Cooking & Crafting !

Just to prove that women are SO capable of multi-tasking, today has been a blend of cooking & crafting - oh and swimming 60 lengths, doing the washing & planting out lettuces !

I tried a new chicken recipe - chicken thighs with pineapple & chipotle chilli. It was supposed to be mango but I'm not fond - so pineapple it was !

I made the marinade this morning & left it to seep into the meat in the fridge all day.

It came out really quite tasty & I would make it again but maybe would crisp off the skin a bit.

Then I had decided to make Chutney to try to use up the Rhubarb that is going mad in the garden - I found a recipe in my new Preserves book which suggested adding shredded tangerine skin - have you ever tried to de-pith a tangerine ? - well the tangerine may have been orange but the air was blue !!

I decide to go with a 50/50 mix of dark brown & golden caster sugars to get a nice balance of sweetness & a deeper colour. Oh & I thought that spicy would be good - so added a couple of chopped red chillies & a couple of inches of fresh chopped ginger.

So it's now made & successfully bottled - Lakeland's Jam Funnel's are the real deal !!

Now I just have to wait 3 months to see how it matures up - so come back in September !!

Whilst the chutney was cooking, I was nipping back & forward to my craft desk to make up the perpetual calender & wooden bird I had bought at the Artsy Crafty weekend.

I had decided to base the colour scheme on the Wisteria & Pistachio Kaiser paints, added in a bit of Distress Inking, a spray of the new Crafty Notions matte white paint spray (a little goes a long way - all over the desk & everything on it from a couple of tiny squirts !!)

Then I used the Ding Dong Paperartsy stamps to get the Time theme & numbers - Pro-markers proved very effective to colour things in !

I also got to finish my Scrap Club challenge.

We each had to draw a template on the theme of "A Day in the Life" which had 1) 5 photos, or more, 2) 3 different papers, 3) a pocket & 4) a fabric flower .

Then we swopped all the designs & were given someone elses to make up as a page.

I decided to do the Day as the Saturday from my Artsycrafty weekend - I took photos on the day, asked a couple of the other girls to take some of me & then used a lot of the scraps & leftovers from the weekend to make the page - plus a new stamp and a grunge flower adaptation !

All in all I am quite pleased how it turned out !

Crafting but not Blogging !

Poor sad neglected blog ! One minute it was March - then up crept Easter, a fantastic spring holiday in sunny Ras Al Khaimah in the Emirates & somehow May rushed past and still I hadn't blogged !

Happily I have been crafting ! A full album scrapbooked about our holiday and a wonderful inspiring time at the Artsy Crafty weekend - as usual we tried lots of great new products, fun inky & painty messy techniques in lots of brilliantly put together colour combinations !

Here's some work in progress !

Something From Almost Nothing

Great news - a new Shimelle class - and something geared at stash-a-holics - how perfect is that ! I am so relieved to know that it's not just me that has an addiction to buying "stuff" ! So many girls from round the world seem to have the same problem - far more stash than we can ever get to be creative with ! Hoping that Shimelle's new Something From Almost Nothing Class will inspire me to use up some of my copious amounts of papers, ribbons, buttons & use my stamps more creatively - so watch this space for the rest of March !!

Snow Boys !

My sister sent me these great pictures of my nephews making snowmen back in January - just had to make a page for my scrapbook !

Mixed Media Mosaics

Well despite not blogging for a while I have been trying out a new craft technique - making my own mixed media mosaic tiles. The technique is taught in Laurie Mika's excellent book Mixed Media Mosaics and she combines really clear and encouraging instructions with some inspiring examples of her own work. I have great fun finding a way of using the Sculpy clay I had bought in a way that really appealed to me. My messy mat has a grid marked on it which made sizing the tiles much easier and it was fun adding the beads & charms. The most amazing technique was brushing the raw clay with mica powders for stunning colours & pearlescent affects.

The tiles represent the four seasons and are added to a box frame in which I have featured my new Owl stamp. All in all I'm pleased with my first attempt - even if my tile edges are a bit wonky ! That's one to work on with my next piece !!

Guardian Angel ?

I have been dabbling with the next page of my art journal this week - moving things about until I liked the final look of them!

The page was a coming together of inspirations. The theme was inspired by my finding a small white feather on the lap quilt on my sofa.

I have heard from somewhere that if you find a lone white feather somewhere unexpected that it has been left by your Guardian Angel as a reminder to have faith that they are there looking after you. It's quite a comfort to believe this at the moment when we are so concerned about Mum.

The style is a combination of ideas - I am reading "The Art of Personal Imagery" by Corey Moortgat in which she gives ideas & techniques for including pictures, images & photos into a collage style which has some personal meaning. I have seen quite a lot of what I call modern American or "Stampington" style collage but whilst it can be quite attractive it does seen a bit derivative & cliched with its wings & crowns and "inspire"/ "believe" & "journey/ discover" words dotted around !

But I decided to take it in the right spirit and take some of those very motifs and make a page about my Guardian Angel. The image is from Kelly Rae Roberts beautiful artwork in her enjoyable & inspiring book "Taking Flight" - the inking & painting ideas from "Personal Imagery" - so a bit of fun with some of the things I have been reading over the past few months.

Here's hoping that my Guardian Angel is here with us especially when we need her at the moment.

Not much crafting got done !

Well here we are back from our week in Spain & although I did take a crafting kit in case of poor weather confining us indoors - we were really lucky & the weather was pretty good - a couple of damp days but then 3 days of blue skies & sun to finish - so no crafting got done at all !!

Still nice to chill out, rest up & see friends & take some long walks. Including a sunset walk which turned into a moonlit stroll courtesy of a full moon in a clear sky !