an ordinary man...

He is not a famous actor, nor a world-class athlete, or someone who gets written about in newspapers or appears on tv, but he is a generous, giving, gentlemanly gentle man, always quick with a witty retort (usually at his own expense!), a mentor, a diplomat who could calm warring parties into seeing things from both sides. He is my Dad. Yesterday Dad had an emergency quadruple by-pass and at this moment lies in the Intensive Care Unit at Royal Perth Hospital hooked up to life support machines. There were some doubts as to whether he would survive the surgery and a nearly 50% chance of him suffering a stroke during the procedure. So far all has gone well and as a friend of mine said "wishing him a speedy and boring recovery".

Some of you may have read in an earlier post how generous a spirit my Dad has when he found that he was unable to go on our mega-trip because of his ill health, he gave his trip to my best girlfriend so she could enjoy it with us. He told my Mum she still had to go as he would feel even worse if he thought she would miss out too. The highlight for Dad was that Joan had a fantastic time and he was truly, genuinely pleased for her. He's known Joan since we were in high school together 37 years ago so she is like a 2nd daughter to my parents.

I don't generally write much personal stuff on my blog, but I just wanted to say (and write) out loud, "I'm not ready to lose my Dad"!!! I know everyone loses loved ones, all 4 of my grandparents have passed away, as well as a cousin (much too young!), but losing a parent is a pain that we must all go through at some stage in our lives and this scare has come too soon for me. Give your Mum and Dad a hug and tell them you love them.....now!

Not much arting has been done in my house in the last few days but I found when I did my last couple of atc's, they were reflecting my sombre mood. The first one is winging it's way off over East for someone else and the 2nd one, well....think I'll keep this one as a reminder of this week of my life. You can blame my Dad for my sense of the absurd and my Mum for the pragmatism. I still remember as a small child watching Monty Python's Flying Circus with my Dad and my Dad, brothers and myself cracking up at each scenario and Mum sitting there wondering what we were finding so funny. I'm sure he'll see the funny side of his hospital stay in a month's time too!

More Inchies!!! (plus some atc's)

As promised, I took my camera to work and took some photo's of the large canvas that Audrey put together after being in a swap. Not this many actually got swapped, Audrey just wanted to do it large scale so made up the rest herself to complete this huge size! It looks awesome and everyone that comes into the store comments on how wonderful it is!

This is what it looks like sitting on our counter...

Here are a couple of close-up shots...

These next inchies are ones that I've made just yesterday. Addictive little buggers these things! You think, "oh, I'll just make a few", and before you know it, you've done more than a dozen!

My Saturday atc class just gone was on using the fabulous transfer medium, Sheer Heaven. It is a paper-like product that you run through your inkjet printer - and yes, any inkjet will work! Print your images (I can get about 14 for atc's onto one sheet), cut them out, spritz image with rubbing alcohol (NOT the 92% one, think it's around 70%???). After spritzing, lay down onto your absorbent receiving surface - watercolour paper, card stock, book page, scrapbook paper etc, burnish all over in circular motions with the back of a spoon for around 10 seconds, peel off and voila! A beautiful transfer! I usually use watercolour crayons to scribble around the edges in co-ordinating colours to complete this. This is available at Scraptivate.

So this first atc is using a Sheer Heaven transfer for the image on the right hand side. We also have new in at the store, mica flakes! This stuff is just beautiful....drizzle on some diamond glaze or glossy accents, sprinkle on the mica, shake off excess and let dry for a magical, subtle, sparkly effect!

Another new product we have in is Ranger Antiquities Frosted Crystal embossing powder. It looks like it's clear, but after it's been heat embossed it looks like frosted glass! It's what I've used all over the background of this stamped image below as well as on the little image up the top. That's the light reflecting on it that makes the little image glow so much. Also added a little mica flakes for her tears.

Assorted work - canvas, card, atc's & how to track your blogs!

