I know, I know {stop telling me}

Yes I have been a bad blogger, I know I know. Be quiet already. I decided that people getting their orders had to be placed a bit higher up the list of priorities than blogging. When I figure out how to morph into an octopus with three heads, life will be so much easier!

As I keep saying, if you miss me that much, get on your iphone (if you haven't got one yet you *need* one from Santa!) and follow me on twitter @paperartsy for daily updates from the mad life of PA world HQ, plus you can laugh at all the goings on of family, work and the latest TV excitement on Saturday evenings. For example, you may have found it interesting to know that Miss Millie (12 yr old baker and chef extraordinaire) 

 threw the whole house into crisis when she broke the rules by wearing her roller blades indoors, fell over and almost broke her arm! Due to a very bad sprain, we have suffered deeply without freshly baked cookies, brownies or red-wine casseroles! What a nightmare! So if you followed me on twitter you would know a lot more of our behind the scenes life, and boy did we get up to some stuff when Mark went off to the rugby recently...it's not often he goes away leaving me at home, so while the cat's away.....


Anyway, even if I am a bad blogger, I am a very competent twit. Nuff said.

So in the last couple of months I have only been home about 2 weekends (the last 2 actually)


....it all started back in October.....The Artisan  Show:

Love that show. We were flat out. Missy Jo Firth-Young had a lovely make and take going down with constant queues of people waiting to play with her lovely self. We had fun with flowers (above) and mini books (below)

I demoed on the stand, and found time to fit in a workshop which was full of lovely ladies who made fabulous double icon frames decorated with Hot Picks stamps and copper metal. They were brilliant. Like I said, love that show. Mark Sept 30 and Oct 1st in your 2011 calendar now!


Next up we had ArtsyCrafts: 
2 weekends of utterly fabulous creativity at Newport Pagnell and Warrington. I have to say, for me this was my favourite AC so far. I was really looking forward to it because I really, really loved each of the projects so much. And we seemed to get the timing spot on this time for every single class - the majority of people went home with 3 totally finished projects. The pace was nice, we oozed through comfortably.  And the ladies were so lovely who we got to spend the weekends with! Perfick!

There were lots of beginners who totally coped magnificently well with all our weirdo terminology, and many, many repeat customers who consistently call our events 'second to none' which gives us the uber warm fuzzies, because we really do put hours and hours (and hours and hours....) of work into these events. Not just Lin and me, all the team has a special part to play in bringing these special weekend retreats to you all...

so in October 2010 this was what we all had great enjoyment making....

  

 The owl from HP1011 proved very popular sitting inside his niche which was covered with the new PaperArtsy 12x12 Thordon Hall scrapbooking papers. The paper is from Italy (swoon now), and is printed locally to us. I had a big looong list of how I needed the papers to be...I think the printers thought I was asking a bit much, but they searched high and low, and found the most high quality , gorgeous paper, we are so totally over the moon. And they work out at just 62p ea for a double sided 12x12, so didn't we do well!!! You can get packs of 24 sheets (4 of each design) for £14.99 Did I mention they are so smooth that they stamp up beautifully, and we love to alter the colour with a wash of gesso, then ink or paint. So much fun to do! Go ask Santa for some! You know you've been good!

This metal frame decorating the front of one of the projects is made from a grid pattern from a kabuka mould. We run it through the big shot to be embossed, then flatten the metal between the acrylic plates. Its a great technique for all kinds of cool embellishments, and used to great effect to frame this lovely collage stamp HP1006 (above)

I adore this stunning frame project. It was a whole day class. We created the background from heavy duty corrugated card, then painted, embossed with metallic powders, and embellished with the PaperArtsy flower stamps - we needed those PaperArtsy dies quite a bit for this... and the odd hint of metal was fabulous. How lucky were we that the border from the kabuka mould fit perfectly across the bottom of the frame!

 Nice texture from the ribbed paper under the metal-flower top layer.

 And this little frame of layers was so much fun to make too. It uses the new door stamp from HP1011, the frame was covered with canvas and painted.


If you want to come to ArtsyCrafts next year, the dates will be announced very soon, we are looking at late May - mid June 2011, and mid to late October 2011, and as usual, there will be a weekend of the same curriculum on offer at Newport Pagnell (nr Milton Keynes), or Warrington (nr Manchester). The classes are developed by me, Leandra from PaperArtsy, and the fabulously talented Lin from LB Crafts. We are 2 separate companies, and ArtsyCrafts is our joint venture where we share all our ideas of how to use paints, stamps, metal, papers and all kinds of other goodness in a hole weekend of creative joy. You really should come along, 2011 is our 4th year of AC events!

Timmy update:

Oh and we have the uber-talented, product-designer extraordinaire, the one and only Tim Holtz coming over to teach a very special in-depth mixed media mega super duper class with us for a special event in Feb 2011....If you booked a place, watch your email for a 'despatched' notification soon.... because tickets will be landing early December, just in time for those Xmas stockings!!!  (squealing with excitement!!!)

OK, so that is October updated, watch this space for what happened next to Leandra in November!!!

Another fabulous month of excitement!!!