Glenda

Mixed media artist, rubber stamper and designer.

Tangling Time

Blog

May 162012

It’s still very unpredictable weather here in the Highlands – you can see the weather moving across the distant hills – columns of cloud sweep over the skyline obliterating sections of the islands while the sun is shining here. Then it flips around and the rain patters on the glass roof at the back of the house and you see the distant islands bathed in sunlight. We’ve seen quite a few rainbows – often doubles.

We really are taking it super easy and enjoying every minute.

We found a little market in Poolewe yesterday and I fell in love with some hand thrown pottery. I think we may invest in some to take home with us. She had a limited range with her, so we’re hoping to pop into her studio sometime next week. She told us it was in an out of the way little place called Logie near Ullapool and obviously didn’t expect us to have ever heard of it. When we both said, ah yes we know where that is, she was so suprised, we explained it was the place we stayed on our honeymoon 15 years ago!

We spent most of today in the house, apart from a short walk along the beach at Melon Udrigle which is the northern headland of Gruinard Bay. Although it was cold and slightly wet, it was lovely to just watch and listen to the surf gently pounding the rocks and the sand.

Back at the cottage, I got engrossed in some Zentangle doodling. It’s still a work in progress, but I thought I’d show you where I’m up to. This is an A4 sketchbook, so it’s quite big. In the background the circles you see are textured fabric on a footstool which is what inspired me to start doodling this morning.

I’ve added subtle coloured shading using some pencils I’ve had for a while, but not used very much – Derwent Graphitint. They are water soluble graphite pencils with a hint of colour, but because of the graphite, they are all very grey tones. They look particularly grey and pencil like before adding water, but the water brings out the colour. I’m still getting to know them, but liking the range so far. Then again, it’s a coloured pencil, what’s not to like?!

You might be amazed to hear that we still have half the pack of Tunnocks left – how good are we! Yes, well before I polish the halo, I’ll just go and hide the locally baked lemon drizzle cake that we found at the market yesterday … ahem!

I’ll leave you with a couple of photos from our beach walk today.

Click on any of the photos for a larger view. You can see more photos in my Flickr stream – just look for the Flickr photos in my side bar and click on any one to go look at the whole set.

Guess where I am!

Blog

May 142012

This was the sight that welcomed us to our beautiful holiday home – a giant print of a Tunnocks teacake (by artist Fiona Watson). Even better – there was a pack of 10 real ones on the kitchen workbench with a welcome note! Greeted by chocolate – how did they know?!

This time last week I didn’t think we’d get here. I had a long chat with my GP about the cocktail of symptoms that have been making life rather unpleasant over the last six months and we even discussed the possibility of cancer being the root cause. When certain symptoms present together they have to consider that option, but after a slightly tense 24 hour wait, a fresh blood test put all our minds to rest that we didn’t need to go down that route. Just as well as they were on standby to admit me to hospital immediately last Thursday and I’d much rather not spend my precious holiday in the care of the NHS!

It’s the first proper holiday Adrian and I have had in about five years and it’s a real opportunity to recharge the batteries. We are in a remote, but stunningly beautiful part of the north west Highlands. The house is only a couple of years old, ultra modern, quiet, super insulated, warm and cosy with an ever changing view of the sea from huge patio windows. We haven’t switched on the TV since we got here, we’re just mesmerised by the sea.

Here’s a little watercolour I’ve called ‘First Impressions’

I’m out of practice, but I don’t care, the act of putting paint to paper has captured something of the view and it makes me smile to look at it. I’ve started another, slightly larger one using PanPastels – it needs some detail added, but it’s been fun to use them just like paints, mixing and blending colours and using the palette knife tools to draw with.

The hills are covered in the most pure and vivid yellow gorse bushes and when the sun shines, the sea is as turquoise as the carribean. I’d forgotten just how good for the soul natural beauty is and we are drinking in every little bit of it.

Oh and don’t worry, you can still get your chocolate fix thanks to Lesley and Val who are the wonderful engine behind Chocolate Baroque and doing a great job of keeping it all running super smoothly while we’re away – possibly even better without us getting under their feet!

Now where are those Tunnocks ….?

Spring Distress Inks

Blog

May 102012

I managed to get a very quick bit of playtime with the new Spring Distress inkpads. I used all three colours and I do like the palette. I started by inking the top with squeezed lemonade and the bottom with shaded lilac, then I stamped a couple of different lace stamps top and bottom with peacock feathers and the bottom two corners with the corner stamps from Lace Fragments. I misted the top with quite a bit of water and let the colour bleed and run down the tag. I misted the bottom a bit too, but not as much. After drying with a heat tool, I flicked a little clean water over and blotted it off.