At the end of this month (August) I'm going to be teaching an inchie class using a 4" x 4" canvas as a base. As inchies are notoriously small I've decided to cheat a bit and make mine 1-1/4" in size so I can fit 9 of them onto the 4 x 4 canvas. We have an absolutely wonderful example of a MEGA-INCHIE canvas in at the store (Scraptivate) that just shows how fabulous a whole lot of little inchies can look when all grouped together. It was put together by Audrey after both she and I had participated in an inchie exchange with another online group. I have yet to do anything with mine as I'm a little over-awed at how Audrey's has turned out, a hard act to follow! I'll take my camera to work to get some pics and post them soon....promise!!!


In the meantime, here's some shots of my smaller canvas. If you're in Perth and want to learn how to make one of these using all sorts of techniques, give us a call at the shop (9444 6626) to book in!

The whole thing with all 9 of the inchies...

These next 2 are raffle atc's for a couple of previous classes that I forgot to post earlier. First is "Regal" for the Textured Backgrounds class - Svetlana "won" this one.....hahaha....sorry, private joke. ;-)

"Serene" was won by Mel at the Faux Tin Type class last week, yay Mel....she pulled her own raffle ticket out! No, not rigged at all, just a lucky pick! That's our story and we're sticking to it, right Mel??? I've used the Ranger Crackle Paint in Tattered Rose on the background of this one.

I've been lucky enough to be the recipient of several on-line awards recently, so I'm going to list them all here together. It's very, VERY hard to narrow down single blogs for awards so I nominate everyone who's listed in my favourite blog lists to the right. I learn something from virtually every blog that I visit and I think that it's important to remember to share, share, share what we learn. Kind of a "pay it forward" type thing with our collected art knowledge travelling the globe and infecting (in a good way!) other unsuspecting blog surfers who stumble across our sites with the love of art in all it's glorious forms! Man, what a long sentence!

So a HUGE thankyou to the following talented people for bestowing these awards...

Thankyou Audrey and Jenny (Crozza) for the Brilliante Weblog Award...

Thankyou Nancy for the Kind Heart Award...

and Sam for the BFF Gold Card Award...

On another note, I've had several conversations with friends about the unfortunately demise of Blogarithm, a neat little program that helped you keep track of all your favourite blogs and sent you a daily email when they updated. Alas, it is no more. Darn it when they try to fix something that isn't broken and then it's REALLY broken for good!!!

So now I use bloglines. You simply input your favourite blogs, then you can keep track of who's updating easily on one page. The easiest way I've found to do this is by adding your bloglines page (after subscribing, so it links to YOUR bloglines page) to your links (in favourites), then when it opens up it has a list of your blogs you've subscribed to and if they are in BOLD, then that blog has been updated. Click on the blog and it'll open up on the right hand side of the screen and if you want to leave a comment, simply open the blog by clicking on it from this right hand side. I've also added a "sub with bloglines" link to my links bar so if I happen to come across a blog I really like, within a couple of clicks I've added it to my bloglines list. Easy! It's actually easier to DO than to WRITE. Confused? Questions? Ask me and I'll try to be a little clearer.

Onto more pictures...my cousin Corey and his wife Kellie are expecting their first child. I attended Kellie's baby shower last weekend and I made a card for her. As you know, I'm not really a card maker at all, I tend to just try to think of them as BIG atc's. I used a picture of an unborn child and printed it on transparency, xyroned (that must be a word!) it, also printed the quote on transparency and gave that the same xyron treatment and attached them both to some nice pale green paper. I also used a couple of cuttlebug chipboard corner embellishments which I painted using the new in at our store Twinkling H2O's Radiant Rains in a dauber. The colour was Olive Gold (I think? it's the only olive green one), beautiful olive with a sheen of gold shimmer just like the fabulous Twinkling H2O watercolours but much easier....dab, dab, dab. Here's the front and then the inside with the quote.

The West Wing is about to start....bye....

A Mixed Bag...including art!

