Bright and Funky Floral Art for That's Crafty!

 Hello on a rather wet and dismal evening. I luckily went out for my walk today quite early and managed to get home before the deluge started thank goodness!

I have my usual Friday post up over at That's Crafty! blog today and this week it's something bright and cheery, much needed in these very uncertain times. 

I've actually had to stop watching the 10 o'clock news as it's so distressing that I have trouble sleeping after seeing the devastation in Ukraine and it's so heartbreaking seeing the people struggling to leave.

If you'd like to see how this was created then please click HERE

I hope you have a lovely and hopefully crafty weekend (I know I will as I have birthday cards to make!) and will see you soon.

Fliss x

 

Sunflowers For Ukraine

 Hello all, it's been an age since I last posted largely for family reasons and my time on social media has been rather limited but with luck I might be back more often this year - or at least, I hope so!

I have a sunflower piece of artwork to share which I made in support of the people of Ukraine as I've been so shocked and saddened by the wilful destruction going on in their country. The people are so brave and resilient under terrible pressure from Putin's army who should not be invading Ukraine at all!

It makes you feel so helpless when you see all the refugees and the people still in the country living in the underground stations to try and avoid being bombed. I so wish something could be done to stop all this happening.......

I made the background with Distress Oxides and a stencil from That's Crafty! and the gorgeous sunflower image is a stamp design from Melina Dahl which I coloured with Kuretake Zig markers.

I hope you're all well and will try and pop over to see anyone that visits.

Fliss xx

A Trio of Spring Artist Trading Cards

 Hello! I'm here today to share a trio of atcs in Spring colours that I created the other day using things from my bits and pieces box as I haven't been able to craft properly due to my hubby (who caught a cold from his father) passing his cold to me last weekend but unfortunately for me it went to my sinuses then on Monday went down on my chest so I've been feeling somewhat poorly.

The backgrounds on these are my ever useful ink spray overflow or inky stencil presses on the spare paper I always have on one side when spraying ink through masks or stencils.

The flowers were stamped on inky paper too and as you can see, you don't need a smaller stamp than the atc as you can use just part of the image as I've done here.

The text comes from one of Lynne's wildflower stamp sets and one of Melina's new DL key stamp sets and fit my chosen theme perfectly.

I hope you're all having a good week and will be back soon.

Fliss xx

Some Spring Cards

 Hello on a rather rainy and cold day. I have a few photos to share of some Spring and colourful cards I recently made as well as some photos from a walk over Easter to cheer up a dull day.

These all use my current favourite technique to use up scraps of hand decorated papers using ink sprays, stencils and stamps and the second two use leftover bits of papers designed by Amanda Southern and Melina Dahl for That's Crafty!. As you can see, they're all very bright and cheerful.

These photos were taken over the Easter weekend when we went walking at Angmering woods hoping to find some bluebells but sadly we were a week or so too early as everything is late blooming due to the cold weather we've had this last winter.

Have a great weekend and see you soon.

Fliss xx

Back After A Long Blogging Break

 Hello! I'm finally back after rather a long break from blogging as due to family and work commitments there haven't been enough hours in the day to cope with all the social media stuff I should be doing so I'm hoping to gently get back into the swing of things.

I'm over at That's Crafty! blog today with a mixed media piece of artwork that was inspired by the photos I took last summer of the patches of wildflowers along our local coast. It was so lovely to see them with beach huts in the background and I'm eagerly awaiting this year's crop in a couple of months, not to mention the warmer weather too as it's been cold for so long.

You'll find all the details of how I created this by clicking HERE

Here are a couple of pics so that you can see where my inspiration came from 😀

I hope you're all well and managing to cope with the lockdown and will be round to visit as soon as I get a few spare moments.

Fliss xx

Vintage Patchwork for That's Crafty!

 

Hello!

As promised I'm trying to do more blogging as I've been so bad at things lately (and in fact have a now huge catch up on Instagram due very soon as I'm even further behind on that!)

