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.

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 ….?

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!

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.

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.