Something of the marvelous

I created this scrapbook page using paper from the  Kaisercraft Fairy Dust Collection. It is such a pretty paper that I wanted to find a photo that was as magical as the illustration and this pretty pansy captured in my garden seemed perfect. I added some pressed violas, washi tape, a metal butterfly embellishment, an applique dragonfly, some hand stitching, and some rhinestone embellishments.

I agree with this quote by Aristotle one hundred percent. Everywhere you look in nature there is something marvelous to be found, something to fill your heart with joy.

I love that pansies continue to bloom throughout  the cold weather, adding colour to the winter garden. Each winter I grow them in pots and tubs outside my studio where it is lovely and sunny. They provide a cheerful welcome to visitors coming through the gate.

I am joining in the Add a Quote challenge over at Try it on Tuesday.

Finn

We recently celebrated Finn’s third birthday with a trip to one of his favourite river spots, where he loves to run, explore, swim and chase sticks. I made this scrapbook page for his album, which is filling up fast.

Here are some close-ups of the details.

I love to layer papers.

The burlap gives it a natural feel.

I used collage elements and did some chalking through stencils.

Washi tape and ribbon co-ordinate with the colour theme of water and nature.

This pretty sticker was from Graphic 45’s Botanical Tea collection.

 

Treasure The Memories

This is one of my favourite photographs of my grandmother. It would have been taken in the 1930s when she was in her twenties, before she married. I love her dress; I wish I knew what colour it was. Although when I think of my grandmother, I always think of her as old, I can see her in the face of this young woman, gentle and reflective.

For this scrapbook page I used ribbon, lace, paper flowers and butterflies, and beads from a broken vintage necklace. To honour my grandmother’s love of gardening, I added pressed flowers from my garden – alyssum, feverfew and pansy.

 

Granddad

Originally posted on my Wattle Lane blog.

My granddad was a special person in my life. Although, while I was growing up, we lived quite a distance from my grandparents, we would have a family holiday with them once a year, and I have some very fond memories of those holidays. Eventually we moved closer to them and, for the last few years of my grandfather’s life, he lived just around the corner from us.

I remember him as a kind, gentle man with a great sense of humour and, what we thought at the time, some crazy ideas, always trying to come up with new inventions and ways of making his fortune.

To me, he was an inspiration. He could play the piano by ear, never having learnt music, a skill I always envied. He took up painting later in life, creating many lovely works of art. I often wonder if I inherited my creative genes from his side of the family. His sister, my great-aunt, was also an accomplished pianist, as well as dabbling in many different crafts. My mother sewed all our clothes when we were young, taught me how to knit and to do tapestry and cross-stitch, wrote pieces for magazines, and has encouraged me in all my creative endeavours.

Creating this scrapbook page of my grandfather when he was young seemed like the perfect opportunity to use these tiny playing cards that I have had for a while.

I have always loved this photograph of Granddad taken during the years of the Second World War. The music-themed background paper seemed perfect for celebrating his love of piano music.The background paper with the poem and the bird was a free artist paper from the Somerset Studio magazine. I added the green ribbons and stitching to add a pop of colour to the layout.

I have many more photos of my grandfather taken over the years with his family, which I am looking forward to putting into scrapbook layouts to document his life and to remember the wonderful man who I was fortunate to have called my granddad.

The Language of Flowers

Larkspur…lightness
Pansy…think of me
Feverfew…warmth
Lobelia…malevolence
Forget-me-not…true love, forget me not
Alyssum…worth beyond beauty
Buttercup…childlike
Lavender…devotion, serenity

Make A Wish

When I saw this pretty scrapbook paper from Kaisercraft’s Fairydust collection, I knew I had the perfect photo to go with it. It was one that Nick took a few years ago that I have always loved. I added some honeycomb stencilling, ribbons and fibres, vintage lace, chipboard embellishments, and a few splashes of watercolour paint.
I hope this little garden fairy has added some whimsical delight to your day!

Dandelion, puffs away,
Make my wish come true someday.

 

Halloween Mixed-media Art Journal Page

A Visit From The Ancestors

This page in my art journal was made using scrapbook papers, fabrics, chalk, paper lace, and a metal embellishment.
A while ago I was given some quilt fabrics. There were several black pieces with designs of silver stars and swirls, and were perfect for including in this project.

The All Hallow’s Eve scrapbook paper is from Graphic 45’s Time to Flourish collection.

The ancestor pictures are from Kaisercraft’s Betsy’s Couture collection.

