas?  Well read on as we did find another sign later and couldn’t resist taking a photo of it.

Back home, the other elderlies are also in need of a little TLC as well – Derrick isn’t feeling too good at the moment.  Breathlessness is his main problem, but he’s also starting to be sick again which is not a good sign.  They keep messing about with his medication and we’re just hoping they’ll get the balance right very soon.  We actually came back from Scotland after just one night and spent the rest of the time having days out nearby.

We had a great day out at Whitby, stopping in Yarm for a very scrummy lunch.  We did actually break the law on two counts in Whitby – we didn’t have fish and chips and we didn’t have ice cream!  Luckily the Whitby police didn’t catch us, I think we got away with it.

No sign of Dracula today

Whitby has an interesting mix of shops – lots of nice gift shops with interesting bits and pieces for the home, jewellers, art galleries, tea shops and cafes galore, all interspersed with shops catering to the Goths who flock to Whitby for it’s association with Dracula. They even have Goth festivals which must be quite a sight to see.

Seaweed (bladderwrack?) on the harbour walls

We really played the tourists and took a boat trip which meant I could play with my  long lens and get some shots of the Abbey from the sea.  Not bad for £2.00 each.

Whitby Abbey

Today we are finally getting our new boiler installed.  We will be warm this winter – yay!  The guys are here right now, flushing out radiators and doing all that boilery stuff that boiler engineers do.  We had to run the oil in the tank down to empty before we could move it and about two weeks ago, the gauge was showing empty.  Talk about perfect timing – the Aga has been running on fumes for the last couple of weeks and finally petered out last night.

So, having waded through my mammoth backlog of emails that had built up, I am back in work mode and busy preparing our newest product line – SCRAPBOOK PAPERS!  Well, printed papers in general really.  I have three collections that I am working on at the moment: Spirit of Christmas which we previewed as 6×6inch paper packs at our recent open day; Simple Elegance – a good basic collection that will coordinate with lots of other things; and my favourite, Echoes of Italy – inspired by soft faded fresco colours and hand marbled papers – just yummy.

So, I’m sitting here thinking shall we do 12×12 or would people prefer A4.  What about 8×8 or 6×6.  A5?  Single sided or double sided?  Decisions, decisions…   I know we have one customer who hates double sided because it’s even  harder to stop stroking and start using when there’s two sides to choose from.

Anyway, feel free to let me know what paper size you would like most – they are all designed as 12×12 inches originally, so I can adjust them to anything really.

Meanwhile, here’s the other photograph from Scotland.

Hmm, I can see why the plants are thriving!

Fixated on Chocolate

That’s chocolate the colour,  not the cocoa bean.  (I’ve lost well over 1 stone now, not going to let anything spoil that!)

At today’s open day, I was once again completely obsessed with the Elusive Images signature colour scheme of chocolate and blues.

Isn’t that little bird punch cute!  I put a piece of glittered paper behind the tag and it’s layered onto Spirit of Christmas Artylicious paper, which is a new product.

In fact all these cards feature the new papers.  They’re not available on CD, only as printed papers and they will be going onto the website soon.

This one also uses a beautiful border from one of the new Cuttlebug combo sets.  I’ll try and find out the name of it tomorrow (if we have any left).

Ah I managed to avoid chocolate on this one, though it does make me think of Milky Ways.

Thanks to everyone who came along to the open day today – it was a nice relaxing day after the rushing around beforehand to get all the new stock into the shop.  The weather even turned out sunny which surprised the people who had come from awful weather quite short distances away.

So if  you’re coming along tomorrow, we look forward to seeing you!

Retreat sold out

Thank you to everyone who has booked – the November Paradise Weekend Retreat is now completely sold out.

Don’t worry, we have another one planned for April next year – we don’t have the final date yet, but it’s looking like the weekend of the 9th or 16th of April 2010.  You can register your interest with Judith now and you will be the first to get the info when that one is finalised.  Please put APRIL RETREAT in the subject line of your email or it may go into her junk mail folder and she won’t see it.

Thank you to all the quilters who responded to my post about quilting.  I’ve taken the post down now as I’ve had so many replies.

Don’t forget, it’s the Graphicus Open Days this weekend – two days packed full of demonstrators, five of us altogether working with a huge range of products, including.

• Melt Pot
• Artylicious CDs
• Clarity stamps
• Cuttlebug
• new Pendant dies from Spellbinders
• Cricut
• Tim Holtz stamps and products
• Grungeboard and Grungepaper
• Studio 490 stamps by Wendy Vecchi
• Elusive Images Christmas stamps
• Crafty Individuals stamps (brand new in stock)
• Glimmer Mists

We have lots of new stock, including Martha Stewart punches, EK Success punches, Floradoodle and Prima flowers including the most divine sets called gallery roses.  There’s also a couple of different packs of plain white flowers which are perfect for colouring with Glimmer Mists, Shimmerz, etc.  Then there’s the new ribbon assortment – one of the treats of visiting the shop in person is the ability to buy ribbon by the metre and I can pretty much guarantee there’ll be at least a metre missing from each roll by the time it makes it into the shop …

For all of you who can’t make it to our shop, we really do try our hardest to get all these exciting new products onto our website as soon as we can, so do keep checking.  You can keep up to date with what is new on the Graphicus Blog – there’s a ‘What’s New‘ page which Carrie uses to let you know what things have been added recently.

