Crafting past and present

It was difficult to know where to start with this blog. It is something I have had in mind to do for some time. I have been living in Spain for two years now and my crafting has changed in that time. Before then I would have a go at anything. I always went to the big craft show at Birmingham NEC twice a year where I saw new materials and techniques to tempt me. Now my access to such variety is much curtailed, and I rely heavily on online videos and tutorials to keep me up to date. Fortunately, during the last five years of employment in England I built up a large stock of materials which I am now using, and I supliment this by buying online. I am lucky enough to have my own craft room out here, and I have made some like-minded friends through a small craft shop in a neighbouring town. I have not found anyone locally to swap ATCs with so I take part in a couple of online swaps, and also swap personally with two ladies in Australia and one in UK. So I thought I'd start by showing you a few ATCs I made recently on the theme of Autumn.

For the first one I started with a piece of glossy, white card that I painted with a very wet brush and colour from Distress ink pads swiped onto a tile, in this case I used Shabby shutters, Peeled paint and Broken china. While it was still wet I scattered large crystals of sea salt on it, left it to dry and then brushed the salt of. The second one has a Crafty Individuals background stamp and the last one has a background lightly tinted with a variety of Distress inks and overstamped with individual leaves from a nature set by Woodware. The chinese lanterns are a stamp by Lavinia, which I stamped again on cream card, painted with twinkling H2O's, and used to decoupage the individual lanterns. The honesty, conkers and toadstools were from the Elusive Images stamp plate Nature table. I coloured them with copic markers and used glossy accents to put a shine on the conkers. The honesty was painted with the white from the Artquest pearlescent watercolour palette to give it that shiny papery look. The script above the conkers is a Serendipity stamp.