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A glimpse into the studio

February 11th, 2012

I don’t have much in the way of finished projects to share at the moment. This is the state of my studio this morning:

Yesterday we had a delivery which included a whole load of new Crafter’s Workshop stencils. Well, much as I love stamping, I’ve been feeling the call of doing some mixed media type stuff, so I had to have a play.

I’m working on a couple of canvases and having a blast trying out the stencils. They are standing up to a fair bit of rubbing and scrubbing as I’ve been using them with fibre paste and gel as well as paints and inks.

This canvas has doilies and lace attached with gel medium and I’ve used the Circle Grid stencil in the corner. I applied fibre paste over the stencil with a palette knife. Here’s a close up.

Not sure where this canvas will go, I might try an image transfer of some trees on it. Adrian took some photos of trees recently which I think might work quite well.

I’ve also been playing around with the stencils on some tags, just to try them out.

There’s embossing and Perfect Pearls going on here – I don’t have shimmery, coppery-reddish-goldish embossing powder, but by the time it’s been dusted with the pearls, it look like I do.

I love the pointy circles stencil on this canvas and can see me using this one loads.

It’s in the background of the tag too, but after doing the background, I decided to paint a face and covered most of it up! I drew the face and hair shape and blocked it out with Titan Buff acrylic paint (by Golden).

It’s a fairy heavy body paint so gives pretty good coverage when you need to hide the colour beneath. I don’t know why I gave her teal hair – seemed right at the time.

So there you go, a brief journey around my current work in progress. Hopefully I can get some of these finished off over the weekend, but I’m much more likely to end up with another batch of half started items – I am definitely not a completer-finisher!

Comments ( 12 )

Crafter's Workshop, Golden, mixed media, stencils

While working on a birthday card …

December 30th, 2011

Well firstly I have to say a huge thank you for all your very flattering compliments on the last post. I almost didn’t publish it, but I’m glad that some of you feel inspired to get healthier in 2012.

Today I have a little treat for you which has been a long time coming. At the last Paradise Weekend Retreat we held in September last year, Adrian took to the stage on the Saturday night and performed a little song that he wrote specially for the event.

We didn’t have a video camera to hand at the time, so there is no footage of the original, but I’ve put a little slide show together and I’m proud to present … Add a Brad!

For those who were there, I hope it brings back happy memories and for those who weren’t, I hope you enjoy this little bit of silliness.

Happy New Year!

Comments ( 25 )

Retreat, Videos

So here it is, Merry Christmas!

December 25th, 2011

I’m not a great one for posting photos of myself online, but I am celebrating.

I am celebrating the fact that I have got rid of 34 pounds of excess weight since April. That’s one pound short of two and a half stone – nearly 16 kilos, or the average weight of a 3 year old child.

It has been fun buddying up with Lesley – we’ve been going to Weight Watchers together and she has done fantastically well too, shedding all the weight she gained after quitting smoking at the start of 2010.

I am 5ft 10 inches and Lesley is 6ft and we have both been told many times that it doesn’t show, we carry it well, you don’t look overweight, etc. Well thanks guys, but looking back at old photos, anyone who said that to me should get themselves down to Specsavers immediately. I did NOT carry it well, I had fat legs, fat arms, a huge bum and several chins. What I did seem to be fairly good at was accumulating the weight evenly over my entire body, so I never became an apple or pear shape, just bigger all over.

Back in 2009 I was given a diabetic warning which shocked me into making a few changes (click here to read about it). I was 17 stone at the time. With the stresses and traumas of the last couple of years, we have found it hard to stick to the healthy eating and I knew my weight had crept back up, I was 16 stone 8lb in April.

Me in 2009

Weight Watchers has been great, but it’s not enough on its own. If you turn up and expect it to be a magic wand you will just put the weight back on again. If you carry on eating what you normally eat, but substitute low fat or low calorie versions of foods, then you are not changing habits and again, you’ll eventually put it back on. WW has a lot of tools to help you, but my view is that to make it a permanent lifestyle change, you have to have the right mindset. You really have to be prepared to honour your body and treat it with respect.

I began this year with a resolution to look after my health more. I won’t tell you what that resolution has cost me in dental treatment, but you know, it doesn’t matter. I hadn’t been to the dentist for 8 years, so if I average it out, it’s cheap.

After losing about a stone in weight, I had a very painful flare up of endometriosis this summer, so I paused the ongoing dental work and spent the money on acupuncture instead. My acupuncturist has also studied nutrition and she gave me some great food advice. That problem seems to have settled down now, and I’m sure the extra weight loss has helped with that too.

