Open Day

This coming Saturday two of my friends and I are having an open day to showcase our internet and studio based businesses.

Adele Collections has beautiful pearl and fashion jewellery as well as handbags, wallets and hair accessories.

Ambience Candles are a locally made, hand poured 100% soy wax product available in a range of gorgeous fragrances and sizes.

Lorna Blue Studio of course has the scrapbook, stamping and giftware range.

So on Saturday the 6th December between 9am and 4pm at 10 Forbes Court Avoca we will have our products out there for you to see. Feel free to drop by and bring your friends, you'll find the 3 businesses compliment each other to give a varied range of gifts.

We'll have credit card and EFTPOS facilities available and I'll have a sale table set up as well for anyone looking for a bargain.

Hope to see you there.

It's Christmas card time

I've finally started making some Christmas cards and I thought I would show you. With these I've done a combination of embossing and watercolour pencils. The bauble one is pretty bright and not what you would call traditional but I think it kinda works.

Well I did say I would tell you about the Rural Women's Gathering. It was held in Coonamble and over 450 women from all over NSW attended to attend talks, workshops and garden tours. From what I understand it's been going for around 15 years and it's an opportunity for rural women to get together to learn new skills (both for their worklife and hobbies) and network with other women and perhaps form friendships.

I have to admit I think the committee were a little overwhelmed by the volume of work needed to host an event with that many participants but it was a good experience overall.

The paperwork said that the accomodation in town was booked out but they would have "luxury tents" with an amenities block available. Well I haven't been camping (by choice) for a lot of years but I think I can tell the difference between luxury and not (this was definitely not). The camp bed was quite narrow and the mattress was 2cm thick, now I understand it would have been difficult to come up with the required amount of tents but they could have at least advised people to bring an air mattress or extra doona to sleep on if thats all they could access.

So now I come to the amenities block. In my mind I imagined something like a caravan park might have, but no, these amenities came trucked in on the back of a semi trailer which you then had to access by walking up a set of lightweight aluminium stairs. They were made out of a converted shipping container and they had 2 for showers (containing 8 showers in each) and 2 for toilets. The good thing with the showers was the water was hot but the bad thing was they were so small you had trouble protecting your modesty. You had to leave your clothes on a hook outside the shower stall, have a shower (trying to keep the shower curtain from wrapping itself around you) reach out to get your towel, dry off and then decide whether you wanted to attempt dressing yourself in a confined wet space or go out into the walkway and dress quickly while trying not to "flash" somebody. We had Sarah with us who is 21 and she tells me she's seen enough naked 60yr olds to last her a lifetime.

Now the toilets were delightful (sarcasm intended). They should have been OK but the trick was working out how to flush them. For those of you like myself who have never seen these type they have a lever (a bit like the peddle rubbish bins) that is attached to the base of the toilet that you depress with your heel, very firmly. However a lot of women evidently found this too difficult and you would find when you went to go it hadn't been flushed so we first of all tried to avoid using these toilets where possible but if need be we would flush the toilet and move onto the next one, our theory being that it would hopefully eliminate some of the smell.

I did feel sorry for some of the older women attending because I had to be careful when walking up or down the stairs and I'm fairly agile so for some it would have been difficult.

However, I met some lovely ladies and I had the opportunity to take some products and showcase my business so that was the good part of the weekend.

October ATC Swap

This months ATC swap theme was "Under the Sea" and the variety and talent of this group of ladies is fantastic. We were ask to do either 3 individual ATC's or one that could be folded up to the size of a single ATC. I chose to do a folded up version and the photo's show the front, back and the little sleeve I made for it to go into.

I've been away to the NSW Rural Women's Gathering at Coonamble and I'll tell you about it the next time.

New Cards

Don't you love it when you sit down to play around with some scraps of paper and a few ideas and they turn out better than you thought. Here are two cards that I've done recently. I've used the Darkroom Door stamps available from Lorna Blue Studio on one and some scrapbooking paper on the other.

Pencil Art

People have the most amazing imaginations. Have a look at this website to see more weird, wacky and wonderful creations made out of coloured pencils.

More on ATC's

I didn't realise it had been so long since I'd posted. Anyway I thought I would explain a little more about ATC's for those people who haven't heard of them.

Although miniature works of art created on cards have been around for centuries, the modern day concept of ATC's was conceptualized by artist m. v"anci stirnemann in 1996. In May 1997, stirnemann held a gallery showing of 1,200 cards at the INK. art & text bookstore in Zurich, Switzerland, for which he collaborated with artists Cat Schick and Gido Dietrich. Those attending the show were told that if they wanted to acquire a card that was on display they should bring one of their own creations to trade for it. A movement was then born that denounced the tradition of critiquing and appraising art, and embraced the process of one artist connecting with another.

One attendee at the first trading session was Canadian Don Mabie (Chuck Stake). Mabie was so impressed by the concept of artists sharing with one another in this way that he brought the idea home with him to Calgary and held the first North American trading session at The New Gallery in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The First International Biennial of Artist Trading Cards included 80 artists from ten different countries and took place in September 2000.

In person trading sessions quickly spread from The New Gallery across Canada and the United States,and interest continues to spread across the globe. While it is always conducive to the trading culture to trade cards in person there are also multiple opportinities for trading over the internet through various groups.

Artist Trading Cards or ATC's as they are commonly referred to, encompass all types of media. The format for this art form is of a small nature: 2.5" x 3.5" (6cm x (cm), the size of a playing card. The number one steadfast rule of ATC's is they should never be sold. Selling diminishes the true sense of sharing and community among artists. Trading is just that - sharing your art with others for no other reason than wanting to gift a piece of yourself to another.

# This information was found in the book Artist Trading Card Workshop by Bernie Berlin.

# The ATC posted is one by Vicky Phelps for the monthly swap titled "When I grow up".