I then stamped the phrase from Artistic Affirmations about three or four times over the background using squeezed lemonade and added a little more shaded lilac at the bottom. The lilac stamped corners were a bit faded out by this point, so I added another lace border in shaded lilac. I then stamped the words and border swirls with Onyx Black Versafine and added a piece of decorated Stampbord.

I can see the lilac and lemonade combination would work really well with our Elegant Iris stamp set – definitely Spring like. I just wish the weather was!

PS – I’ve been tweaking a few bits and pieces around the blog – menus at the top, side bar content and a little slide show thingy at the top of the main page. You’ll now find a list of links in the side bar, and in the menu bar right at the very top, there are now links to Cards, Mixed Media and Video which show you blog posts from those categories – like little galleries. It’s a constant work in progress, but I feel like it’s a bit more organised now – hope you like it!

Origami Landscape

Mixed Media

May 072012

I created this canvas back in February and after I first created it, I knew that I wanted to turn it into a landscape with trees. I found some Japanese origami paper in my stash and thought it would be fun to create some trees from it, but changed my mind and decided that I would use torn strips of it to create hills instead. The trees were made from dictionary paper coloured with PanPastels and the flowers are newspaper coloured in the same way. I used a Black Soot Distress Marker to add some shading to the base of the tree trunks and around the edges of the flowers and put a big blob of Black Diamond stickles into the centre of each one.

This is what it looks like now.

I’m going to re-photograph it in better light as it doesn’t look very in focus to me. Possibly because I left the camera on the manual settings after trying to capture a huge owl at dusk that had landed on our neighbour’s wall the night before. It was getting pretty dark, so we were there with the tripod and the long lens, adjusting the camera’s settings for low light and using the remote control to minimise any camera shake on the long exposure that was necessary. Half an hour later we were excitedly downloading the photos from the camera to find we had lots of very blurry dark shots, but one or two that clearly showed that we had spent a good twenty minutes photographing a wooden decoy!

Our suspicions were confirmed the following morning – the owl hadn’t moved a millimetre! I’m pleased to say we saw the funny side – in fact we howled with laughter. Howled … get it? H-”owl”-ed!! Yeah, ok, I’ll leave the bad puns to Adrian.

The Birdcage

Cards

May 032012

I actually made a card – yay! This is made with Lesley’s Chic Script Set 4 and the Lace Fragments stamp set and something new for me …. PAN PASTELS!! Yep, I saw the gorgeous creations that some of our Design Team were cooking up and thought I need to try me some of these. I was never particularly entranced by standard chalks, so ignored the PanPastels thinking they were the same, but they’re not. I don’t like having a gritty work area – I always have to clean up when I’ve been using embossing powders because I hate that powdery kind of mess. So I originally tried the PanPastels with a bit of a skeptical attitude and lo, I saw the way to Damascus and I’m now a hook, line and sinker convert. (I’m also mixing my metaphors abysmally.)

The special tools do make a huge difference, but I have also had some success with some brands of latex make up sponge. I tried a soft brush and that creates instant dust, so I’ll be sticking to the sponges unless I particularly need loose pigment (brushing onto texture maybe?).

I have more exploring to do and I will be sharing the results, but I’m still recovering from last week’s little episode, and I’m still playing with Distress Markers and getting to know those too.

Anyway, back to this card … well it’s a laser cut chipboard bird cage and birds which I have had for about two years. (We have a similar one, slightly smaller, on the website here). I embossed the cage with Ruby Romance WOW embossing powder and the birds with Sparkling Snow. The birds looked too white, so I coloured them with Copics and then added clear Versamark and added two or three layers of ordinary clear embossing powder over the top.

The printable paper has a dress form on it, but I covered it up with the bird cage so it looks like it is sitting on a pedestal. I inked the edges of the paper with Distress inks before sticking it down.

The background card is where the PanPastels come in. I stamped one of the lace stamps onto my 8×8 inch backing card with Versamark and gently patted Turquoise PP over it. I mixed in a touch of Phthalo green, then once the stamped image was mostly coloured, I rubbed the sponge over to colour the background too. It is unbelievably quick to create a smoothly blended background and a quick buff with kitchen towel takes off any excess and you’re done.

