Inspired by...

Happy Sunday all! Have you ever seen a painting or card, or any other crafted creation and thought to yourself "Oh Lord, I wish I'D done that!"? Of course you have, every one of us is inspired by others, whether that be other bloggers, famous/non-famous artists, crafters worldwide..... Every year in Bromsgrove we have an Arts Festival. It lasts for two weeks and there are a number of performances and street artists and concerts etc. take place all over the town. One of the things I love most is the Art Exhibition at one of the churches because it brings together some of the most amazing works of art by some extremely talented local people - one day I would LOVE to have the guts to exhibit something myself but up to now I haven't had the bottle! This year I found some mounted but unframed pictures by a lady who I think is called Linda someoneorother and I just swooned at them! Unfortunately though I wasn't in a position to splash out and buy them so I took these photo's of them to remind me how gorgeous they are and to aspire to be able to paint this good - ha! then I woke up!!!


The picture above is a painting of Chaddesley Corbett Post Office. I just love this lady's style of painting and I would give my eye teeth to be able to paint like this. Over at Tag, You're It! this week our theme is Inspired By..... and I chose this picture as my inspiration to make this Good Luck in your new home tag. This is my second tag for the June Swap which our lovely Janet is hosting.

I'm not fooling myself by imagining it's anything like as good as the original, but it's a start and it was such fun to paint - even though this was actually my 4th attempt!! LOL!!

Thanks for stopping by here, and I hope you have a great week! :o) xx

Too hot to sleep

Ugh! It's a fact that us Brits are always talking about the weather - maybe because it's so diverse. And right now it's just tooooooo hot! I'm really tired this morning because I just couldn't sleep at all last night! Instead I spent half the night tossing and turning and listening to Joe Public's solutions to Britain's binge-drink culture on TalkSport! I even had the fan blasting out all night but I just could not get comfortable. I did do my bit for England yesterday though - we're not footy fans in this house (thank the lord!) but I am feeling a bit left out by the red n' white craze that's taking over the country right now. But there's no way I'm going to be hanging flags and pennants out of the windows here so I made my hanging baskets using only frenzy red and vanilla white petunia's, and now I feel quite patriotic! LOL!

So, over at Tag, You're It! this week we're starting our June Swap. We are really hoping that many people will join in this because at the end of it, we all get back 4 lovely surprise tags from the other players as our lovely teamie Janet has offered to collect all the tags in, mix 'em up and re-distribute them for us. I know from doing this many years ago what great fun it is not knowing what you're going to get in return and how lovely it is to recieve something from another crafter that you may not even know! Our first theme is Needle and Thread. All our themes are open to interpretation, and although it was absolutely my intention to get my sewing machine out and do some proper stitching, unfortunately I just never got round to it so I went for the faux stitch look. You see the problem is, my workstation (aka dining table!) was in such a horrid mess and I felt that I just had to clear it all and get things put away. So I did and there was lots of room for my sewing machine then..... but there's nothing more enticing to me than a lovely clean workspace and an idea brewing in my head, so out came the stamps, out came the inks, brushes, acrylic blocks, d/s tapes, papers, scissors, box of scraps, flowers, pearls, bling, ribbons, the glitter glues, and lo and behold, it looked exactly the same again in no time at all - and still no room for the sewing machine! So I gave up domesticity - it doesn't suit me! I did however manage to produce this:

Very, very simple, but then I think tags should be. The image is coloured with distress inks and stickles and the sentiment is a home-made rub-on which I'm very impressed with and intend to make many, many more!

Today is the last day of the holidays - back to school tomorrow and my therapy starts here. I calculated that I have only 34 more school days to go before the 6 weeks holiday - great, except that my baby has exactly the same number of days left at First School. I'm struggling to imagine him beginning a new life at Middle School from September, though he's really cool about it - he just seems so young to be joining 'the big kids', and it's going to feel pretty strange for me being at my school without him..... Oh lord, get me a therapist, quick!!!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a happy Sunday - I will be spending it at the Cinema and Frankie & Benny's entertaining my son and his friends for his 9th bithday bash! Thanks for stopping by! :o) xx