The picture of the haunted house is from The Graphics Fairy, which is a great resource for free vintage images, crafting ideas and tutorials.

I love that in my art journal I can tell a story in pictures rather than words.

Keepsakes Box

I often keep cardboard boxes that things have come in, thinking that they might be useful for storage. This one was a particularly nice, sturdy box.

After having it sit around for quite some time, I decided to embellish it and use it as a keepsakes box.
I decorated it with scrapbook papers, die cuts, fabric trims, buttons, and inspirational phrases.

Now I have a lovely box for my keepsakes.

Halloween Mixed-Media

Esther’s Attic

 

Vintage Scrapbooking

Recently my dear Aunty Jo passed away, aged 80 years old. She was a very close member of our family and is dearly missed by us all.

Very skilled at handcrafts, she was seldom seen without her knitting at her side. When we were little, she would knit us beautiful cardigans and jerseys, and make lovely clothes for our dolls. She embroidered tablecloths, and stitched tapestries that adorned the walls of her home. In later years she learned to quilt and made each of us beautiful patchwork quilts for our beds. It was she who inspired me to take up quilting, a hobby I quickly became hooked on. Right up until the last few months of her life, Josephine was knitting clothes for the prem babies at our local hospital, and blankets for the orphans in Romania.

I wanted to honour Aunty Jo’s memory by creating pages that reflected her love of crafts. I used vintage doilies, lace, and buttons that once belonged to her. The photographs are layered with patchwork fabrics, and the page borders hand stitched with embroidery floss from her stash of cottons. The little purple rings holding the inchies to the photographs are stitch markers used in knitting.

I love seeing her in the old, black and white photographs showing the styles of the times.

Her warm personality and sense of humour clearly shine through.

New Cover for Scrappy Cupcake Angels

My novel, Scrappy Cupcake Angels, has just come out with a new cover. I think the new design has more of a crafty feel and is perfect for the story inside.

Most online retailers are now selling the new edition, but some, such as Amazon, may still have the old cover on their website until they have sold the books they have in stock. It is available as a paperback, hardback, and ebook.

Here is the new cover.

 

Amazon.com

Amazon UK

Barnes & Noble

Fishpond (NZ)

Also, I have a new blog, which will be all about the book. It will have recipes and crafts from the story, as well as news on upcoming books in the Wattle Lane series. Click here to take a look. www.wattlelane.wordpress.com

A Steampunk Halloween

When black cats prowl and pumpkins gleam,
May luck be yours this Halloween.
                                               ~Author Unknown

I made this little Halloween book using papers from Graphic 45’s Steampunk Spells, and Olde Curiosity Shoppe collections, as well as embellishments from 7 Gypsies, Graphic 45, Tim Holtz, and various other ephemera.

Weekend in Wellington

This is a scrappy collage page I made of our recent visit to Wellington. Although we were only there a couple of days, we tried to fit in as much as we could. We went to the Andy Warhol exhibition at Te Papa, and to the Gregory Crewdson exhibition at the City Gallery, which included photographs from his Beneath the Roses series portraying the dark heart of contemporary Americana, as well as photos from his Sanctuary and Fireflies works. We visited our favourite bookshops and art & craft shops, went for a morning stroll along Queen’s Wharf, and had dinner at our favourite waterfront restaurant.

Olde Curiosity Shoppe

This project was inspired by one that I saw on Starrgazer Creates blog. You can view her blog here. I fell in love with the Olde Curiosity Shoppe line of papers by Graphic 45, and a printer tray seemed like a great way to display the images, along with charms, trinkets, dried flowers and gemstones, to create an olde worlde feel of a time gone by.

The tiny apothecary bottles are filled with berries, seeds, herbs and spices.

I made the birds eggs from polymer clay.

I think it evokes the atmosphere of a dusty old shop from the Victorian era, tucked away down an alley, filled with herbal medicines, strange specimens and unusual curiosities.

Autumn Fun

This is one of my favourite photos of Cody, full of the joys of autumn, running through fallen leaves.

The Art of Pressed Flowers

A while ago when my mother was having a clear-out, she gave me an old flower press and some pressed flowers that she had pressed many years ago, some of which still lay between the pages of old telephone books. She knew that I could find a use for them in my craft projects. They are great for making cards and bookmarks, for embellishing scrapbook pages, and for using in mixed media art.

I decided to paint the top of the flower press to add a bit of colour.