I positioned the panel top left to show off the pretty lace pattern and it’s finished very simply with a punched sentiment.

So I currently have two enticing sets of products sitting on my table waiting for more play time – the Distress Markers (waiting for more stock) and the PanPastels. I’m enjoying what I’ve seen so far, but hope to get a chance to study them in more depth and give you a full report in due course.

Did y’all miss me?

Cards

Apr 272012

You may be wondering where I’ve got to over the last couple of weeks. Well apart from general busyness, truth is I’m currently rather unwell. I won’t bore you with the details, but my latest bout of endometriosis pain did actually result in an ambulance trip and a day in hospital with a couple of doses of morphine to sort it out. I’ve had it since 2003, but for some reason it has got significantly worse in the last year and this month it seems to have been complicated by a slight infection too. I have a specialist appointment next week so I should soon have a plan to get sorted and following a recent scan it does look like there is still a non-surgical option available to me which is great news.

I’m feeling much better now, though still not back to my usual bouncy self – a bit more rest and pampering is called for I think (wondering how long I can milk it …).

So apologies for the artistic wasteland. I did have a few new cards to show you, but they’ve been picked up by a magazine for later in the year, so I have to hold off publishing them myself (for two years) and I’ve not had the energy this week to create anything new.

My timing is apalling as I was going to spend the week championing Lesley (thepaperengineer.blogspot.co.uk) who took up my seven day blogging challenge, just like Adrian did a couple of weeks ago. If you get chance please go check out her blog, she has so much talent to share and I really hope she keeps up the blogging. She’s also designing some gorgeous downloads exclusive to Chocolate Baroque, including brand new Patterned Spool sets and Ribbon Cards, just launched this week. You might also find Adrian’s style of humourous writing quite entertaining too (after all, this is the guy who wrote Add a Brad!)

All the responses to the last post about kits were very interesting (thank you for sharing your thoughts) and very much echoed what I suspected. Before I wrote that post, I had actually put a pack of papers together from Kaisercraft which I completely fell for and I added some tags and ribbons to it, but resisted calling it a kit because there are no instructions with it. Instead, I called it a Playpack which harks back to a club that my mum signed up to when I was a kid. Once a month a ‘playpack’ would come in the post and you never knew quite what was going to be in there, but it was probably sugar paper and fuzzy felt (yes, I’m a child of the seventies). I still remember the excitement of playpack day and the fun of sitting at the kitchen table with my mum drawing and painting and constructing obscure monsters from glue and pipecleaners.

There will shortly be an inspiration leaflet for the pack as I loved it so much, I made a quite a few cards with the papers and I’m writing them up for a download leaflet (free if you buy the pack).

The papers are all double sided and see the printed strip at the bottom? Well on the reverse side, that strip is printed with a contrasting design, so rather than cut it off, I’ve made a feature of it on the card below, which also features our new Haberdashery stamps.

The new Lace Fragments and Haberdashery stamp sets were announced on the Design Team blog last week and you’ve still got time to be in with a chance of winning these gorgeous sets if you leave a comment over there today. Here’s what the stamps look like if you missed them:

I’ll be picking a winner sometime over the weekend – who knows, it could be your lucky day!

A Bo Bunny Spring Thing

Cards

Apr 132012

Every Wednesday night, I host a ‘live chat’ over on our community forum and one of the topics that cropped up this week was to do with inky messy techniques versus ‘licky sticky’ crafting. So I thought I would show you a card I made recently from, gasp, a cardmaking kit!

When we moved house a couple of years ago, I purged a fair bit of craft stuff and over the last year I’ve purged even more (much of the good stuff making its way into our Stash Boxes and Stash-e-lopes that we occasionally sell on the website). One of the outcomes was that most of my decorative paper went the journey – if I liked it too much, I didn’t want to waste it, but in all honesty, most of it had just lost its dazzle for me.

Now I’m being very, VERY selective on what printed paper makes its way into my craft room. After all, I have the talented Lesley’s downloads to play with and I can whip up a mean paper myself when I want to. Yet there is something so seductive about paper – other people put colour combinations and patterns together that inspire me so I continue to be hopelessly and unashamedly addicted.

What is different though, is that I have a new rule – if it comes into the craft room, it must get USED. I have thrown out my ‘precious’ attitude towards the stuff, after all, so what if I use the last piece, I know there will be another, equally gorgeous design that will ease the pangs.

