Craft and ramblings about life: 2012

Well I am back again. Had a very busy last few months with one thing and another, mainly my baby son having to go into hospital for a minor op. He was in and out same day but we have had this hanging over us for months, and you know how us Mummys worry. The thing that seemed to bother him the most was not the pain or anything like that but the fact that he wasn't allowed anything to eat or drink. He sure made up for it afterwards though and ate a days worth of food within half an hour... I was worried he was going to pop! So as you can imagine I've been a right stresshead!

The first Dream Valley Challenge for 2012 is Anything Goes! I love these sort of challenges as I like to try and do something completely different and try out a new idea. I have a habit of starting out on a project then getting distracted by 'real life' and end up with a stack of bits and pieces which I put to one side in the hope that I will one day get to finish it. I wanted to make a bookmark out of some of the bits and pieces, but wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do, so remembered a phrase that someone I used to know used to say a lot and so I decided to 'Just wing it!'.

I have used some beautiful stamps Hannah Lynn's Bookworm Fairy on the main part of the bookmark and Sweet Pea's Lisa Victoria's The Butterfly Dragon on the 'tag'. I used a large tag from a pack which I bought a while ago and never got round to using, spritzed with Glimmermist sprays in pinks and purples and blues to co-ordinate with the colours of the coloured images and swooshed them around a bit with another smaller tag which I had cut using a Sizzix tag die. Not a drop of that beautiful shimmery ink was wasted! Once it had all dried, as is usual with any paper or card which gets wet with inks and stuff, it was all curled up so I used some stiff black card to flatten it out again and trimmed to size.

For the smaller tag image, I stamped the wings onto fantasy film using an iron and trimmed them and layered them so they stand out more. For once, I think the camera has actually caught the effect quite well, but it looks even better in real life. The flower I created myself with some shimmery chiffon type material which I had been given, using a flower diecut to create the petals and held all together with a brad. I realised once it was on the background it was disappearing a little with the colours so I cut another shape out of black card and backed the flower with it for definition. A couple of eyelets and a short length of purple ribbon to link the two parts together and it was complete. :)

Any regular visitor to my blog will know, I love quotes and often spend many an hour browsing quotes sites online looking for that perfect quote. I found a perfect quote this time and just in case you can't make it out on the photograph it reads “To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.” written by A C Grayling in the Financial Times.

Now, as it is a bookmark I thought I would show it to you in use in the manner to which it is intended, to mark a place in a book. The book I show it with here is the new book in the Wereworld series, written by an old schoolfriend of mine, Curtis Jobling (yes he of Bob The Builder and Raa Raa the Noisy Little Lion and not forgetting Frankenstein's Cat of course). Shadow of The Hawk is the third book in the series and I picked it up when he was doing a book signing session at Waterstones. See, even the book fits in with my wing it theme!