Treasure at the bottom of the garden

Neil Gaiman linked to the most amazing photos of fairytale houses, abandoned and intact because they were buried deep in a forest in Russia. I love fairytales with magical things hidden in forests, or even at the back of the garden. Remember Enid Blyton's 'The Wishing Chair'? Magical stuff.

Our garden is pretty wild. There's plenty of treasure to be found, thanks to our relatively lax gardening skills, despite the best efforts of my girlfriend, who is a demon with secateurs and blackberry poison. (That sounds scarier than I meant it to!)

Here are some treasures from our last foray into the tangle:

A tiny nest in a tangle of blackberry canes at the back of my garden:


Stepping stones that lead to nowhere:


A wall of briar roses:


Giant rosehips, big enough to eat:


And our house at the top of the garden:


It seems to be a long, long way away...

Bon Voyage, ATC!

Here's the ATC that's currently on its way to Domito in France. It's an Autumn themed card.


And this one is made from scraps of crazy quilting that were too good to throw away. It's looking for a home, if anyone is interested in swapping.


I think I prefer photographing my work to scanning it. I really like using my camera, now that I've figured out how to use the macro setting properly, and to switch off the automatic flash. Ten Tastiest Food Photography Tips is a really helpful site for capturing good pics of tiny things like ATCs.

Treasure From Afar

I've been quite busy with misdaventures at work - a tire detached from a moving car and hit the front door of the shop, smashing the window and bending the front strut out of alignment so that the door no longer closed. Nobody was hurt, and it's all fixed now, but we were quite the buzz in our sleepy country town.

I see that I have a bazillion blog posts to catch up on now - I'll save those for tomorrow at work, but I wanted to post about my exciting presents. I had two lovely surprises in the mail this week - though one was actually hand delivered by my dad.

Firstly, I received this beautiful ATC from Domito. We both agreed to make a fabric ATC for the season, (Spring for her, Autum for me), and this was the lovely result.


And Dad brought presents for me from Mum's holiday in Hong Kong:

Shiny, glitzy fibres



Delicate butterflies made from feathers


Luscious papers


And the most delicate little glass teapot


Thank you everyone for these beautiful presents - I feel very spoilt.

On topic, by a technicality

This week's theme at Inching Artists is Lace. Mine don't look very lacy, do they? But they have a secret.



These are made from the Lutradur and Lace technique in the first issue of Fibre and Stitch Magazine, and I think I may have buried the lace a little deeply. It is there - scraps of broderie anglaise layered with gauze and painted with acrylic paint and iridescent inks. I was going to burn the layers back with the heat gun, but on sample pieces, the gauze proved extremely heat resistent. I embellished the squares with some varigated thread and a bright bead.

I've also signed up for Joanne's Inchie swap that she runs each month, and this month the theme is Children


I've never gone in an inchie swap before - I'm really looking forward to it.

Carving out some art

Last month at Green Pepper Press Street Team, Michelle Ward challenged readers to carve stamps. Though I didn't get mine done in time for the deadline, the post for Challenge 18 is a great resource for anyone wanting to get into stamp carving. It made me get out the cutting tools and a sheet of rubber and get to work.



I carved a lot of birds - my NaNo project last year was built up around bird mythology. One day, far off in the future, I'm going to have the time and motivation to stamp my own tarot deck, so in preparation for that wondrous time, I carved out words and symbols for the four suits, and the corresponding astrological symbols. (Can you sense the procrastination in this great project?)

I stamped one of my birds in acrylic paint on a page torn from The Coral Island, and I really like the rough, textural look of the image.



And on one of my favourite stamping lists, Stamphappy, there was a thread about blogs, which gave me a chance to track down a few of my list-mates in the blogosphere. Hi people, if you're dropping by, after I've left manic messages on your blogs.

And lastly, I have beautiful mail, from Debbi Baker. A beautiful green ATC, made to celebrate St Patrick's day, from tissue paper or beautiful serviettes, I think. The photo doesn't do it justice - it really glows.



And because Debbi is an awesome chick, she wrapped the ATC in that gorgeous, filmy lavender ribbon. Thanks Deb!

A busy weekend

Easter has been fun - despite the heat and humidity and thunder storms and craziness at work, I actually got a lot of work done.

TMTA's theme this week is Texture Effects. I made an ATC made from a background of scrunched up newspaper, lightly covered with gesso for extra texture, and dry brushed with copper and gold acrylic to pick up the shapes and texture of the newspaper.

I used an image of Virginia Woolf, and once it was down on the card, it seemed to need simple embellishment - a black ribbon and an gold charm holding a leaf pressing. I was quite surprised at the way my subconscious constructed this - it wasn't until the leaf was glued down that I realised it was rue, and then I had my theme for the ATC.



This week's Inching Artists theme is Words. These inchies were cut from a very precious piece of scrap paper that I've been using under my craft work for months, letting it accumulate layers and layers of paint in that perfectly random way that can only happen with scrap paper.



And lastly (how productive have I been this weekend? Chocolate is the super-fuel of the creative mind!), I have a fabric ATC that will be zooming over to WA fro a one-on-one exchange with Debbi Baker. It's a piece of velvet (I know! I said I'd never use that stuff again!), with a layer of blue foil netting stitched over the top, and a motif in buttons, beads and sequins set in the middle. It was fantastic fun to make.

Think Monday: Think ATC

Twice in a row! I'm on fire with the organising and the doing of craft this week.

The theme this week at TMTA is Transparent Art. I took a transparency of an antique daguerreotype of the moon - it's mottled and golden in that beautiful way that daguerreotype photographs are. (I had to use the word twice, to make it worth looking up the spelling.)



The image is over a background of pearly iridescent ink, which of course, doesn't show up in the scan, but makes the image really glow. I took the words from an ancient dictionary.

I love using transparencies, but the hard part is finding original ways to frame the very obvious edge. This time, I put my new sewing machine to the test, and it blitzed through the plastic and card with no problems, even when threaded with horrible, snagging metallic thread. Oh metallic thread! You look so fine, but you are so evil. Same problem that I have with velvet, I think.