Surf's Up by Penny Black holiday card #craftbarnchallenge

This is my entry for the Craft Barn's challenge of the week, the theme being 'holiday.'  I know my work is still looking pretty amateurish at the moment, but I am still practicing.  I just used coloured pencils and gel pens to colour this image in.  The stamp is 'Surf's Up' by Penny Black and I used gloss accents to make things look a bit shiny.

For info on this week's Craft Barn challenge please visit http://thecraftbarnblog.blogspot.co.uk/

Bag featuring From the Hollow 'Serena' stamp #Craftbarnchallenge

I've been meaning to try my hand at rubber stamping for a while, but this week's Craft Barn challenge to make a bag prompted me to stop worrying about how good my colouring is and just give it a go.  For this I used the From the Hollow 'Serena' stamp, some Trimcraft paper and a lilac blank bag.  

I coloured my images with a mixture of normal pencils and Spectrum Noir markers in some of their red shades.  I enjoyed myself so much! Whilst I know my shading of the stamp is far from perfect, it has set me on a journey of studying tutorials and getting a bigger colour range of markers to make my final results look more professional.  Hope you like the bag!

For this weeks Craft Barn challenge visit http://thecraftbarnblog.blogspot.co.uk/

Balloon Memories and a Tutorial. #Weloveballoons

I'm bursting with ideas that have popped in to my head about balloons.  When I think of balloons, I think of childhood.  In fact the most traumatic of childhood memories involves a balloon, a beautiful opalescent purple helium balloon in the shape of a heart.  I loved it!  And so it seemed did my little sister... I'm guessing our ages were something around 8 and 4 years old.  I was pretty good at sharing as a child, but I drew the line at giving my sister my precious balloon as even I was aware of the hazards.  I had managed to walk back to the car with the balloon tied around my wrist, I carefully kept it out of my fathers eye line whilst he drove us home with the precious cargo, but when we got home something disastrous happened.  My sister wanted to hold it, not just hold it, but hold it outside!!  

I was not at all happy about this, but she promised my mother that she would hold it tightly outside and that my mother could hold her hand for supervision.  However, the inevitable happened and she let my beautiful purple balloon slip far, far away in to the sky.  I came out of the house just at the moment my purple balloon became a purple dot in the sky.  The reason for this was that my sister wanted to see how far it would float.  And although as children, it seemed there was no limit to how high a balloon can fly, technically the answer would have been roughly 10 km.  SO there's a fact for you dear sister, you really didn't need to sacrifice my wonderful balloon.  However, I suppose you did need to get me back after that wonderful haircut I gave you with that delightfully wonky fringe.

Now, I have my own children and balloons still provide a constant source of fun.  From balloon battles to drawing silly faces there is much fun to be had.  However,my favourite way of cheering up the children when they are ill is to make them some balloon flowers.

 These are super easy to make, but are pretty impressive to look at and are great for parties or just for cheering the kids up.  If you can blow a balloon you can make these...

 TUTORIAL:

For the above flower I used:
5 standard sized red balloons
2 standard sized yellow balloons
1 caterpillar balloon
Sharpie pen
Balloon pump


I suggest using a balloon pump as it is the easiest way to describe to you how much air you need to pump in to each balloon.

Step 1: Get two red balloons and give them 6 pumps of air.  Hold one whilst you are pumping the other as you will need to tie these two together.

Step 2: Repeat the above step with two more balloons.

Step 3: Fill the final red balloon with 6 pumps of air and twist and tie so that you pull together all 5 balloons.  

Step 4: Pump 2 yellow balloons with 3 pumps of air and tie together, then slide in to place and twist until they become the centre part of the flower.

Step 5: If you want to add a stalk, I used a caterpillar balloon, but you can also use any long balloon and tie around the balloons.

Step 6: Use a Sharpie pen to add detail.

This post was part of the Perfect Party UK 'We love balloons - blogger competition.'  They have some glorious balloons on their website, so if you want to take a look or just want to find out more about the competition head to Perfect Party UK.