Pendants

With travelling and spending time with my sister I have not been able to do much art recently. Last night I made these quick pendants from stones which we found on the beach in Cairns, they are for my sister and they will hopefully remind her of the good times we had during our holiday there.

Cairns holidays

The Cairns holidays are unfortunately over, we got back last night and we are still grieving over the good time and the warm weather we had up there as it is freezing in Brisbane. Even though it was cloudy for the most of our stay , it was still very warm - around 26 degrees. We hired a car so we were able to drive around and visit many places like Port Douglas, the Mossman Gorge, Barron Falls and Cape Tribulation. We were able to see the Mossman hospital where my husband Ross was born and the house where he lived for the first three years of his life. We also saw the house where my mother in law grew up in Cairns and the school she went to.

My sister and I when we arrived at the Cairns Airport

Walking on Trinity Beach

Enjoying BBQ dinner at our resort

Pre-dinner drinks at the Yorkies Knot Boat Club

Ross and I having lunch at Port Douglas

Collaborative book project

Last year I was part of a collaborative book project with four of my friends - Jane Norrish, Louise Magetti, Vanessa Henry and Ellie Philpott. We all picked our own themes and exchanged the books every month. For every book page I made I used the technique from one of the Sommerset Studios magazines with masking tape and glossy magazine pages - painted over with golden paints. I also added my own touch of texture paste and on some I used stencils. These were fun projects and I really enjoyed working on everyone's book.

These pages were for Ellie who chose "Vintage Children" as her theme.

You can see here the background with texture paste put over a stencil and then some Treasure Gold rubbed over the top of it.

These were the pages with the above background and they were done for Louise who chose "Christmas" as her theme - these were the most challenging pages for me as I don't do much Christmas art. I enjoyed using my Cricut for the lettering and also other touches on the page.

These pages were done for Ness who chose "Wings" as her theme - it had to be birds for me but funnily enough it was still a challenge as it came down to not being able to decide which bird images (of thousands I have) I should use (lol).

For those who know Jane won't be surprised that her theme was "Wanton Women", I didn't really know what to do for this page but I managed to find this little poem on the net and I thought it was appropriate to use.

My own book was on "Paris" but I need to scan all the pages so perhaps I can do it in my next post.

My sister has been here for the last week and we are having such fun. Sadly I have to go to work every day but from next week I am on 2 weeks holidays. On Sunday we are off to Cairns for a week and the following week we will spend on the Gold Coast.

Another card with the quilted background

This is another card I did with the quilted background. It is great to have them on standby for quick cards as I need to make them for people.

Only 2 more sleeps until my sister arrives here from Poland on Tuesday and, as you can imagiene, I am so excited about it. I will be having some time off work while she is here and we will be going to Cairns, Gold Coast and Hong Kong on her way back home.

Card made with paper quilt background

This is a very quick card I made today with one of the paper quilt backgrounds. I made it for a colleague who is leaving tomorrow.