I'VE BEEN REVIEWED - AGAIN!

Out of the blue, I just got an email letting me know I've been reviewed on Scribnia, and inviting me to the panel of writers! 

Well, blow me down with a feather and get me a stiff drink! I'm gobsmacked (and delighted). This has been one roller-coaster week, and no mistake!

Thanks so much to Bombshellrisa for writing the review, and to Elena Grama for letting me know, and inviting me to Scribnia.

I'VE BEEN REVIEWED!

Well folks, I'm covered with blushes: an unsolicited review on Featured Product Reviews blog. And she says such nice things!

Thank you so much Millie - this just makes me want to try even harder!

I GOT INTERVIEWED!

Lookie here!





I was interviewed by Kathie of Just a Happy Housewife - you can just imagine how happy I was to be asked! Beyond excited!

Here's the interview if you'd like to read it - and thank you so much to Kathie for making my day. I even get a button, which is now proudly displayed in my sidebar (and on Computery as well - I've repeated this post over there as well).

Nothing like overkill, lol.

TRENDY BLOG AWARD

The wonderfully kind and generous CC at Lace'n'Ribbon Roses has given me a Trendy Blog Award! 




So it's official, I have a trendy blog, lol lol lol.

Thanks so much CC, you're a star! And considering you had a terrible fall yesterday and fractured your pelvis, I'm amazed you could sit at a computer to send it to me. Which makes me feel doubly honoured.

In receiving this award, I have to promise to:

• Post about the award in my blog.
• List your Top 10 Trendy Blogs 
• Share with them
• Leave a link to the Trendy Blog Button 
• Tell them they need to give this award out to 10 as well

Here are my Top Ten blogs (in no particular order):

1. Lori at Lori's Freebie List 
2. Stephanie at Queen of Dreamz 
3. Kate at The Kathryn Wheel
4. Nancy at Linens & Laurels 
5. Helga at Granny Art 
6. Elizabeth at The Last Door Down The Hall 
7. Jenny at The Artistic Stamper 
8. Ashley at A Daily Dose of Dieting 
9. Inka at Altered Arifacts 
10. Jessica at Chronically Vintage

Share the love!

SUNSHINE AWARD FOR CREATIVITY & POSITIVITY!

Oh happy day! Laure from Painted Thoughts has just given me this great Sunshine Award for creativity & positivity! I'm thrilled - this has totally made my weekend.

So I get to hand this on to 12 blogs I love - that might just be new to you, so I highly recommend you take a look!

In no particular order...

Nancy at Linens & Laurel - who promised us all a new project every day this year - and has kept it up! Phenomenal (I know I couldn't keep this up for a week!).

Blanca at Magic Moonlight - who has her own blog and Magic Moonlight freebie images. Tons of lovely vintage images for you. Blanca is so generous - I don't know where she finds them all!

Sophie at My Cup of Milk Tea - a young Chinese lady who designs the most exquisite free blog backgrounds and headers. An undiscovered treasure, in my opinion.

CC at Lace'n'Ribbon Roses - because she is just so enthusiastic about her favourite craft, so you have to love it too.

Tina at Beansie Babbles - because she also is so enthusiastic about her favourite craft (crochet) and even writes her own patterns! Anyone who shares the love like these two ladies deserves an award.

Delicious Scraps - wonderful elements, and commercial use too! A must for scrapbookers and digital artists.

Deb aka The Scrappin' Cop - a Photoshop genius, great brushes & textures: tutorials as well!

Glamour Bomb - who deserves an award for merely existing (never mind she does the most amazing videos etc and her blog is To Die For).

Carmi at Carmi's Art/Life World for gorgeous cards and other artwork, and great tutorials.

Sugar at Lipsticks , Lace & Lolly Dolls - the most amazing photographic site. Stunning. Check out her other blogs as well.

Violetta at VM Creation- the most exquisite fashion illustrations and designs, beautifully made into some fabulous creations. Her other blog is lovely too.