I have been experimenting with flowers from my garden, learning which ones press well and which ones keep their colour. I’ve found that oranges and yellows seem to hold their colour well, as do mauves and violets, but pinks will often fade to nothing, and reds will sometimes change to a brown colour. When I go for walks, I collect interesting ferns, grasses and leaves that I think will press well. Below is a variety of flowers and foliage picked from my garden.

I placed the flowers and leaves between sheets of blotting paper, building up layers. It’s a good idea to label them as you go, as it is easy to forget what they are when you go back to them several weeks later. They should be left for at least two weeks, although thicker plants may take up to six weeks. Of course, you don’t have to use a flower press. Placing the flowers between sheets of blotting paper, then putting them between the pages of a book with something heavy on top, such as a pile of books, will work just as well.

The calendula and lobelia held their colour well as you can see from this bookmark. The cute little feverfew flowers added some nice texture.

My grandmother always loved flowers and gardening, and all the homes she lived in had beautiful gardens. She did the flowers for her church for many years, providing flowers from her own garden, and also ran the flower stall at the church fairs. The pressed flowers that I used on this scrapbook page are ones that my mother pressed more than twenty years ago. Amazingly they have held their colour for all those years, and made a wonderful embellishment for my grandmother’s page.

Pinwheels & Whirligigs

Pinwheels and whirligigs provide a fun combination of colour and motion. They make a great accent for scrapbook pages, a design element for quilts, and add whimsy to the garden.

I wanted to do a bright, colourful page for the beginning of spring, and remembered a tip I had seen in a scrapbooking magazine a while ago on how to make pinwheels. They are easy to make. All you need to do to make one pinwheel is cut out two each of three different size circles. Then cut each circle in half. Layer them together with the spinners all facing the same way. Then add a colourful button or brad to the centre. You can make small pinwheels from leftover paper scraps.

Products used: K & Company green vine embossed vellum, cardstock, Bella Felt Frame, Tim Coffey Die-cut stickers, buttons, paper scraps

A couple of years ago, I made a quilt with a whirligig design, in my favourite colours of purple and green. The design is called End of the Day and came from the book, More Quilts from The Quiltmaker’s Gift.

Whirligigs make a fun addition to the garden, adding a splash of colour on a still day, or spinning cheerfully in the breeze. Whirligigs likely originated from weather vanes, used by farmers and sailors to indicate wind speed and direction. They soon became popular as wind toys, and early whirligigs often depicted figures that moved as the propeller twirled. I love walking through graveyards and seeing colourful whirligigs brightening the graves.

In Scrappy Cupcake Angels, a row of whirligigs twirl in the breeze from the narrow strip of garden along the front of Mr. Thomas’s cottage.

Chasing A Dream

For as long as I can remember, I have dreamed of making a living as a novelist, of working from home and creating stories that people might want to read. As I dreamed, I worked as a supermarket deli assistant, a fiber tester, a data entry operator, an apple picker, a cider bottler, a home help, and a despatch worker. Eventually I sold a novella to a magazine in Scotland. Then I sold a few more. But I realised that this would never provide me with the means to give up my day job and write full-time. So I started writing novels. But several novels and a pile of rejection letters later, I decided that if I was ever going to achieve my dream, I would have to take control of my career and be proactive.

Last year I set myself some goals. I would write a novel, publish it, and promote it myself. Then any success or failure would be down to me. So I wrote a novel about a subject I love—a scrapbook novel, I bought a self-publishing package, I set up a website and blog, and I chased my dream.

I chose Abbott Press to publish my book. As a division of Writer’s Digest, whom I have found to be a valuable source of information and resources over the years, I knew that they were all about helping authors realise their dreams. Abbott Press have been wonderful, helping me to produce a book I can be proud of. With their guidance, I felt in complete control every step of the way. I learned a lot about my writing and about the whole publishing process, from formatting to editing and design.

These are exciting times for writers, with so many opportunities to take control of your own career, and not have to wait around forever to be noticed by an agent or publisher. With self-publishing and e-publishing, and the great opportunities available for self-promotion through social media and blogging etc., it has become easier than ever for a writer to turn their dream into reality. With a little imagination and a lot of hard work, the possibilities are limitless.

Last week was an exciting time for me when I got to hold my book for the very first time. Although it was incredibly exciting to have my first story published in My Weekly all those years ago, there is nothing quite as special as seeing your name on an actual book.

What the future holds, nobody knows. Although I am not yet making a living from writing, at least for now I have been given the chance to live my dream, to stay at home and write stories—and hope that they bring people enjoyment. I have many more stories to tell about Wattle Lane Keepsakes and the people who gather there to explore their creativity and embellish life’s magic moments. I look forward to sharing more of their stories with you, my readers.

