What a brilliant weekend....

Have just spent a fantastic weekend at Artsycrafts in Warrington. I met lots of lovely people, and under the expert tuition of Lin and Leandra , made some wonderful things!

We started making Gothic arches on Saturday morning...here is mine in it's very early stages...

.... a bit more....

After a much needed coffee break we started stamping onto calico for the insert, and then used Distress Inks to colour with. After a delicious lunch ( my calorie count went into total over-ride!!) we made a Castle Niche which was really cute. We used Terra for texture, then painted, stamped and embossed metal to our hearts content...

After dinner, which wasn't without giggles, we did some stitching and beading onto the stamped calico. At this point I was glad I'd passed on the wine, as needle threading proved quite tricky enough when sober! We then did the '30 minute Challenge'. Leandra gave each group a bag of miscellaneous materials and we had 30 minutes to create a joint card. This was hilarious, and resulted in the most bizarre pieces of work, as styles and colours CLASHED!!! Then off to bed, where I spent an hour tweaking my Mothers' Day present (more of that later), before sleeping extremely soundly!

After yet more calories at breakfast we were back to work, this time making the beads to dangle from the bottom of the arch, We started by painting a small wooden bead with Viva Metallic Paints, then dipping it into  a Melting Pot of hot UTEE. The results were amazing...will definitely be doing more of this!

We then made metal embellishments for our arches and put the whole thing together...and here it is!!

..here's a few close-ups too...

I just absolutely love it...in fact, I think it is the nicest thing I have made...this year, anyway!!

After our lunch...complete with March Hare..... we decorated a wooden bowl with embossed, painted and Glimmer misted metal and small mosaic tiles.

It really was a fantastic weekend and I would recommend Artsycrafts to anyone!! 

I then returned home, where I found more wonderful things waiting for me....a huge bunch of flowers from Sam; a DVD of my favourite film ever, Jack & Sarah (if you've never seen it, make sure you do....it's just lovely) and Tim Holtz's new book from Bethany (huge Brownie points!!), and a fabulous lasagne made by my wonderful hubby! It was also lovely to see my mum at last, so late in the day, and hand over her gift that I had only finished off on Saturday night in my hotel room! She was thrilled, and here it is...

...a book of quotes, made using Audrey Tan's idea of coffee filters for pages, from last months Craft Stamper.

I made the tags for inside the pages using Distress Inks and Tim's stamps. The quotes were printed on cartridge paper and coloured and stamped with a background stamp.

Phew!! Well that was my weekend..hope yours was just as good!

Jayne x