As far as stocking the website with delicious papers goes, I have learned that what I consider drop dead gorgeous is not necessarily everyone’s cup of tea, so I go cautiously and test things out. We just got some Bo Bunny 6×6 pads in recently, and while ordering, I spotted they had card making kits for each of their new lines. I have a glut of birthdays in March, so I popped one of the Ambrosia kits onto my order.

It’s ‘licky sticky’ crafting at it’s absolute best. There are die cut sheets, rub-on sentiments and stickers, cut pieces of paper from the Ambrosia range and a simple set of instructions to make 8 pretty cards. I threw the instructions out, examined the die cuts and discarded a few that I just wouldn’t use, and set to making up a batch of cards with the remaining pieces. The folded cards are all printed with gorgeous designs and printed both sides too, so I have cut some of them up to stretch the kit to more than the 8 cards they recommend.

The card above took less than ten minutes. The bunting is self adhesive die cut chipboard pieces, the sentiment is a rub-on which I applied to a cut nestie shape then inked the edges with Tumbled Glass Distress ink. I used the yellow printed card, choosing not to hide any of the lovely pattern with another piece of paper, just a little strip behind the nestie shape.

So I still have lots of the kit left and it will come in handy when I need to throw a card together quickly. Now I didn’t get any of the kits for the website because historically, we have found that most of our customers prefer to buy the papers and do their own thing. We do have the Ambrosia 6×6 pad (well we do at the time of writing this, but by the time you’re reading, we may have sold out so I’ll get more in) and a couple of other rather gorgeous 6×6 pads too.

So my question to you is whether you think I should get kits in? I know most of my readers would probably class themselves as being more of the adventurous inky types, but I’m curious to know if you have bought, or would ever buy a card making kit?

Wakey wakey

Uncategorized

Apr 052012

Come on Miss Sleepyhead, wake up.

NO! Go ‘WAY! I need more SLEEP!

Tschja, kids eh!

A time for reflection

Blog

Mar 302012

I suddenly realised earlier this week that on Sunday 1st April, it is the first anniversary of the launch of Chocolate Baroque. Our baby is a year old!

It has crept up on me a bit – I should be planning fireworks and celebrations, but instead I’m blinking and thinking, “huh, where did that year go?”

Many of you have followed the blog for a long time and know all about the trials and tribulations of recent years. For newer readers, I’m not going to go into details but suffice it to say that we’ve had a very rough couple of years and have done our best to handle all that life threw at us with grace and dignity.

I came across this wonderful quote last year and I know that our tragedies and our experiences, though painful, have ultimately given us huge reserves of deep inner strength. They haven’t destroyed us, they won’t define us and the fact that Adrian and I are still married is proof that we are both stronger than ever!

This time last year there was an awful lot of scaremongering news stories about the economy and we wondered if we were doing the right thing. Adrian and I both have professional qualifications and corporate backgrounds – there were times when we thought setting up a brand new business was just chasing a crazy dream and we should get the suits dry cleaned and dust off the CV and see about getting a “proper job”. After all, we have “failed” once before, if the economy was that bad, what on earth made us think we could succeed this time?

We set out to build a strong foundation by focusing on things we can excel at, rather than trying to be all things to all people and only being average at most of it. We wanted to offer exceptional service and set about making the operational side of the business slick and efficient from the start. We feel that we have achieved that – our deliveries are fast, errors are rare. We are not perfect, but we always aim to resolve problems or mistakes as quickly as we can.

We continue to develop stamp designs that we hope inspire you to pick up an inkpad. I love every single stamp set we produce and am quite frankly amazed at the never ending versatility of stamping as a hobby. I have a pretty low boredom threshold, but I am never bored of stamping as there is always a new look to be created, a new inkpad to try, a new colour scheme or paper or technique to mix in.

This year has been about re-building. Learning lessons from the past and building a new business which suits our lifestyle and allows us to factor in our caring responsibilities. Along the way there has been more pain and loss, uncertainty, fear and lots of introspection. Through my journals, I can see my own development from a state of utter exhaustion at the end of 2010 through self doubt and depression towards hope and cautious optimism. I masked it all behind brave words and a brave face and now I feel true hope, true excitement and true faith that everything is going to be alright. It’s not just brave words any more, I have emerged from the chrysalis.

Journaling helped a lot and I am working through some ideas for an online journaling class at the moment because I know that I can use my experiences to help.

