Procrastination - a mighty beast

Well, here we are! It's December 31st... New Year's Eve 2010. Tomorrow we start a new year and we all hope to start afresh resolving to improve this and change that. And like everyone who makes a New Year's resolution, I want to succeed, not fail! So I will not sabotage myself before the year starts. I will make just one promise to myself..... to procrastinate less. Not "to stop procrastinating" but just to procrastinate LESS. I procrastinate in all areas of my life: at home; in my work life; in my studio; everywhere! The procrastination monster is a mighty beast that is hard to tame so I will be happy to just control it a little bit better than I do at the moment! So here's to 2011 - and to less procrastination. Happy New Year! And just quickly before I go, I'm in print in the latest edition of Scrapbooking m.m. - a Swedish magazine. Wow! I've never been translated before! It's strange to see your instructions written in a different lan...

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RAW Bead Weaving - Very Magenta Daisies

Now that the Christmas celebrations are behind us, I'm in holiday mode for a few days which means I get to work on the little kits I bought earlier in the year to keep myself amused whilst everyone lazes around. I'm one of those people who just can't sit idle and I like to keep busy even when I'm relaxing. So these holidays I'm trying something new to me: bead weaving. I've always admired this style of jewellery but thought it looked too hard to do, so I thought kits were the place to start. Here's the first one I attempted. At first, I wasn't sure that it was the best project to start with when the instructions said to use two needles but it turned out to be really easy to create the pattern so it was a good choice after all. I got the hang of right-angle weave really quickly. I'm quite happy with the result but I've got to say that whilst the weaving was easy, when I read the finishing instructions and it said weave back here and through ...

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Post Christmas Baking

Christmas Day might have come and gone but I was back in the kitchen this morning baking more Christmas goodies. Forcer biscuits have become a Christmas tradition in our household and we only ever bake them for Christmas; once for our tree-decorating get-together in early December and then again just before Christmas. But today we had a belated Christmas lunch with our good friends who have become part of our family. It's wonderful to have such close friends when you are so far from your family at this time of the year. So this batch is for our adopted family. Don't they look pretty when they're paired together with delicately coloured icing. Yum! I know my last few posts have been food oriented but I just wanted to assure you that this is not becoming a food blog. Things will soon return to normal once I'm back in the studio creating again but in the meantime I'll be playing with some bead weaving kits I bought earlier in the year. I've been wanting to lea...

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Gingerbread House - Construction Complete!

It was back to the construction site for my son and I this evening. The first thing we did was add more sweets to the roof...... and then we transported the house onto its new site, a silver cake board that my daughter picked up from Spotlight earlier today. We piled it high with lollies before placing the house on top. The board is nice and sturdy but we didn't really like the look of the silver foil and thought it would be much better covered in snow. So between us we covered the entire board with royal icing. We both agreed that was a much better look. Now it was time to get into planting the garden. Here, Bryce is adding the greenery. We also made a snowman and a pine tree with a star on top. There's a pile of wood off to the side of the house too, ready to make a fire, and a chocolate path lined with little flowers which leads from the front door to the candy cane fence. And here's the finished masterpiece! As you can see we are pretty pleased with our ...

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Under Construction!

My family is all too familiar with my crafting activities in the kitchen. Many of the craft materials I work with require heat: the oven, the stove top or an electrical appliance. When we built my studio in our new house, the family gave me strict instructions that everything was to be contained in the room and not escape into the rest of the house and they supplied me with a portable stove top, an electric frypan and a small oven. Bless them! But today, I get to craft in the kitchen with everyone's blessing. With my son's help we're making a ginger bread house, the first we've ever made! I'm a bit time challenged at the moment so I picked up a prefab one at IKEA where all you have to do is put it together and decorate it. Sounds great! So here we go...... In typical IKEA fashion it's a flat pack and the instructions are in diagrams but the one written instruction it does provide is to melt some sugar in a saucepan and use it to assemble all the piece...

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Christmas crafting finally arrives at Mill Lane Studio

It has been a while coming, but Christmas has finally made an appearance in my studio! My studio is a very functional space and I try to keep as clutter free as possible. But at this time of the year as we are counting down towards Christmas, I thought it would be wonderful to bring a little Christmas cheer into it. So I'm starting with something requiring little effort but that will add a nice festive touch to my workspace. The plan here is to display some of my favourite Christmas cards to help bring some cheer into the studio.This is a quick and easy project: All you need is Designer Dries Clear from Art Glitter Institute, chipboard snowflakes from Maya Road, some metallic pegs and glitter in your choice of colours. Apply the Designer Dries Clear to one of the snowflakes Pour glitter over the whole shape. Be generous with it so that you get solid coverage. Use a needle tool or toothpick to dig it out of the pile of glitter and give it a light tap to remove the excess. Allow...

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An Obsession with Resin

Somehow, I haven't managed to move on from my fossicking adventures with the contents of the resin box yet. I know I said it was time to put it aside and get on with some crafting for the festive season but the resin bug has bitten me hard this week and it just won't let go. No matter how hard I fight it, I can't seem to get it out of my system. So rather than fight it, I gave in to it over the weekend. Here's what I got up to. Firstly, a jelly bean coloured button necklace...... .....featuring a sprinkling of Plaid Fresh leaf charms and resin beads tucked amongst the buttons. Nice and bright and in almost every colour of the rainbow. Those buttons look good enough to eat! How about this one for feeling summery and tropical. It might be cold and snowy in the northern hemisphere, but here in subtropical Brisbane, it's summer and what says summer more than frangipanis? Don't you love the silhouetted birds? It's a Plaid Fresh Pendant - and it goes perfec...

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More Treasures from the Resin box

I'm still digging around in my box of undiscovered resin treasures. This container seems to be bottomless and I think I could keep digging forever.... there are so many of them that I wonder if I will ever use them all up! I have been giving them away at camps and retreats in place of ATCs for some time now - everyone seems to LOVE getting one - and yet my box is still overflowing. And every time I cast another bangle, the leftover resin gets poured into a Krafty Lady art mould or two because you just can't waste good resin. When the piece is cured it gets added to the box to become some future undiscovered treasure. It's become quite a collection! Anyway, here's another button piece - a sea-themed version of Vintage Buttons . This set of turquoise and green coloured resin pieces is a mix of glittered, translucent and opaque buttons in so many different shades of green. I've called it Tide Pools because there are lots of sea-themed silver charms tucked amongst the ...

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Vintage Buttons?!!

After the wonderful transformation of the rather ordinary-looking cameo that I found in my box of resin casts on Sunday, I decided that I should see what else is hiding in that container. I'm sure there are some other treasures to be found in there if I dig deep enough. I have so many to select from - literally hundreds - and the box weighs over a kilo. That's a lot of potential! So dig I did! And what I noticed was all the button shapes I've cast over the years. They had never caught my attention before. I certainly hadn't realised that I'd cast SO many of them - there were blues, greens, pinks, corals, fluoro pink, creams, bright yellows, and glittery ones too. But this pile here caught my eye - colours which had a bit of a vintage look about them. I remembered having some lovely lucite flower beads in a similar tone in my stash. So that was my starting point. I picked out a nice mix of buttons in different colours and shapes and glued them onto the pads of ...

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