So hope to see you on Friday or Saturday!

Studio 490 Tags

I’ve been playing with Wendy Vecchi’s Studio 490 stamps again.

I was tempted to take part in a swap, but I know from past experience that I  have to make the swap items before I sign up as if I sign up first, the looming deadline just kills the creativity stone dead.  So I thought I would have a go at making some tags and if they turned out ok, then maybe I would enter them in the swap that I read about on the EverythingWendyVecchi group.

However, I didn’t read the guidelines thoroughly – the swap is for her new stamps and I was busy making tags with the older ones.  The new ones have actually arrived in the shop, though I don’t think they’re up on the website yet.

The backgrounds on all these tags are done in the same way, by rubbing Ranger’s Adirondack pigment inks into the card.  They blend so beautifully, all I have done is pat the inkpad onto the card, then polish them with a bit of kitchen roll to blend the colours.  I’ve gone around the edges with a darker colour.  The overstamping has been done with a mixture of inks, then there’s different stuff on each one.

The butterfly is stamped onto grungepaper which was painted white then inked up with dye inks.  The sentiment is stamped onto a scrap of glimmer misted card which is why the flash has bounced off it and you can’t really read it.  The black and white rub-ons are some we had in the shop a while ago, can’t remember who they’re by, but I love the black and white mix.

The tree has been accented with Ranger’s white inkssential pen and again, the black and white rub-ons went with it so well.

The flower on the bottom card is stamped onto Hambly vellum and one petal glued to another to pull the design into a circle.  That was glued to a button using glossy accents, then a small paper rose was glued into the hole in the middle.  The sentiment is stamped onto a page from an old dictionary which has been given a coat of gesso.  A 7 Gypsies rub on has been applied in one corner, then it was framed with a little chipboard scalloped frame from Maya Road.  The frame has been triple embossed with a glitter embossing powder at the base.

So, I’m not sure I’ll get round to doing six more tags with the new stamps, but you never know, they’re so gorgeous I’ve already started on them.  Actually I used a couple of them to make a pocket in my special journal today.  Lynn gave me the special journal as a birthday present.  It is a beautifully made, hand stitched, leather bound book with creamy watercolour paper pages, but what really makes it special are all the journal prompts that Lynn hand wrote for me on huge playing cards.

It was in danger of falling into that terrible zone – too precious to use!  So I got it out today and looked at the first journal prompt that I came to – “I love the sound of …”  It was early this morning, I was the only one up and it was so peaceful that I wrote about the quiet.  I would love to say I drew that freehand, but I traced around some Maya Road chipboard letters, then coloured them in with very pale green and grey watercolour using the watercolour pencils from the Derwent watercolour collection tin.

Well thanks to the bank holiday, I have one more day of quiet before the madness that ensues just before an demo day event – don’t forget it’s next Friday and Saturday – 4th and 5th September and it’s going to be a good one!  Not to mention the chaos that’s about to erupt at home – it’s wall knocking down time next week, ready for the new boiler in two weeks.  Oh joy.  Hope the Dyson can cope with all the dust  coming its way…

Paradise Weekend Retreat

At last, all the details of our weekend retreat are online – see the tabs at the top – just click on the one that says Retreat and you will find all the info, costs, how to book etc.

Spaces are going fast though ….

Painted UTEE Reindeer – the cheap version

Well Mr Amazon has delivered the lead for the video, but having just bored myself silly listening to myself waffling on about how I made this, I think I’ll just explain it for you to read instead.  It wasn’t a video of me actually doing it, just me talking about it and did get a bit tedious.

I used bright lime green UTEE (ultra thick embossing enamel) which I heated in the Melt Pot, that fabulous gadget by the Queen of all things melty, Suze Weinberg.  You can pour out the molten UTEE onto a non-stick craft mat, then stamp into it, or you can pour it directly onto your stamp – as long as it is rubber.  Please don’t try this on a clear stamp, it might not cope too well.

I actually poured it straight onto the stamp, then when cool, I turned it over and rocked it gently to release it from the stamp.  I had painted a piece of chipboard with a layer of gesso and I wanted to melt my piece onto it.  I heated the chipboard with my heat tool for ages, then laid my UTEE piece onto it.  It stuck in places, but not evenly all over.  I gave the edges a bit of heat from the heat tool, but didn’t want to overdo it as that would just make it all melt flat again.