The artwork above is my post this week over at That's Crafty! Blog where I'm sharing my vintage style patchwork of inchies, twinchies and dominoes.

 Hope you like it and will be round to visit soon.

Have a great weekend.

Fliss x

Trying To Get Back To Blogging

 Hello from a very sheepish Fliss! I just realised how long it is since my poor blog had any attention from me and I'm really hoping to do better from now on.

There's been a lot of family drama going on in the background, mostly concerning my increasingly frail father in law as lockdown has not been good for his general wellbeing at all. His walking is now very bad due to his not being able to leave his home for several months and he's now very wobbly and has had several falls, the last one when he fell off a chair and hit his head so he ended up in hospital for a week. He's now requiring a lot of care with 4 times a day visits which the family are corrently dealing with and as you can imagine, it's taken up a lot of time!

On top of that, we have business worries with lack of work, furloughing staff, making staff redundant and so on. I won't bore you with that as I know lots of people are in the same boat.

I'm here today to share my artwork that is on That's Crafty! Blog and is one of the samples that I created for the One Day Special on Hochanda last week. There's also a pic of last week's one too underneath. I have to say that crafting has been the only thing to keep me sane at the moment as there seems to be no end in sight for the current doom and gloom!

As you can see, the latest release from That's Crafty! has seen the return of inchies, twinchies and dominoes but with a twist from Laura and Graham as they devised surfaces for whole sets to sit on if that's what you want to do, although of course you don't have to as my second pic shows 😀

I'm also getting to grips with the new Blogger format so really hope this comes out right!

I'll be round to visit shortly I promise and please forgive me for being missing for so long.

Fliss xx

Always Look For Rainbows!

Hello on a rather dull and blustery day. Hope you're all staying safe and well in our troubled times at the moment.
I have a project to share over at That's Crafty! Blog today which came about as I wanted to create something to show my appreciation for our brave and amazing care workers and this is the least I could do.
If you watched the Hochanda shows yesterday That's Crafty! had, you may have spotted this on the counter next to the gorgeous new stamp designs from the ever talented Melina Dahl. There's rewind if you missed them and they're well worth a look for some amazing demos from the lovely Jo Channon, back in the studio for the first time since lockdown started and her nasty brush with the dreaded Covid-19 virus.

If you'd like to see how I created my rainbow, please click HERE to be transported to the blog.

Have a lovely weekend and see you soon,
Fliss x

Back Again!

Hello everyone, apologies for being missing over the last few weeks. I've been having a very stressful time dealing with the furloughing of some of Andy's staff who ran out of work and no more had come in to give them due to the ongoing pandemic.
I've had to do webinars with our payroll software provider and do a lot of reading up via the HMRC website and various other sources on how to deal with the Job Retention Scheme and calculate what can be paid to the staff and reclaim.
It's lucky I checked the calculations on the HMRC calculator before finishing the payroll as I discovered the payroll software was not using the right calculation method so I had to try and find out if they were going to sort it out. There were lots of complaints from other users but no explanation forthcoming so in the end I amended the figures to agree to HMRC's before making the claim. I was glad I did as they paid the grant in 3 days!
Our payroll provider said today that we would have to amend the figures to make them agree to HMRC's which is what I suspected as I couldn't see any other way of getting them correct due to the way the payroll usually calculates pay. I don't want to change providers as their accounting software is very good so I guess we're stuck with it!

Anyway enough whinging and on to much happier things as I've been crafting to keep me sane so here are some of my recent creations:

A tutorial for the following 4 floral note cards can be found on That's Crafty! blog by clicking HERE

Hope you like these and I should be round to catch up over the weekend as I have mostly finished with my payroll and accounting duties for the moment - luckily doing what I do, I'm the only one that won't get furloughed as someone has to work out what to pay everyone else!!!