Blondie at Blonde Episodes for wonderful photos, great bios and great research and attention to detail. If you love old films, you have to read her blog.

Enjoy!

BLOG AWARD!

Alphabuttonpusher nominated me for a blog award!

Isn't it brilliant? I'm so pleased - it's cheered me up after a really rough week.

And I'm passing the award onto:

Sneaky Momma Blog Design

Barnacle Goose Paperworks

Book Girl

Blin-kin-eck

I Love The Way She Blogs

Jenni B Originals

Laurie's Charming Designs

Vintage Papers

Do check these blogs out - every one is very special and each blog has a character all its very own. They are all Lovely Blogs, so very deserving of this award.

THE KARMA AWARD

I don't believe it! I've been gifted with another award! This one from the lovely and generous Michi Michelson - and of course I am thrilled to bits!

Do take a look at Michi's blog - this talented lady is a real sweetie - and has taken a class with Traci Bautista (I'm so jealous) so has some fabulous artwork to share (she's been featured in Stampers Sampler and Take Ten).

THE KARMA AWARD

These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind of bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers. Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award.

Michi, this is unbelievably kind! Of course, the hard part is deciding who to pass the award on to...

La Chambre Rose
Nancy has a lovely, eclectic blog - she shares tips, tricks, recipes, all sorts of stuff including web and blogger tips - I never know what I'm going to find when I visit! There's rather a good recipe for a Salty Dog cocktail just for starters...

Shabby Blogs
Megan at Shabby Blogs has created a lovely website with great freebie backgrounds, buttons etc - and of course has a blog. And on the blog there's MORE! The lovely post divider on the BladeRubber Blog is thanks to Megan, and so are the little sidebar titles. Much fun!

Three Muses
This is actually a challenge blog, organised by Taluula, IndyBev and OzStuff, who are the Three Muses. This is a pretty new blog, but the artwork is amazing, and I think this blog will be One To Watch. These are three dedicated ladies who are fabulous artists and just want to inspire and share - so if that doesn't qualify for a Karma Award, I don't know what does!

Bree's Corner of the World
Bree has a really pretty blog, with lots of scrapbooking, cards and journal pages - and tutorials! Bree is really generous in sharing these - and also runs a Ning group (how on earth she has the time...)

Papieren Avonturen
Dymphie makes beautiful books, and I love her very clear photographs. Her ideas are very original - and fun! She also has freebies for you to download.

Art Alchemy
Kim has a very lovely site, very dramatic - loaded with gorgeous artwork. Very haunting. Kim is a mixed-media and graphic artist - you can just tell by looking! Fabulous header...

Lara Berch Tutorials
Lara's blog has free tutorials - and so does her website. Tutorials on how to distress picture frames, bed frames, tile, paint dressers... I love DIY and transforming furniture etc, and you don't often see How To's written from the female point of view, so I was delighted to discover her! Of course there are art techniques too.

The Last Door Down the Hall
Elizabeth is another artist whose work I like very much: eclectic, colourful, and a nice mix of digital and "real" collage. Plus the occasional very nice freebie for you to download.

Now I'm off to email everyone!

FABULOUS BLOG AWARD

What can I say?

My head is seriously spinning! I just got this award from Trudi Sissons at Two Dresses Studio!


As Trudi is one of my most favourite artists (whom I respect highly) I am totally thrilled! (and in overdrive with my exclamation marks). Thank you so much!

List 5 of my favourite new blogs to pass the award along to, & list 5 things I love.

Aargh: this is always so difficult...

Kitschy Kitschy Coo

Azrael Brown's blog - steeped in the 50s (my fave era) and great fun, very irreverant. Definitely a different point of view!

Memories and Treasures

Brenda Wampler's lovely blog, featuring lots of the most stunning soldered jewellery. I adore vintage jewellery. Also lovely altered books, ATCs, journals... do go and look.

Vintage Soul

Deborah has Vintage in her soul: go see the 50s frilly net petticoats, the dolls, the crowns! Another blog new to me, and great fun. Also some very interesting pennants and her own design of embellished and beaded leather bracelets.

