My Top 12 of 2012

One of the joys of blog-following is coming across blogs followed by bloggers you follow (if you follow me).  I followed a link from another blog that brought me to the Catered Crop Top 12 in 2012 challenge.  Now, I've already shared my favourite project - my final assemblage piece for the Timeworn Techniques workshop - but it got me thinking, what were the other 11?   So, in no particular order, I present -

"A Bottle of Firewater" - made for Andy Skinner's Evil Elixir Mixer workshop. 

The Altered Coffee Tin - 

The tag that I made for the "Hammer House of Horror" challenge, which is an example of my sense of humour - well, I think it's funny!

This one was a piece of serendipity - it was almost all made of  "rejects" or surplus bits from other projects - I love it because it came out so well!

I was having fun playing with Viva Terra paints and making paper roses out of paper I'd coloured with mica paints when I made this sundial out of unwanted CD's and a cardboard tube.

I think the rubber stamp I used for this cabinet card is beautiful so I didn't do much with it.  Again, this is a "reject" that I reused (the top left of the image didn't stamp clearly, but it's covered by the frame).

The theme for this next one was "Mona Lisa";  I spent a fair bit of time heating and re-heating UTEE to get the texture I wanted.

The UK went Olympic-mad this year - we went to watch the Torch be carried through our town.  As I tribute, I made my own, to be carried around the office!

A different faux leather and faux snakeskin technique on this little box.  I do enjoy making paper and card look like something else!  

I once had a cat that would go to any lengths to avoid setting paw on the floor (he was a rescued cat so we don't know what he'd experienced before he came to us).  We thought he had ambitions to catch bats instead of mice!  He inspired this tag - 

This is the cover of  a mini album I'm making.  The challenge was "stamping without ink" - I stamped into a thick layer of Viva Ferro paint to get the textured swirls-

And finally, one more time - The Dead Man's Chest.

So that was last year.  Onward and upward in 2013!

Mona Lisa Tile

I'm having a really great time on my leave this year.  Not going anywhere much, just pottering about and having time to craft and enter blog challenges, which I don't normally have the time for.  This piece is for the Artful Times blog challenge, as sponored by Oyster Stamps, and the theme is Mona Lisa.

Now, a few years ago you couldn't move without seeing La Giaconda on a rubber stamp but she's gone out of fashion a bit.  So while I was at it, I thought I'd revisit something else I'd not used for a while - Stampbord.  And while rummaging through the haunted wing of my stash, I found some Joanna Sheen Leonardo Da Vinci paper and some very old Kanban alphabets.  A bit of UTEE, a background stamp and a few well-chosen words when I put my thumb in the molten UTEE (Oh bother!)  and here's the result.  UPDATE - I was runner-up in the challenge! Woo-hoo! 

I hope you like it, and thanks for visiting!