Stay safe and well,
Fliss xx

On Butterfly Wings

Hello everyone on a lovely sunny Good Friday. I hope you're all surviving the current lockdown and not going stir crazy! I always find crafting helps and luckily I'm still able to go out for a walk each day and so far everyone is very good at keeping their distance.

I'm over at That's Crafty! Blog today with some very bright and pretty journal pages, chock full of floral detail as I wanted to show another way to use a lovely texture stamp.

I hope you all have a lovely Easter, well as much as you can under the current circumstances. We can't spend the weekend with our children as one is stuck in Brighton and the other in London but we will at least be able to talk to them via Skype.

See you soon.

Fliss xx

Back to Nature and all that!

Hello!

Hope you're all ok and managing to cope with all that's been thrown at you since the world went mad! This is a bit of a long post as I managed to snap a few pics on my walk this morning as nature is growing fast even if the rest of the world has come to rather a standstill.

I'm also over at That's Crafty! blog today where I've gone back to nature as I thought we could all do with a dose of serenity, the perfect time to share these particular art journal pages that were created for the February One Day Special on Hochanda.

I just love these gorgeous trees that were stamps created from the hand carved designs made by the very talented Lynne Moncrieff.

Now for my nature photos that I had to snap as it's so lovely to see nature in bloom.

I hope you like these as must as I enjoyed seeing and snapping the original flora.

Stay safe and well and keep on crafting!

Fliss x

Feelin' Groovy Baby!

Hello, hope you're all ok and managing to stay positive and cheerful in spite of all that's happening in the world at the moment.

Everything feels rather strange like a row of Saturdays and Sundays and going to the supermarket really is an ordeal! I did my usual weekly shop yesterday and we all had to queue around the outer edges of the huge carpark, 2 metres apart to enter the store. That took around half an hour as the queue was so long but when you actually got in the store it was a different story with quite a few people getting much closer than they were supposed to as they were so eager to grab the food! I mentioned this on the way out and was told they were now limiting the number of people in the store  as they seemed to have under estimated the length of time it took to do the shopping and pay.

It wasn't all bad though as the elderly man in front of me at the checkout had what I though was a walking stick in his hand but when he put it on his trolley I saw it was a riding crop!!! I nearly asked if it was to warn people away from him but thought better of it lol

I have my usual Friday post up over at That's Crafty! blog and this week I'm sharing a rather funky art journal spread with a retro vibe that I created for the last Hochanda shows.

You'll find all the details over at the blog.

Keep calm and keep on crafting and see you soon.
Fliss x

Art Journaling Day

Hello, I hope you're all coping in the current very difficult circumstances and surviving isolation if you have to do that. We're now on lockdown here in the UK and it's been difficult already as I've been doing financial things over the last couple of weeks as I'm the accounts and financial manager for my hubby's partnership which if you didn't know is an architectural business.

It's not just the shops suffering from lack of income as the business has lots of fees outstanding and no-one is paying them! This makes it so hard as we obviously can't pay our bills so we're scrambling around trying to find out what to do!

I have a couple of art journal spreads to share, one of which was my That's Crafty! post for last Friday and is very topical as is the other which shows how nature is so important to me although at the moment, the nearest I'll get is my garden! I think by the time the virus issue is over it might look a lot better than it does now.

This second is my nature refuge one.

This one has an ink spray beackground which I misted first using a stencil with walnut flat matte spray, flipping the stencil over and pressing the inky side on the other page. I followed this with the same stencil and aqua flat matte spray, flipping the stencil over again and repeating the previous step.

I stamped Alexa's gorgeous face on the right hand page with black ink, colouring her hair, eyes and lips with the amazing new satin inks from That's Crafty! I coloured her face with Prima watercolour pencils.

I stamped the trees (by Lynne Moncrieff) and mushrooms (by Melina Dahl) on the left hand page with dark brown ink, colouring the mushrooms with pencils and adding blossom to the trees by dotting with white, light pink and magenta multi surface paints until I was happy with the effect.