This post is going to be a bit of a mixed bag, some more pics of our mega-holiday in Alaska, some arty pics, a TY for an award as well as plugging my most favourite blog of the moment. We'll start with the blog that I just can't live without...The Creative Junkie. The wonderful thing about Andrea and her lovely posts is she does it every couple of days...so you don't have to go too long without your eyes watering, pee running down your leg and your mouth hurting from being stretched in a grin from ear to ear! When I first stumbled across this particular blog I was laughing so much I just HAD to read everything she had previously posted and I'm so glad I did! The CHIA Pet incident is just classic....go on.....read it.

Okay, onto the rest of our day in Juneau. You might remember this was Mother's Day and we'd had a fantastic helicopter flight over glaciers (including a walk on a glacier!) in the morning. Next we went up to Mount Roberts via the Mount Roberts Tramway. The take-off point is actually on the dock and in the following photo's you can see how steeply it rises before landing at the top at the visitors centre and snow everywhere! The square shed structure you see on the dock next to our ship is where the tram takes off from....onward & upward...


The ship's getting smaller...

At the top taken from the visitor centre - what a view!!!

Here's Grant trying not to fall over in his oh-so-slippery leather soled shoes. Drat, I was hoping to make some money on funniest home video as I took about 3 video's of him doing these little walks in the snow. He didn't oblige.

After Mount Roberts we did a quick walk-around inside the Juneau Douglas Museum then started to head back towards the ship for a bite to eat but first, "let's have a quick drink"! We popped into a nice little Irish bar with the locals but unbeknown to Joan and myself, each drink was a double and we'd not eaten lunch and we WERE heading back to the ship for some food. So we had a couple of drinks, left the bar to get that food and we ran into Mike, one half of our dinner companion couple who sits with us each night at our table.

Joan & Kelsey...."Where ya goin Mike?"

Mike..."Off to get a drink"

Joan & Kelsey..."We know a GREAT place, we'll SHOW you!"

So it was that we ended up back in the bar for more double bourbons, still no food on board but the bar pretzels will soak up the booze....right??? WRONG!!!! No idea how much later it was that we staggered/giggled/guffawed our way up the street to the ship, Joan nearly taking home a souvenir Juneau fire hydrant that was almost embedded in her leg as she walked into it full tilt. The bruise lasted for days and turned all lovely shades of purple/green/yellow.

Here's a nice little doggie we saw while staggering up the street, poor bloke must've thought all Aussies are nit-wits the way we acted.

and here's Mike and Grant being best buds in full swing in the bar,

But first, WAIT, there's the Red Dog Saloon (which was full of tourists and was why we didn't go there for a drink), but it does have a shop attached where you can buy real Juneau souvenirs so we bought a couple of t-shirts, one a size XXL for God knows who, a couple of Red Dog Saloon condoms for our 2 son's as well as hubby's brother, and for hubby's brother's girlfriend - just what she always wanted - a Red Dog Saloon garter!!! Told you we were pissed, there would be no way we'd buy that crap if we weren't! lol

Finally made it back to the ship where we (Joan, Grant and I) visited my Mum in her cabin to say a boozy hello, which is also where Joan was staying (there is a reason I'm saying this). Grant had invited Mike back to our cabin for some more drinks (silly, silly, man) so off we go back to our cabin. Joan gets inside and sits on the bed while Grant is preparing more drinks. 10 minutes pass, she's still sitting there with her head in her hands...

Kelsey..."what's wrong Joan"....

Joan..."nuffin...I'm concentrating".

Kelsey..."Oh, okay.

Several attempts at conversation with Joan proceeded over the next couple of hours as she still hadn't left the side of the bed and her head was still in her hands.

Kelsey..."are you okay Joan?"

Joan...."I'm CONCENTRATING!!!!!!!!"

sigh.... The upshot was that after a few "visits" to our bathroom I had to phone Mum in her cabin and say "Sorry Mum, Joan can't come home tonight, the ship is spinning in a vortex and she won't get there". Joan stayed the night in our conjugal bed - I was in the middle in case you were wondering though I did wake several times in the night and as she was still in the same sleeping position I was a little concerned that lest I touch her, she may be stone cold!