Robin's Nest

Robin has a lovely vintage & mixed media blog. I love the background, I love the header and I love the artwork (tags, altered books, metal work, art challenges).

Olive Rue

This is photographer Cyrstal's alter ego, and a great blog: tons of eye candy, great photos (naturally) and great closeups and unusual angles. Including a bullet hole through the glass cover of a petrol pump, which is not something one sees every day! I think you'll really enjoy visiting her.

5 things I love:

1. Chocolate - GOOD chocolate (Belgian, Swiss - and not the soft centres anymore, I find them too sweet nowadays. How curious!)
2. Cafe Nero's chilled Cafe Latte whizzed up with crushed ice. They have got it exactly right: not too sickly (ordinary lattes make me feel slightly bilious - too much milk) and not too sweet. I much prefer them to Starbucks (sorry!) as you can taste the saccharine in theirs.
3. A good haircut - finding a good hairdresser is so hard. I'm still looking (my last good one retired to stay home and raise her family when sprog No 3 was due, 2 years ago). So I've had 2 years of bad hair cuts... so far.
4. Marks & Spencer - great food hall, the best underwear, nightwear and socks. Plus I love their bath goodies and Tshirts and jeans.
5. My new 22inch computer monitor. Life just hasn't been the same!

Thanks again, Trudi.

ANOTHER KREATIV BLOGGER AWARD! WOW!

I just got ANOTHER Kreativ Blogger award - which has stunned me completely. This has been some week.


Thank you to Beansieleigh of Beansieleigh Babbles, crochet guru extraordinaire!

My head is going to be so swelled soon that there won't be any living with me! I am beyond touched.

The rules with this award are to:

1) List 7 things you love.
2) Link back to the person who gave you the award.
3) Pass it along to 7 other bloggers.

7 THINGS I LOVE:

1. Making books. This is an abiding pleasure, starting from a bare piece of grey board and building it from the ground up. I really get a blast out of it. I have a nasty feeling I said this before, somewhere... It's true, though!
   
2. Riding on the top of a bus. I get some of my best ideas this way, crawling along in a traffic jam, staring out at countryside, shops - or nothing in particular! The mind is in freefall, you can't DO anything - so there's plenty of space for an idea to pop into your head.
3. Blogging. Seriously! I never kept any kind of diary for even a week, so I never thought I would keep on posting the way I do. I love all the gadgets and widgets, the posting, the comments, the sense of community and getting to know people... This week I got a Search tag, joined Twitter and now have a chandelier!
   
4. Photoshop. Something I never thought I'd be able to get the hang of, but it's all finally coming together (only had the programme 8 years - and too scared the first 7 to even try to use it!)
5. Reading - another abiding pleasure. I read EVERYWHERE - and I mean everywhere. Even when I go food shopping, I take a paperback - always stop for coffee, and out comes the book. Ditto travelling on the tube or train. Not on buses though - too jerky, and I like to just stare out of the window.
6. Dining out. One of my favourite things is to have dinner out, in a nice restaurant, and take my time about it. Good food, good conversation, good company. What could be nicer?
7. Teaching. Yes, really. When I was at art college, it was all "Those who can do, those who can't... teach." NOT so. In the craft/art/mixed media world I have found myself in, if you can't produce the goods, put up or shut up, you won't last long. And I have found I really enjoy showing someone something new, then seeing their face light up. (Bookbinding especially. Yes, I know... but there really is something very special about holding a book - a thing, a significant object - that You Have Made Yourself). Or maybe it's just that I like the sound of my own voice, lol.
   

LINK BACK TO THE AWARD-GIVER

Thank you Beansieleigh!

Icon copyright Beansieleigh

7 BLOGGERS I AM GIVING THE AWARD TO (As always, this is the difficult bit)

Zeborah's Blog

Zeborah Loray creates some wonderful pieces and is very generous with her tips and tutorials. I love her altered bottles, dripped with wax, aged, distressed... she does amazing things with Fantasy Film which I just adore.