I’m pleased to report that our start up year has been a success – I know that because we are still here! And it wouldn’t be possible without YOU. Your support, your encouragement, your orders – you can all take pride in the success of Chocolate Baroque and we thank you – humbly and genuinely, we really do appreciate every single one of you.

I will leave you with more inspirational words – this describes the person I aspire to be:

I think I better go and plan some fireworks and celebrations over on the website now.

Knitting for Cancer Research

Blog

Mar 252012

One of our customers, Beth who runs a shop in Yeovil called Stamp ‘n’ Craft, is raising funds for Cancer Research by running an event called The Woolly Car Project.

Click here to read more about it on the Design Team blog.

A very pink post – Meadow Lark Cards

Cards

Mar 242012

I said I had some more cards to show you and here they are – these have all been made with the Prima Meadow Lark paper stack.

This little 5 inch square card uses a stamped sentiment from Birthday Words, die cut using Fancy Tags 3 Spellbinders die. I inked the edges with a mixture of pink inks to get the tone I wanted. Quick and simple – a handy standby birthday card.

The Meadow Lark pad I’m using is the A4 one (also available as a 6×6 inch pad) and this A5 card uses another piece from the same sheet as the card above. I used a sentiment from Artistic Expressions, die cut with an oval and shaded with VersaMagic Thatched Straw and a tiny touch of Oasis Green. The sentiment is layered onto an embossed diecut which I sanded lightly and rubbed over with Adirondack Clover pigment ink. The ribbon is not that dark in real life, but a lovely olivey/pesto green.

I put glossy accents on the bird on the paper then tried an experiment with Stickles. I added a few tiny dots of stickles where the feathers were and used a cocktail stick to pull the glitter into feather shapes in the wet glossy accents.

It hasn’t quite worked the way I imagined. I think the contrast is too strong, so if I did it again, I think I would use one of the transparent colours like Stardust or Crystal.

This is a scan of that particular sheet from the pad (though the colours are not quite true) and you can see the two areas I have used leave me more to play with – I’ll get at least four cards from this one sheet and there are three of each sheet in the pack, so loads of potential variations.

This next card is another that has left me chanting the ‘embrace imperfection’ mantra. It looks ok in this photo, but I used Glue ‘n’ Seal to attach the doily and it’s bowed the entire card front and made the doily a little too transparent for my liking. But hey, that’s how you learn and I’m sure if I sent this card to someone, they wouldn’t send it back complaining.

I love it when a new product fires up the mojo and these papers have done that for me. I think we all struggle with creativity from time to time and a little five or ten pound treat like a new inkpad colour or some pretty papers or ribbon can be just the trigger for the ideas to start flowing again.

This is not the only colour scheme in the pad by any means. There’s a light, bright, shabby chic vibe to the palette with lilacs, blues, quite a lot of white and a touch of sophisticated grey here and there.

The only problem I have now is that I’m trying really hard to resist the new En Francais pad that came in this week – it’s just begging me to dig out my Paris stamps …

Online class starts today – Terrific Techniques

Blog, Workshops

Mar 212012

I have one of my online classes starting today Rubber Stamping: Terrific Techniques and there’s still time to sign up (enrollment will close in about a week’s time), so I thought I’d tell you a bit about it.

The five week course will cover the following topics:

Week one is all about resist techniques. You will learn several different resist techniques and see the many beautiful finishes you can achieve.
In week 2, I will show you step by step how to use masking techniques and foliage stamps to build up beautiful layered cards. We will be taking nature as our cue and looking at Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter inspired cards
Week 3 is all about Stampbord, an amazing ultra smooth surface that is a joy to stamp on.
In week 4, we will be taking a look around the house to see what unusual materials we can stamp with, including bleach and lemon juice.
Finally, in week 5, we look at using stamps to create texture in materials such as UTEE, clay and funky foam.

It costs $30 which is approximately £18.91 at today’s exchange rate. (Visit www.xe.com to convert the dollar amount to your own currency.)

There’s more information on the technical aspects of how the classes run on the Online Classes page here on the blog, so if you are new to online classes you can get an idea of how it works.

One of the new features at My Creative Classroom is lifetime enrollment. After the course is finished, students have access to the course material forever!

If you fancy it, click here to sign up – you may need to register with My Creative Classroom first (it’s not my company), but you only need to do that once.

If you have taken one of my classes, please feel free to leave a comment to let other’s know how you enjoyed it.