The next day we visited Glacier Bay, the Hubberd Glacier to be exact, 6 miles wide and oh so beautiful. Worst weather of the trip, 35 foot seas and 50 knot winds and a MEGA HANGOVER added to a wonderfully listing ship. Certainly was a Mother's day to remember!

Onto some arty pics, kudo's to you if you've lasted this long!

I posted a pic of one of my mica atc's on another blog that was having a comp for "flourishes". I love flourishes so had no trouble adding them to an atc, here was my entry.

The image is a transparency trapped between 2 pieces of mica with flourish stamping, some embossed and a piece of cuttlebug scroll that was embossed also. Here is the link to the blog if you want to take a look at some other entries with flourishes.

I have a couple of pieces of artwork coming up in Cardmaking, Stamping & Papercraft using Rachel Greig's Darkroom Door stamps, the "Doors" set. Can't show the full pieces but here's a couple of glimpses of one of the cards, the other piece is a canvas.

That's it for now!

Mica atc's, Published canvas, student's canvases

I have had a few items published in the Australian magazine Cardmaking, Stamping & Papercraft but now I have ventured into the realm of a scrapbooking magazine, Scrapbook Creations. I know, not my normal area and this particular issue (#56) was the first (& probably the last) scrapbooking magazine I've ever bought. I was invited to take part in the project by Viv as she was doing an article on canvases, and so I did. She said...."no death or darkness please Kelsey"!!! I mean, would I do that? lol So I managed a little bit of death anyway, the image is of my Grandparent's wedding day in 1936 and they have both since passed away. I kept the colours nice and vibrant so they would photograph well but still with a vintage touch. When I showed my Mum she told me I now have make another 8 of them as she is one of 9 siblings and they'll all want one....guess I know what I'm doing for Christmas presents this year! This is a 5" x 7" canvas and yes Netta, you're right.....my Grandad was a bit of a looker!!! lol



I taught another canvas class at Scraptivate not long ago and remembered to take my camera along....so here you go girls, here are your canvases for all to see! I loved how they all turned out and once again it surprised them to see how quickly they came together.


Bibi and Ingrid...




Jackie and Margaret...



Marie and Megan...

Netta and Tracey...

Carmen...

and Jane...

Saturday's class is on using mica on atc's. I've done several before and they are notoriously difficult to photograph as the mica is transparent, so doesn't show well in photo's. This first one is using Mica D'Lights, a product that has mica and glitter suspended together in a dust-like form, you use it the same as you would use glitter, no heating required!

"Remember" is using a thicker piece of mica that is attached over the imagery using eyelets. A good tip I learnt from Nina Bagley is to put a little piece of masking tape over the mica where you intend to punch a hole as this prevents the mica from splintering or cracking. Just remember to peel it off before you attach your mica!

Arte y Pico Award, Emboss Resist atc's & Technique Book #1

I was given this award from an artist from the US, Elizabeth (love her blog header!), so in the spirit of pay it forward, my 5 recipients of this award are below. I knew this was going to be another one of those "this is going to be difficult" moments as so many blogs I read are inspirational and just downright beautiful, how do you narrow it down to just 5! I'm going to step out of my normal little world and choose blogs that I don't get to see very much, either because they don't post very often or I haven't got them on my rss feed and all of a sudden I "remember" them and check them out.....then am in awe of what I find. So here's the rules.....

1. Choose 5 blogs that you consider deserving of this award based on creativity, design, interesting material, and overall contribution to the blogger community, regardless of language.

2. Post the name of the author and a link to his or her blog so everyone can view it.

3. Each award-winner has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her or him the award.

4. The award-winner and the presenter should post the link of the Arte y Pico blog so everyone will know the origin of this award.

5. Please post these rules!

My five picks are:

1. Sandra Evertson - just pure whimsy and beautiful photography - think I would've loved the clothing in the era that Sandra loves too!

2. Julian Buttenshaw - this girl has what I call "uber-talent"!!! I love her grungy (in a good way) style and her colour choices are right up my alley.

3. Hermine Koster - Hermine produces lovely artwork and her blog is always a joy to visit. The imagery she uses and the way she puts things together, combining stamping, imagery and paint is wonderful!