That’s where the Aga comes in.  I went and put the card straight onto the warming plate and kept an eye on it until the heat from underneath started to melt the UTEE enough to create the bond with the chipboard that I was looking for.

With a smaller piece, you would be able to put it back into a clean melt pot pan to do the same trick.  However a much simpler idea would be to pour your molten UTEE straight onto a piece of card in the first place, then stamp into it.  I didn’t do that because I find that sometimes you get pockets of air trapped and it doesn’t always give the best impression.  Working onto the stamp or non stick mat means that if it all goes wrong, you just pop the piece back in the melt pot and melt it down to try again.

Obviously there are lots of alternatives to an Aga, though I would urge caution – don’t get carried away with enthusiasm and burn yourself.  Molten UTEE is extremely hot and if you start messing about with upturned irons, well I just don’t want to know about it, ok!

To be honest, I think it’s the finishing touches that generated so much interest at the event last week. The ridges around the edge and the blobby bits came from the heat tool – carefully directed at a shallow angle so I wasn’t flattening the main image.

I then did something slightly unusual to the UTEE – I painted a layer of white paint right over the top.  I think I actually used white acrylic paint now I come to think about it, not gesso as I originally told people.  I wiped the raised areas pretty much straight away though so that the paint went onto the background layer, but the raised areas were still lime green from the UTEE.

When the paint was dry, I carefully dusted a selection of Perfect Pearls and our own Pearly Powders onto the background – blue in the background and gold and pearl on the reindeer and foreground.  The photo is angled so you can see the pearly sheen – the green is actually brighter in real life.

I used an ink blending tool to add some Peeled Paint Distress ink to the background and StazOn Olive green around the edge.  I think I will punch a couple of holes in the top and hang it on a little ribbon.

Be aware though that the UTEE can curl pretty dramatically.  The morning after I made this, I nearly threw it in the bin as it had curled up like a banana.  I actually put it in the book press and forgot about it – other things have been in and out of the press and I came across it about three weeks after I put it in – beautifully flat.  So do build in a couple of days to leave it under a stack of books if you want to have a go at something like this.

Anyway, here’s a more traditional use of the same stamp.

This uses Ranger pigment inks (Lettuce and a bit of Bottle around the edge) which have then been embossed with my trusty sparkly embossing powder.  It’s probably Kaleidascope, could be something else though as it’s been a faithful friend for so long that it’s been moved from tub to tub and has lost it’s original label long ago.  The background paper is from Decadent Brocade and the sentiment from the Damask Reindeer plate has got to be one of my all time favourite Christmas sentiments!

I have so much to share with you this week – including new Cuthbert stamps and a competition to name a sweet little friend of his.  I’m heading over to the Elusive Images blog to see if anyone has won last week’s competition over there, and tomorrow, Carrie and I will be going through all the new products that just came in to see what we can get up onto the website this week.

So stay tuned, there’s lots going on!

Prizes up for grabs

There are more Christmas cards to see over on the Elusive Images blog, with a little competition to win some stamps!

The most expensive card in the world?

Materials List:

• Lime green Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel
• Piece of greyboard (chipboard)
• Gesso
• Perfect Pearls
• Damask Reindeer Christmas themeplate
• Aga (or Rayburn)

Last night we launched the Elusive Images Christmas range of stamps at Graphicus – you can see the full range on the Elusive Images blog.  It was an exclusive invitation only event and we had a lovely group of ladies who turned up and enjoyed David’s turkey sandwiches and mince pies while seeing all the new stock that has been arriving in the shop from America this week.

Lynn and I were demonstrating, though I hardly got a chance to because nearly every single person there wanted to know how I had made this little piece of artwork here.  Well after I had explained the first time, there was some consternation that the latest must have craft gadget costs somewhere between £5,600 and £11,000 depending which model you require.  However, fear not, we have canny customers at Graphicus.  Someone pointed out that if you don’t happen to have an Aga in your kitchen, you could use an upturned iron.  Well, ya know, I’m a stickler for quality, so I reckon you really should start saving for a craft Aga myself.  I’m thinking of having talks with their executive board and getting them to bring out a duck egg blue and chocolate one, or better yet, one covered in an Artylicious design – like ‘her hammer’!!  We wouldn’t be able to do free shipping though, not even to Guild members, sorry!

Anyway, how I arrived at this finished piece was a bit of a long story, so in the end, Adrian videoed me talking about it.  It curled very badly and has been in the book press for about three weeks and I almost forgot about it.  I’m pleased I managed to get this photo of it today in a brief moment of sunshine, it really shows off the perfect pearls on it.

I would love to show you the video, but it would seem that Adrian was so excited when he bought the new video camera a while ago, he forgot to get a lead that actually connects it to the computer.  So we’ll have to wait for Mr Amazon to deliver a lead before we can download the footage and see if there’s anything actually usable!