50th Birthday card

I mentioned last week that I'd made as requested by the teachers a card for one of the TA's at school for her 50th birthday, but I couldn't show it to you incase she saw it lol .. so today I thought I'd share it with you ...

I had a piece of Bronze coloured card from the school to use as my base as they wanted it to be a large card from them all, So I used my Tim Holtz Sizzix dies, the flower & the birdcage, I distress inked some card for the flower and mixed it with the bronze card and some of Tims lovely papers, I used buttons for the centres of the flowers and added some beaded trim to the bottom of the birdcaqe. I used a bundle of real twigs for the flower stems, bound together with some wire, and a strip of 7 Gypsies gaffer tape along the bottom.
The background was created with distress inks (that makes for a change then lol)and some paper artsy stamps.
Basically I just had real creative fun playing with it :D
Thanks for stopping by x

Altered Book workshop

Finally I've made it back to my computer to update my blog, this is what happens when the kids all break up from school & I feel that perhaps I really ought to do 'those' jobs that I avoid most of the time, we spent 4 hours yesterday, washing, drying & Ironing the backlog of clothes, & at the same time getting the boys to try on everything in their wardrobe, Sas did hers at the same time & we now have a good 4 bags of clothes for charity ... another good job done !
So back to the business in hand, I ran an altered book workshop on Tuesday, with 10 lovely ladies attending we had a full house & a very messy table ( for those of you who read my blog you'll know I find the messy table bit hard lol)

We did hand print opening pages, we made windows, opening doors, pockets & Niches & several different ways of folding the pages to add interest. We tried gesso'ing the pages out & leaving the type showing.

We got VERY messy but had fun playing with Colour washes from Ranger, Spray Inks from Dyan at Art from the heart, Distress Inks, Claudine Hellmuth studio line paints, Dabbers and piles of collaging materials.
The ladies were alot of fun, we had some of a younger generation along to play too, (thanks for coming Jo, Amy & Alex) :o)
BEtween them all they created some beautiful pages, I was suitably impressed with all of them & their first attempts at altering a book, (apart from Sue who has already altered a book :o) ... Even Bernice who wasn't at all sure about ripping pages out of the book before we started got into the swing of things & even started a second book when she got home, Blimey !

So from left to right we have Bernice, Jayne, Amy, Trish & Jo.

and from right to left we have June, Jenny, Alex, Halina and Sue

And here is my lovely daughter Saskia making tea & coffee for everyone ! She came along to help out for the day :D

Here's Jo with one of her pocket pages

This is the very talented Trish with her window pages ,,
Here is Amy (Trish's daughter) with her handprint pages
Here is Jayne with one of her lovely backgrounds ..

Here's our resident workshopee Bernice ...

And June with her gorgeous Opening doors page

Halina on the left & Alix on the right with their fabby pages,

Jenny with her lovely page ,,,

And last but certainly not least is Sue (sue is my most brilliant Mum xx)