Welcome to my blog

I hope you enjoy reading my posts, and please leave me a comment. I always enjoy reading them, and will try to visit you in return.

For security reasons for me and for you, I would appreciate it if you would leave your name on your comments.

You are welcome to copy any of my designs, as long as you do not take credit for them yourself. I am very happy for you to sell them. If I have used anyone else's design, I always try to give credit where it is due. If I have missed anything, please let me know and I will put things right.


This is intended to be mainly about my crafting stories, as a personal record of what I do. However, I interpret crafting quite widely, not just paper crafting but other things too. I have a butterfly mind and like to change from one thing to another depending on what I feel like on a given day - knitting, crochet, cross-stitch, cards, baking and several others, including my favourite right now, parchment, both traditional skills and Groovi, very relaxing and calming to do.

I have decided to put some structure into my blog so that each day will have something of a theme.
Monday- for Mindfulness; Tuesday - Tidy Up Day; Wednesday - What's on Your Workdesk Wednesday; Thursday - Technique and Tips; Friday - Finish Off Day; Saturday - Start Something New; Sunday - Anything Goes
These themes are not hard and fast and will be changed if I feel the need.

Monday 21 June 2010

Relaxing is such hard work - 21st June 2010

A little bit of tweaking and this holiday photo of an old bridge over the River Tavy will probably find its way onto a card sometime in the near future. Our weather so far has been incredible. In fact, we have spent today in the cool of the caravan site on the Lizard Peninsula. We shall go down later to Mullion Harbour to let the dogs have a good swim, lots of fun, and cooling off too. After swimming they both sleep all night - peace for us.

I have done some crafting while we have been away, just a bit of water colouring, and some embossing, trying out new techniques. I have loads of very old embroidery transfers and have experimented with several different techniques. I have scanned them all to computer, so I can print them out whatever size I wish. Printing onto acetate and using pens to colour in can be very effective, then cutting then to mount them in aperture cards. Just mounting them onto plain white card is also good, covering the edge of the acetate with peel offs or some other type of frame.

Another effective technique is to either print them onto vellum, using My Craft Studio Professional, changing the outline colour to pale grey. Then you use your embossing tools to trace the outline, using as much embossing as you wish to achieve a satisfactory result. The shading tool can transform a basic embossing into something really pretty and delicate. Don't try to emboss deeply to begin with, go over each line 3 times gently to avoid puncturing the vellum. Pansies are a really good flower to start with for embossing and shading. I will try to post a photo of pansies tomorrow, once I have transferred it from camera to computer.

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