I then stamped the flower from the Alexa's face set directly on the pages with the same ink and coloured them with orange satin ink. I finished off with one of Lynne's fabulous affirmations from the trees set I used which I stamped on a scrap of ink spray overflow paper.

Have a great rest of the week and stay safe and well.

Fliss x

That's Crafty! and Other News

Hello all, I hope you're well and have had a good week, definitely better than mine anyway as I had a rather traumatic experience on Wednesday afternoon as a man phoned up saying he was from the security section of my bank and that a large transaction was about to go through my bank account and had I originated the payment, which I had not!

Suffice to say it went on from there with him piling on more and more pressure in various ways but it wasn't until he tried to get me to transfer money from a savings account to my current account (to protect my compromised accounts of course!) that I realised there was something radically wrong with the phone call (the number of the caller being that on my debit card by the way) and left him hanging on about to send me a "security email to prove his identity" and phoned Andy.

Andy phoned the bank and was told it was definitely a scam. I can't tell you how stupid I felt letting it get as far as it did, even though I did realise it before it was too late. You hear stories of other people being taken in by these sort of scams and don't understand how that happens. I can tell you now having been on the receiving end of one of these calls just how plausible and convincing these people can sound. It's really shaken me up too!

On another note entirely, a much more cheerful one, I have my usual Friday post up over at That's Crafty! blog and I'm sharing one of my sample journal spreads for this week's One Day Special on Hochanda featuring some of the gorgeous new stamp designs from Lynne which I absolutely love.

Here's one half of the spread but you'll need to hop over to the blog to see all of it.

Have a great weekend and see you soon.
Fliss x

Floral Tag for That's Crafty!

Hello everyone, a slightly late post today to let you know that I have my usual Friday tutorial up over at That's Crafty! Blog and this week I'm sharing a mixed media tag that I created for the January Hochanda shows.
It features some of the gorgeous new doodle stamps designed by Melina and topped off with one of her lovely floral images.
Here's a sneak peek to hopefully tempt you to hop over.

As you can see, I seem to be in the bright image on a darker background phase although I know I'll revert to my usual bright and cheery style very soon.

Hope you've had a good week and that you have a lovely weekend.
See you soon.
Fliss xx

A Bit of Bling for That's Crafty!

Hello on a somewhat dull and dreary Friday. A quick post to let you know that I'm over at That's Crafty! Blog today with a mixed media piece of artwork with a bit of bling from the amazing That's Crafty! 3D holographic gel medium and some bright and cheery flowers.
Here's a sneak peek to tempt you to hop over if you'd like to see the whole project.

You can just see the bling in the background and hope you like the bright flowers as I wanted a strong contrast to the darker background which was an experiment on MDF with the flat matte ink sprays.

Have a great day and a lovely weekend.
See you soon.

Fliss xx

Longing For Spring Artist Trading Box

Hello everyone on a very wet and miserable day here in the South of England. I decided to finish off the artist trading box I started creating last week to cheer myself up as I'm really longing for some better weather to arrive.
Hope you like my cheery artwork.

Here's how it began:

I found some ink spray overflow paper with shades of green and yellow with white space in places and a sprinkle of orange in my box - perfect for a spring themed creation. I took the gorgeous leaf silhouette from one of the sets designed by Lynne and stamped leaves in shades of green on the papers cut to fit my box. A couple then had additional stamping with another leaf and orange ink.

I stamped some of my own flowers, choosing the one that makes me think of spring as it looks a little like a parrot tulip and coloured them with flat matte sprays, using orange, saffon and tomato.

I then assembled my box adding in some leaves from my box, not exactly spring shades but oranges, browns etc to contrast with the background.

 

I added text from Lynne's Leaf sets and some of her beautiful affirmations together with the lovely butterfly from That's Crafty! Textures Collection set 3 stamped on overflow paper.

I hope this has cheered you up if you have a nasty wet day.
Have a good week whatever the weather.
Fliss xx