Paula Pascaul Workshop

I had a fabulous weekend away at The Gentleman Crafters workshops in Godalming. If you get a chance to go on one, you're sure to have a fabulous time - you can check the itinerary here

On the Sunday we  had a class with Paula Pascaul and made three projects. This is the card we made:

We used lots of Tonic products and it was good to try the mouse and pastes

I really like this layout and this is what we'll be doing in my class on Wednesday so I've made another one just using inks.

I'm entering this into the following challenges:
Butterfly Challenge - Not Square and/or Navy
Pixie's Snippets Playground - snippets of blue and silver mirror card for the butterfly and swirl

Butterfly Quote & Quicksilver

The latest theme at The Butterfly Challenge is Quotes and/or Quick Silver. For this card I've used a technique that my friends Pam & Cally introduced me to a little while ago and I know that they got it from a class they did with Clair Matthews. It's great for masculine cards but I thought I'd try a more girly approach and this theme suited it perfectly

The basics are silver tape and plasterboard tape, both of which can be found in DIY stores (or hubby's toolbox) but I got mine in In-Excess:

The other things you need are die cuts and alcohol inks. You basically stick the die cuts to a sheet of card adding pieces of the plasterboard tape for texture and then cover with the silver tape, go over the whold thing with an embossing tool to make sure the tecture comes through before colouring with alcohol inks. For this one I then used the blending solution to remove the colour from the butterflies and flower (the butterflies and flowers are cut from snippets so I'm taking this to Pixie's Playground too. And the new challenge st PaperArtsy is Alcohol Inks and Pens so I'm entering this there too

For masculine cards I usually use die cut cogs and screws / hinges cut from cereal boxes:

This one just has some odd chipboard shapes that I would never have used because the colours were awful

So thanks Pam, Cally and especially Clair for this great technique

Dublin and Hamburg

I had the most wonderful weekend last week starting with a visit to Dublin on Friday to meet up with family. There were 21 of us plus our honorary cousin Pol O Duibhir. We first met Pol when he gave a talk about my grandfather in Dublin in November 2014 when there were seven family members there. My father was always very reticent to talk about his family although we knew he had a happy childhood until his father passed away suddenly when he was 15. He joined the merchant navy very soon afterwards. Last weekend we returned for an updated talk and we found out so much more about our family. We will always be grateful to Pol for taking such an interest and we look forward to the book he is planning on writing

This is my grandfather, Gordon Brewster, at his desk working for the Irish Independent Newspaper  Group as political cartoonist. The National Library of Ireland holds 479 of his original cartoons and when we visited in 2014 we were lucky enough to be able to view some of them

This is one of the cartoons which actually shows his house as it was at the time:

And this is The Grove as it was in 2014:

The main difference is that the large garden to the right of the house has been sold and new houses built on the grounds. Last Friday Pol arranged for my brother, two cousins and myself to go to the house for tea and apple pie. We were made so welcome by the new owner of the house and her mother and they were so interested in the history of the house. Pol arranged a framed copy of the above cartoon to present to the new family

This is a lovely picture of my grandfather, aunt and father Christmas shopping in Dublin.

We had a lovely family meal on Friday night and Saturday we all went into town for the talk

Sunday was my surprise trip and Derrick and I left everyone at the hotel and made our way to the airport for a flight to Hamburg. We arrived early evening and made our way into town through the Hamburger Winter Dom , the largest funfair in Germany - and it was massive.

Monday (my Birthday) we managed a little craft shopping before going to see the fantastic Caro Emerald in concert.

Our hotel room overlooked a lovely park with some fabulous coloured trees and a beautiful Japanese garden and I had intended taking a picture before we left on Tuesday but when we got up and opened the curtains, everything was white - the snow had arrived! Luckily our plane had quite a long run round in Hamburg so our flight was only 30 minutes late

Such a fantastic weekend - this one will seem very tame in comparison