Freubel

Rian Freubel is a fantabulous digital artist, and has some stupendous links and tutorials which she willingly shares. She even shares how she creates her digital art, step by step. Not sure I'd ever be that generous! Originally Dutch, the blog is written in English, so you'll have no problems following along. I love what she does - there's always something new!

The Graphics Fairy

Karen at the Graphics Fairy (who is also the Background Fairy) has a blog with nothing but freebie images for you to use in your art (and backgrounds for your blog). Which takes a lot of time and effort to track down, scan, enhance etc. So I think she totally deserves an award for selflessly sharing all these lovely images with us, day in, day out.

My Story Art

Sharon House is one of life's great raconteurs, and her blog is one to settle down with and spend TIME reading all her posts. I recommend tea & cake, or your own favourite combination. Sharon has traced the genealogy of her family and posts all the whys and wherefores, twists and turns - how she stuck with it I'll never know! She'd make an ace detective. Add to this her fables and fairy stories...

La La La Illustration

Leanne Ellis is an artist and illustrator whose stylised ladies are adorable. Very few artists are confident to work in just greys and blacks, but Leanne isn't - neither is the result dark or gloomy. Her creations are charming: luminous and full of light, very sweet and very whimsical. You'll therefore be delighted to learn that Sugar Nellie have made some of her artwork into stamps!

Spark Your Imagination

Debrina Pratt is a mixed media artist with a wonderful sense of colour, who makes lovely assemblages, shadow boxes and dolls etc. She also has some nice freebie vintage photos on her blog, which are available for download, as well as collaged and photoshopped background papers (also free). She does lovely work!

Bakerella

And now for something completely different, but close to my heart (and stomach). I no longer cook as much as I used to (I lost interest), but oh boy do I enjoy watching other people. And looking at pictures of food. Bakerella has the most wonderful foodie site, devoted to all that is wonderful in the world of cakes, biscuits et al - and the most amazing artistic presentation. How anyone can spoil these creations by eating them.... then again, just let me at them! Now we have a new cooker with a decent sized oven, I might just get into baking again (I used to win prizes for my cake decorating back in The Day). Bakerella posts great how-to photos, so you can see exactly how she achieves those wonderful effects step by step, so go forth and cook up a masterpiece (a batch is even better).

It's been so hard to choose, yet again - so many brilliant blogs out there, and so much wonderful artwork to view.

KREATIV BLOGGER AWARD

This is proving an absolutely MAGIC week for me!




First, I get the proofs of the stamps I designed for BladeRubber Stamps - and we have a giveaway on the BladeRubberBlog if you want to enter for it...

....Then I get picked to be Guest Artist of the Month on Vintage Flaire... see the post below this one...

... and now Malisa, The Renaissance Chick, has given me this amazing Kreativ Blogger Award!

My cup seriously runneth over!

Do I accept this award? You betcha! To get this award, here are the rules:

The Rules:

1. List 7 things that you LOVE
2. Link to the person who has tagged you
3. Choose 7 more bloggers to give the Kreativ Blogger Award to
4. Comment on those 7 blogs to let the recipients know you chose them

I am beyond thrilled!