My blood sugar is now perfectly normal and the diabetes alert has been removed from my records. I’ve dropped a shoe size, most of my old wardrobe has gone to the charity shops (including the size 22-24 jumper I found the other day) and I am loving the fact I accidentally came home with a size 12 jumper a few weeks ago and it fits!

Believe it or not, I am just over half way. The official guidelines for my height are between 10 stone and 12 stone 6 so I have another stone or so to lose. I will see how I feel because to be honest, I’m feeling pretty fantastic right now and I’m not going to aim for an unrealistic goal just for the sake of it.

So please forgive my self-congratulatory post, but Christmas is a time of celebration and I’m taking a little moment to celebrate my achievement. And the great thing is, I can pig out over Christmas and eat anything I want to. There is no diet, just a proper understanding of food and a lot of respect for how I treat my body.

So here’s wishing you all a very joyous Christmas Day and hoping that you too have something wonderful you can celebrate.

PS: Isn’t this great!

Comments ( 49 )

health

Dear Santa …

December 9th, 2011

White Christmas Challenge prize fund standing at £32.00 so far and growing …

Have you written your letter to Santa yet? I may be way behind the times here, but I just discovered Amazon’s universal wish list feature and it is so cool, I wanted to share it. Not that I have an ulterior motive or anything (ahem), but you can use it to add anything to your wishlist from any website, not just Amazon.

We have a wishlist built in to the Chocolate Baroque website, but it is slightly limited as you have to log in to see it which makes it pretty much impossible to share with friends and family. So when I realised what Amazon had done, I realised that here is a way for all of our customers to share their Chocolate Baroque desires with anyone they want!

Here’s what you need to know.

First you go to Amazon and sign in. Click on wishlist and at the top of your wishlist, you will see something like this:

If you are not using Firefox, you might see something different so just click on the ‘Learn more’ button and find out what you need to do.

You might also have an option to drag a button to your toolbar (not sure if that’s a Mac only thing though).

So if you click install and follow the instructions, your browser will get an extra little Amazon button that looks like this and it shows up just before the box where you type in a web address. Next time you are browsing a site and find a product you want to put on your wishlist, just click on that little Amazon button and a wishlist window will open up.

Make sure you click onto the product details by the way – if you are on a page with more than one product, it won’t know which one you mean and will select one from the page itself.

In the wishlist window, you can edit the details and add comments, then click Add to list.

It’s so simple!

You can then share your Amazon wishlist with anyone who is buying you a gift, whether that’s for Christmas, your birthday, retirement or other special occasion. Or maybe you have one of those special partners who likes to give you a gift for no reason (ah, they’re keepers aren’t they!).

I have no idea how long Amazon have been doing this, so you may already know about it, but I’m now encouraging all my friends and family to use it so I can buy them gifts with confidence, knowing that I am getting them something that they really want.

I haven’t spent all my time surfing the innertubes – I did manage to get the ruby rose ATC turned into a Christmas card this week.

It took a while to figure out a nice background for this and in the end I kept it simple with a stamp from Holly Flourish stamp set (which is on special offer at the moment by the way and matches the Holly Flourish download that I used on the ATC). I distressed the edges of the sentiment (from the same stamp set) and rolled it round a cocktail stick to make it look like a little scroll. I used foam pads of differing heights to stick it down and keep the curved shape, though with hindsight, I should have left space for the glitter leaves as they’ve added a bit more bulk than I wanted.

Well I think I’ve earned a ten minute break to go and do a little browsing and add more things to my Amazon wish list. After all, I have to give Adrian plenty of choice now, don’t I?

Comments ( 3 )

Chocolate Baroque, Christmas

Calico Cat

November 17th, 2011

Remember this fine lady? She’s all grown up now, though she does still have her mad kitten moments.

I caught her in a patch of sunlight in my craft room today – she is still fascinated by anything that dangles and that’s the tapes of one of my aprons you can see hanging on the back of the door.

Of course little Miss Innocent pretends she’s just paused to catch a sunbeam and have a little wash.

I love that almost symmetrical diamond of black and ginger on the back of her head. Did you know that calico colouring only occurs in female cats. Our friend Nick has a PhD in something genetic (brilliant mind, working on cancer research) and he explained it all to me when he met the kittens last year. A fascinating genetic mutation I think he described it as. Something to do with females having both X and Y chromosomes and males only having X. I do wish I could retain scientific facts and trot them out like I know what I’m talking about, but that’s not how my brain works. Show me a black white and ginger cat and I can match those shades of ginger with an inkpad or copic marker though! I think I’m wired for colour.