Saturday...again!

This week has been taken up with family and friends so I've had no time for art or challenges unfortunately. I missed some really interesting ones too, like hearts and/or wings and I'd found a really good tutorial on making wings. Also Lace which is my speciality and I could have really gone to town on that one.

However, I did manage to catch up on I.M.T's 'Silver' and because I'm in the middle of a Sampler book course I decided to make one of the pages into a sort of stained glass window like you see in stately homes. I researched silver hallmarks and one caught my eye - Davis & Galt registered a fleu d'lys on a black shield as their trademark c1888-1896. I used this as the basis for the shield in black felt and stamped a fleu d'lys with paint and then embossed it with silver powder. Then I covered a vylene window shape with black organza, then an open net to convey a leaded lights and outlined the shield on it with silver and black cord and an edging of silver/black ribbon. I'm not too happy with it because although it looks OK it is too new and I think it needs distressing but the felt shield is not the right type to react to a heat gun. I'll have another go when I have time to play.

My Sample Book course started on Wednesday of last week, but I had not time to even read the first lesson until Wednesday this week. Bert was here last week and went back to Manchester on Tuesday morning and Ed and family arrived Tuesday afternoon and stayed until Thursday lunchtime. Gareth popped in for an afternoon too. I did have some time on the Wednesderay when they went off to the Big Sheep (a great place for children) and an afternoon at the Atlantic Village adventure park. I made a couple of pages then and completed lesson 1 this Friday but lesson 2 arrived on Wednesday and I've been working my way through 28 pages of instructions since then. I'm happy with most of it, but a couple of pages have not quite come out as they should but it's all a learning curve and I'm using up lots of supplies I had in drawers and never knew how to use. This course is great for that and some of the techniques can be used in my scrap booking.

I also had a mental abberation when I washed my keyboard before Ed came, thinking he would be updating my PC and this caused the keyboard to crash, with half of the keys not working. My new keyboard is causing my PC to crash too somehow, although the installation did seem to be idiotproof...Ha! I've been invited to join a mafia group on Facebook and had to stop before I killed half the town off, that could be quite therapeutic and I can understand people getting hooked.

Well, back to my pages...