Scrappy Cupcake Angels

Nothing can quell Angeline Dunwich’s excitement as she stands before Wattle Lane Keepsakes. As she opens the door to her scrapbooking shop for the first time, Angeline hopes to encourage the residents of her small New Zealand town to explore their creativity and capture memories. Little does she know that Wattle Lane Keepsakes will very soon become the weekly destination for four women drawn to scrapbooking for widely different reasons.

Every Thursday Angeline teaches the Scrappy Cupcake Angels how to find joy through scrapbooking, and each of the four learns to confront her fears and to understand what is important in life. As Grace works on a scrapbook for her mother who has dementia, she wonders if it will help her mother cling to her last memories. Tegan scraps her travel photos with an insatiable wanderlust while contemplating where her heart really belongs. As Jodi creates beautiful layouts of her daughter, she questions whether any of her efforts will help mend her broken family. Kayla finds it easiest to express herself through her art, but secretly speculates whether she will ever gain the confidence to realise her dreams.

As Angeline opens her home and her heart to her new friends, only time will tell if the Scrappy Cupcake Angels can help her overcome her own greatest fear and fulfil a lifelong dream.

Scrappy Cupcake Angels is available as a paperback, hardback and eBook from:

Abbott Press

Amazon 

Barnes & Noble

Amazon UK

Fishpond (New Zealand)

Art Deco Weekend 2012

On the 3rd February 1931, my home town of Napier was destroyed by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake and subsequent fires. It was rebuilt in the Art Deco style of the times and is often referred to now as the “Art Deco Capital of the World.” Every February, Napier hosts an Art Deco weekend to celebrate its heritage, with lots of entertainment and events. Visitors come from all over the world for a weekend of fun and to experience a slice of the Art Deco era, with many people dressing up in Art Deco clothing.

The weather this year was perfect for the celebrations with lots of things going on including a vintage car parade, aerial displays by vintage aircraft, street entertainers, steam train rides, Art Deco walks, concerts, and events such as the Gatsby Picnic, Depression Dinner and costume competitions.

I made this Art Deco page at Jo’s scrapbooking class, perfect for a photo of one of the vintage cars.

Some more photos of the weekend.

Vintage cars.

Street entertainers—I loved these living statues!

 

Vintage aircraft performed aerial displays over Napier throughout the weekend.

And, of course, the wonderful Art Deco buildings.

Welcome to my Creative Journey!

Although I have been writing and scrapbooking for several years, since I began writing a scrapbooking novel the two have become very much entwined and I can’t think about one without thinking of the other. Soon I am about to embark on the exciting journey of self-publishing my first novel, which is in the final stages of editing before I submit it to Abbott Press. It has taken a little longer to get there than planned, however, due to unforeseen circumstances.

Last year I broke my wrist after slipping from a wooden ledge around the edge of our raised vegetable garden. My arm was in a cast for three months and I had to learn how to do everything with one hand while having to rely on others for help. Luckily I was still able to write stories—one-handed typing on the computer—but all crafts were put on hold for a while, which was very frustrating. My fingers were so swollen that it took another three months of physio after the cast came off to get my fingers and wrist working again.

By Christmas time I was ready to get creative again. During a visit to my local scrapbooking store, Scrapbook Corner, for some supplies to make Christmas cards, I saw one of Jo’s wonderful layouts on display and was inspired to sign up for one of her classes. It was a fun afternoon and I learned several new techniques including how to make dimensional flowers, which gave an elegant look to the page. The heritage look of the layout Jo had designed made it perfect for the photo I wanted to use of my great aunt Marili, who passed away last year, aged 96.

Materials used: Bo-Bunny papers • chipboard die-cut • ribbon flowers • handmade paper flowers

Music was a big part of Marili’s life—she was a pianist and a music teacher—and I wanted to convey this in a layout, so I made another page using a similar colour scheme with music-themed papers and embellishments. I repeated some of the same elements used in the first layout, such as the layered papers and the black ribbon across the page, and it gave me a chance to practice making paper flowers, which is a lot of fun and becoming easier the more I do.

Materials used: 7 gypsies paper • Fancy Pants Designs paper • Karen Foster Design paper • Legacy paper • Royal & Langnickel music rub-ons • The Paper Parlour alphabet die-cut stickers • handmade flower embellishments • ribbon • musical notes chipboard diecut

Two things I learned in the last few months—how to make dimensional flowers, and to step carefully in the garden.