My Home is my Castle ATCs

This year I am again participating in Marion's swap. Title is as above.
Here are my creations.

Now lives with Peggy Gato

Now lives with Birgit

Now lives with Clau

Thanks again for the invite Marion. I look forward to receiving back artwork from round the world. One from bockel24 would be nice too LOL.

Tip In Swap for ArtQueens

Artqueens is holding  a Tip-in Swap, we are making one page a month and working through the list of who to post it to. At the end of the swap we will have art work from each person to put into a book or bind however we want to do this. My first page went to Kasha.  I had forgotten that the pages required a quote, but hope my words are ok as one.

This page is to me from Bevlea for June.

Lets see if I can do something on here each week from now on. Pigs fly too, or as the saying goes in NZ "Yeah Right Tui"  Maybe I better join in the WOYWW.  Through "Whats on Your Workkbench Wednesday that is run each week with the guidance of Julia Dunnit.   But then again I am not so sure I could commit to it. We shall see. 

I am about to make my ATC's for Marions yearly swap which need to get to her in Germany by mid July. This time the title is My Home is my castle. So got to rouse my muse and get on with them. See you soon.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

TO ME, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME.
Well, another year has passed, another year older. AHHHHHHHH!!

I got this lovely card from Nephew and wife Rhys and Ruth and little Christian. Its lovely, The black is actually silver.   So now not only am I an ArtQueen, I'm a Queen for any day I choose to look at this card.
Paul made me a lovely card at after school care

and Tori had Geoff's help to make a card too. We enjoyed a lovely desert with Rhys and Ruth, so are all very hyper on sugar LOL.

I have made a bit of artwork lately for swaps, but haven't scanned or taken photos yet. I will do that in next couple of days and load on here for you all to look at. To those of my friends in NZ, hope you had a fabulous Queens birthday weekend. Ours is next weekend.

New Piece

I made this piece today to send to a friend who is not feeling well.
Hope she likes it....
Background is an Itkupilli image, the lady is Hidden vintage Studios, owl is a found piece.

It will be postal in the next few days.
The previous canvas 12x12 is heading to Greece to Valerie, one of the ladies in our Paperarts group. I hope she likes the canvas when she receives it. I am getting hers so it will be interesting to see how each of us interpreted the same image.

Visitors

to our gum tree beside the deck.   These parrots came in on Sunday afternoon to our gum tree.
They make rather a mess, but it probably does the tree good to be pruned like they do.
Not sure what sort of parrot they are, maybe somebody could leave me a comment and tell me what they are. They are quite noisy too....

Aren't they beautiful , I love birds, I used to have an aviary when I was a kid with budgies, then when Geoff and I got married I had a large aviary with lots of different kinds of birds, including Kakarikis (NZ Parrot) and Lorikeets, cockatiels, love birds, canaries etc etc. They and the aviary got moved every time we moved house. 

He (Geoff)  is a  treasure :-)... I gave away my last few birds when we moved to Australia, but I get blessed loads with lots of beautiful birds just being here in our backyard.

Paperarts Same Image Canvas

We got sent an image from Lucy and had to use it on a 12x12 or slightly smaller flat canvas.
I only had  a 12x12 and no opportunity to go and buy anything smaller so this is my effort.
I don't know who it's going to yet.

Knowledge is not necessarily Wisdom.

I started off with two pieces of scrap-booking paper and put them on each half, originally going to do it landscape, then decided to do it portrait. The image we had to use is the girl from Hidden Vintage Studio, "Sitting pretty girl." From DeviantScrap Because she had a book in her hands it denoted wisdom to me so needed an owl (which I love)  as well. I have added molding paste through sequin waste and then colored with several metallic rubons. I hope whoever receives it likes it. Its always hard to do this sort of swap not knowing who its going to so not knowing their tastes at all :-)

Book has arrived in NZ and loved by the recipient Jacquie

Here are a few more pages now. Her title was Living the Dream. It was quite hard to interpret, but I hope she likes what I did.

Cover ala DJ workshop.

The journal has five signatures, of six pages put together in the book with a binding of old lace, and various ribbons and bits of fabric etc in it, hanging from the side.