4. Dot Christian - Dot has such a way with fabric and colour and quirkiness. A visit to her blog is a visual feast for the eyes......and the heart!

5. Debbi Baker - this is another girl who has been bitten seriously by the fabric bug! Her wonderful use of colours and the way she combines imagery/stamping/fabric/stitching is just beautiful.

Onto some pics.....I am teaching the Emboss Resist technique in my atc class on Saturday at Scraptivate and coincidentally, when I checked out Tim's blog I found that he had listed this technique as his July technique but he's called it Faux Bleaching. Whatever you want to call it, it's one cool technique as it's another good use for all those distress pads we just had to have EVERY colour of. Okay, so I have 21 colours, the last 3 I just can't get my head around so don't think I need them (but never say never, right!).

Here's my take on Emboss Resist as a background and also as a focal point. There's actually 2 different techniques here, Home and Streets of Paris are both the same as Tim's way, Certified is white embossed on gloss paper, then distress pads rubbed over the whole thing and wiped off the white embossing as the embossing resists taking up the ink colours.

Home...

Certified...

Streets of Paris...

This last atc was one of my samples that I made for the Fun Foam class, just had to finish it off so it's making an appearance now...

Okay.....girls in my Technique Book Class #1, have you got your book pages all in pieces in front of you? Here's the pictures of the book put together so you can see what order they go in.

Front cover...Sheer Heaven Transfer...

Credit Card Background...

Alcohol Inks...

Peeled Paper Background...

Faux Leather Technique...

Contents page...

Copyright page...

Back cover...

So now I start work on Technique Book #2....stay tuned!

.....and the winner is!!!!!!......and crackle atc's

I used a random number generator to pick a winner for my free art give-away in the previous post......

#4.....Tammy

hi new to your blog-what a beautiful trip to alaska you had!!i love both your pieces of work i am just learning tips and techniques and having a great time :)and would love to have my name dropped into your hat!!enjoy your daymany thanks tammy(tabby) tjo196@aol.com www.crookedheartart.blogspot.com

Congrats Tammy! If you send me an email with your snail mail addy, I'll get your canvas posted off to you. You have to pick first which one you want, the green one or the orange/gold one.

Then, just because I can.....the following person can have the other remaining canvas, sorry if it's not your first colour choice but remember, these things always look much better in real life than on the flat computer screen and I hope you will still like it! So the 2nd person's number drawn is.........

#43.....Sandy

well here I am comment number 43 .... maybe no one will want them WHAT women your work is gorgeous ... would love to be a winner of your piece of work. Sandy dangling by a thread skmarcoux@gmail.com

I'll be in contact with both of you to get your snail mail addy's and after Tammy has chosen first, I'll send the other one over to you Sandy.

Stay tuned, in a couple of days I'll have more atc's to post from my next atc class - "Embossing Resist" as well as some other ones using different techniques that I've finished.

Okay, so here's a couple of atc's already, just doesn't seem right to just type without putting in a picture...or two...... These were all half-made in the crackle class I taught recently, then I finished them off at a "girls-night-in" recently at Scraptivate. Can't have half-finished atc's floating around, can we!!! Do you like the little play on words with the bottom one? I stumbled across the word in the dictionary and thought it was very apt! I even had some little ants to add to it.

My Technique Book #1 class went really well yesterday at Scraptivate too! This was a marathon effort of teaching five different techniques in 4 hours and binding them into a book as well, including instructions! The girls were really pushed to get the book put together but I was happy enough for them to get the techniques done and will modify some of the mega painting effort in the Technique Book #2! So yes, there will be a #2...... The techniques included in the first book were Sheer Heaven Transfers, Credit Card Technique, Using Alcohol Inks, Peeled Paper and lastly, Faux Leather. I'll take my camera to work with me tomorrow so I can post the pics on my blog shortly. This way, you girls who didn't manage to get your book put together can do so in the comfort of your own home, in front of the computer! See how I look after you!!! lol