7 THINGS THAT I LOVE

1. My husband. Yes I do. He is Husband No 2 (No 1 is still, to this day, known as The Creep). This one is A Keeper - highly tolerant of all my mess (the computer is in the front room, the art table is in a corner) and highly tolerant of the hours I spend on the computer, which means I mostly sit with my back to him all night. He's a good cook too, and just as well... or we'd be living on pizza if we depended on me!
2. Blogging. I love blogging. To think that I resisted it so long... I love the mix of people and the things they blog about - it's just a shame that I don't have enough hours in the day to read them all properly (ie: every single post). It's the same with magazines: I tend to skim through and mostly look at the pictures. You should see me at the dentist - I ought to get a Speed Read award!
3. Books, books, books: reading them, altering them, making them. I love constructing/building a book just as much as journaling or sketching in it. And I read every chance I get: in the bath, in bed, on the bus, on the train. I take a book with me everywhere I go, and if I didn't belong to a library we'd be bankrupt.
4. DIY. I adore decorating - I can paint, wallpaper and tile. I LIKE being able to say I repainted our wardrobes etc. My husband hates DIY, although he will do the heavy stuff that I can't do myself. He built the computer shelves etc into the chimney breast alcoves for me. I can honestly say that the number of flatpacks we have put together (wardrobes, bedside drawers etc) we've never had a row! But he hates painting (drips paint everywhere) so it's a good thing I enjoy it. Plus I get to pick all the colours. If things had worked out differently, I might have been an interior designer... who knows.
5. Handbags. For some reason, I seem to own more handbags than shoes! I tend to the larger size that will take a purse, a mobile and an umbrella - plus tissues, pens, a book, a sketchbook, shopping lists, a makeup bag... I also seem to favour the colour black - although why I would think I needed more than four black handbags I don't know! Nothing exceeds like excess, I suppose.
6. Art materials. Why buy one item when you can buy lots? As in: why 1 pot of gel medium, when you better buy a spare - oh, make it 2 just in case I don't visit the shop for a while... then some more gesso (yes, I know I already have white, black, red and clear - all in large sizes). And paint: 3 sets of watercolours, 2 sets of watercolour pencils, I don't know how many tubes of gouache, acrylics, Jo Sonja acrylics, Lumieres, Sherrill's Sorbets, waterproof ink, calligraphy ink...don't even get me started on coloured pencils. Paper - gorgeous paper: Fabriano, Bockingford... lots and lots of paper! Then there's the brushes (acrylic, watercolour, thin, thick, fine, hogshair, synthetic...)
   
7. Rubber stamps. Different tools from art materials, because these are toys to play with! And all the stuff that goes with them: ink pads, ribbons, gem stones, stickers, embossing powders, glitter, tape, glue - can you say "ephemera"? Fripperies...

LINK TO THE PERSON WHO TAGGED ME

The wonderful, the adorable, the lady with perfect taste (she picked me! she picked me!)
Malisa, The Renaissance Chick

7 BLOGGERS I AM GIVING THE AWARD TO - AND WHY

My Magnificent Seven are.... drum roll please....

Jo Capper-Sandon at Jo Blogs for her constantly inspiring, original and immaculate artwork. Plus she's a very nice lady!

Deryn Mentock at Something Sublime because she does the most stupendous jewellery, which she also photographs and presents beautifully. I want all of it! (All I need is to win the lottery).

Laure Ferlita at Painted Thoughts Blog because she is a very sweet girl who does the most beautifully detailed watercolours. Her artistry in portraying feathers and fur are at a standard I aspire to, but will probably never reach!

Sally Turlington at Imagine This, who wrote me the sweetest email when I commented on her studio purchase (a brilliant set of drawers). Her blog is great fun, she writes how she speaks and she is so ENTHUSIASTIC about everything, which always cheers me up. A very fun lady!

Barb Thomas at Somethingz To Crow About, who is the original mad Aussie! This lady has a serious crow obsession (see her clock and die of envy) and a really quirky sense of humour. Her work is sassy, irreverant, tongue-in-cheek and FUN.

Trish Bee at Trish Bee's Art-Venture because she is THE most dedicated woman I know for sharing stamping techniques, writing multiple blogs and running yahoo groups and swaps! If there's a technique out there... Trish will have tried it, posted samples and a tutorial! And inspired others to try it too. I admire her tremendously.

Peggy Gatto at My Coloring Book, who is another amazingly talented watercolour artist - also with an irreverant sense of humour. (I have a feeling these ladies are all my age...) Her avatar is a nun with an umbrella, which struck a chord with me straight away. She also takes the most beautiful closeups of flowers, which I have a real weakness for.

Thanks again Malisa. I am so thrilled to think that not only are people actually reading my blog, but also like it! Off now to give the news to the Magnificent Seven.