My favorite page, still trying to get the clean up in Photoshop right ahhhhhh

Spine

One of signature pages

Another signature spread

Butterflies are a serviette, raised a bit for texture.

Anyway, it was very costly to post to NZ....... And I was worried it had got lost as Jacquie didn't let me know it had arrived, BUT!!!she was away on holiday and emailed me the minute (virtually) she got home... 

I hope she has had a chance to have a good look through it by now.

This page has texture molding paste on it. With a bit of mica over the picture of the girl.

I left some pages like the left hand one so Jacquie can  add some inspirational pages if she wants to.

See you back soon. I have another project , for Paperarts to photograph and put in here too. Hopefully will get it done tonight or tomorrow.

Papertrader's Blog Hop Winner

Thank you so much for all the lovely comments from such wonderful people who have visited my blog over the weekend of the blog hop. It was fun to visit others in the group.
Here is the winner of my giveaway........
As you can see I used  Random.org to generate the list.

There were 18 items in your list. Here they are in random order:

1. Donna M
2. Jo M
3. Michelle
4. Denise T
5. Fairyrocks
6. Beckie H
7. Stampgran
8. Bevlea R
9. Marion
10. Cathy C
11. Amanda E
12. Patti McC
13. Redjanfern
14. Joy
15. paintedlady
16. Gill
17. Cathee
18. Barbara de L

Timestamp: 2013-04-22 06:21:21 UTC

I will be in contact for your address shortly Donna. I hope you like the piece in the flesh when it arrives at your house.

More work to share with you

Paperarts, has some year long swaps running. One of them is Francophilia, whereby we make a 22cm x10cm page in various themes for Francophilia.
Here is my first three months efforts.
1: Fashion
2: Napolean
3: Revolution.

Its a fun swap and I love doing them.
we also have a swap for Tiles that can be put on a canvas or some other substrate at the end of the year. It will be quite large as we do 10 tiles per month in a set size. The backgrounds have to be done using Collections papers. Otherwise we can use any ephemera at all.
So far we have done Jan, Feb and March. These are my ones.

See you again soon.

PAPERTRADERS BLOG HOP

I am so excited to participate the First Paper Traders Blog Hop. I hope it will be a way for you to get to know me and a few of the other group members better, see our art, and get a chance to win some nice prizes that are being offered along the way.  Maybe you'll even be inspired by what you see and want to join the group.

The Blog Hop will be open the entire weekend of April 19-21, 2013.  Be sure to start at the Paper Traders Art Blog here and follow the blog hop list of participating members below:

1. Marion Bockelmann
2. cathee s
3. Gigi Lorenc
4. Heather R
5. Beckie Holso
6. Amanda Evans
7. Donna B Miller
8. Cathy Calamas
9. Sam Bonney
10. Connie Holso
11. Glenda Laing  you are here  and welcome.....
12. Pam Colosimo

Each member will share a little bit about herself and offer either a handmade art piece or other quality prize that will be randomly awarded to blog readers who leave a warm, fuzzy comment.  Just comment below and provide a way for me to contact you and I will pick a randomly drawn name from those who leave a comment.  One entry per person, please.

Here is mine: Titled "Kookaburra"  probably will add a little bit of ephemera in the giveaway too :-)

Have fun on your journey and I hope you'll come back to visit me soon!

A little about me.... I am a Kiwi (New Zealander) who has been living in Australia for 7 years. We love it over here and probably will never go back to NZ :-)
I got into paperarts through becoming a Creative Memories Consultant and that led to me opening my own scrapbook shoppe in Wanganui where I was fast-tracked into learning stamping etc very fast. I saw a picture in a magazine of some stunning work done by Aussie Joy Bathie and I was hooked into Mixed media and ATCs. Never looked back since. Its been a learning curve with painting and that started with doing a course with Joy just after I moved over here, then my friend Bevlea ran some art retreats and I had the pleasure of meeting and doing classes with DJ Pettit (waving at ya Marion) twice even,  the painting and journals are still a learning curve. Over the years I have done many crafts from making children's clothes, knitting, macrame, basket weaving and the list goes on. I think about the only craft I never attempted was tatting, too fiddly for me. But!! Paperarts is now my passion for craft. I love it and seeing what others do and learning from them.
So thank you to all that have blogs etc out there that share their work and techniques...