Midnight Lavender and WOYWW

I'm loving my garden at the moment - especially at night when the colours come alive and the moonlight creates such a beautiful glow on the plants. This tag is made using dried and pressed lavender from the garden, some collage scraps and some metallic wax.
Some of you who visit my blog regularly will know that I love working seasonally and for the last few years have been working during each summer on my 'midnight garden'.  If you are interested you can see some of my older work here.

I wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who left good wishes for my carpel tunnel operation last week - I finally had it done last Friday and it's now well on the mend.   I'm struggling to type (this post is taking ages) or do much art but I made some tag bases before the op and have been able to do the finishing touches one handed - in fact it was surprisingly easy gluing on the lavender flowers.  
I am linking up with Julia over at WOYWW.  I shall try and return visits but might just have to leave my mark rather than a comment - I hope you don't mind!

Midnight Garden

Some sketchbook pages on my desk this week, for WOYWW.

The theme being the garden at night - one of life's pleasures is sitting in the garden as dusk falls and seeing the changing colours and shapes, the moths and  other creatures that appear - we have a hedgehog that has been visiting us over the last few weeks - and even the scent of some of the plants seems to intensify later in the evening!

White Winter Garden

I have just finished another piece of work in my sketchbook this week, based on the winter garden theme.  The whole page is very sparkly and glittery but unfortunately the camera just didn't pick up any of the sparkle.   

In detail the shiny stuff includes glitter on texture paste, tiny diamonds, iridescent thread and little dots of Perfect Pearls.  Non-shiny stuff includes twigs, white feathers and tiny scraps of rubber stamped Tyvek - there's a little bit more info on this technique here.

 I am linking up with Julia over at WOYWW, and also with Paper Artsy for their current challenge 'shiny stuff'.

Tyvek Lacy Papers

The Paper Artsy Challenge last week was to make art with fragile papers, and it coincided nicely with me seeing a fab technique over on the super-talented Angela's blog at Felix the Crafty Cat - she laid Tyvek over a rubber stamp, covered it with greaseproof paper and ironed it to create some amazing and beautiful lacy papers. I just had to have a go - I knew they would be perfect for the challenge - you can see how I used the scraps of Tyvek for my collage here.

 My collection of fragile papers included some scraps of delicate 'paper' using Angela's technique - although they look fragile, they really weren't!  In fact they were as tough as old boots and I had a really hard job tearing the bits apart for my collage!

 I originally tried working with Lutrador but nothing happened - luckily I found some scraps of Tyvek I didn't know I had and here are the results, which I'm quite pleased with. 

I am linking up with Julia over at WOYWW this week.

Paper Artsy Challenge - Fragile Papers

I am cutting it fine, but have just manged to link up with the Paper Artsy 2015 challenge before it closes for this week.  The subject was Fragile Papers. For my collage I used a disintegrating book cover for the base which has been beautifully eaten by something - the nibbled corner fell off while I was working on it!  I also used a page from an extremely old Shakespeare book that is falling apart, and some handmade Tyvek lacy papers.  Where I have pulled the Tyvek apart to make whispy bits, I rather like how they look like they've been eaten and match the little nibbled holes on the book cover!

Before starting the project I collected some 'fragile papers' together to get some inspiration - included is a vintage cigarette card, a page from a 1934 diary, part of the Shakespeare book previously mentioned, the broken top of a box for pianola music, and hidden underneath the various samples of Tyvek paper is a teabag!