Ta-Da! Scrap365 blog hop

Hurray I can finally let everyone know my very exciting news! I am on the Design Team for the brand new UK based scrapbooking magazine Scrap365. Have you heard about Scrap365 yet? It's a new magazine from the people who publish Craft Stamper with a fabulous international design team. I am completely honoured to be part of such a talented team of designers and crafters. It's going to be great! Hello to everyone joining me on here on the trail of the Scrap365 blog hop - if you haven't joined in yet, have a hop and you could win a great prize. More on that later...

Let me introduce myself, my name is Emy Buxton and I live near Bristol in the U.K. I have worked as a freelance crafter since 1999 doing various jobs and have been scrapbooking since 2002. I used to write for a few magazines a while ago but I took a break to have three children. I now have less time to craft but lots of lovely photos to scrapbook.

Five things I love about scrapbooking...

1. I love COLOUR! My pages are usually packed full of colour - pattterned papers, paint, inks, mists.

2. I love stitching. I like to use hand and machine stitching on my pages. I am particularly excited about free-motion stitching at the moment. I have also started working on projects bringing scrapbooking and quilts together.

3. I love making and finding unusual embellishments. I make my own bits and bobs using Fimo, chipboard, felt, paper and ribbon. I also love scouring auction sites and flea markets for bits and pieces too. The border on the page below is made with drinking straws...

4. I love telling the stories behind the photos. I am striving to get better at journalling.

5.I love being creative. Scrapbooking brings together so many of my crafty loves. I'm always looking to learn new things too.

I hope that lets you know a bit about me and my scrapbooking. If you'd like to know more about Scrap365 then you can keep up to date on the magazine blog. You can also like them on Facebook and follow on Twitter (@scrap365mag.com). The magazine will be on the news-stands and available digitally on the 18th November.

Would you like to win a great prize? How about a year's subscription to Craft Stamper AND over £20 of stamps ! To enter the competition you need to leave a comment on here and every other design team blog PLUS the Scrap365 blog. Please leave a comment on here telling me what you love about scrapbooking.

Now on with the blog hop, click HERE to meet the oh-so-talented Anna Bjorkland. Check out her fabulous use of paint.

Inspiration - Doily street art

Through the wonderful world of friends on Facebook talking about interesting things, I've just found a website all about an art festival that has been happening in the Italian town of Grottaglie. It's called the Fame Festival. which is doubly interesting as a title as fame in Italian means hungry, so it adds a double meaning to the English version. It's a group of international artists who work in ceramics, printmaking and installations and who translate their work into street art around the town. It's not all to my taste - but the world would be a very boring place if we all liked the same thing.

This post here is about the work by a Polish artists called NeSpoon. She has created some beautiful ceramic doilies and also used doily stencils around the town.

A doily stencil - so lovely...

Creating ceramic doilies...

A ceramic inlay in a tree...

You can see more of NeSpoon's fabulous work here

Amazing Fimo

Yesterday I spent the day demonstrating Fimo at my local craft shop (the most wonderful Spinning Weal). It was a really good day and one of the staff members referred to it as "standing room only" in the afternoon. The fish brooch above was one of the pieces I took with me as I think it shows the amazing potential of polymer clay. I cannot claim to make anything as fantastic as this. This beautiful brooch was made by the most talented artist Sarah Shriver. I was lucky enough to go to some workshops taught by her a few years ago.

Can you believe these pieces are made from polymer clay! (I know this post is titled "Amazing Fimo", but I'm not sure which brand of clay Sarah uses!)

This is why I love playing with Fimo so much. My kids think it's great and love making models, just like I used to, but the creative potential is limitless.

Fimo swirls

My girls wanted to make some Fimo models recently and we had a big lump of multicoloured Fimo leftover from a recent millefiori project I had been working on. We used some of it to make the bodies of parrots and chickens and rolled out long sausage shapes to curl around into baskets too.

I saw a tutorial on Polymer Clay Central a while ago and decided to have a little play while the girls were making their models. It was so simple and really effective. The tutorial shows the swirls used as pendants and keyrings, but I'm also thinking they would make great buttons and maybe even the centre of paper flowers on a scrapbook page.

Pipecleaner Fairies

On one of our last summer holiday afternoons, I got out lots of bits and bobs with my girls to make some fairies. I would like to add now that I didn't cut any of my kids hair to make these, even though it looks exactly the same colour! I found an old packet of dolls hair from when I used to make dolls for dolls houses as Fimo samples.

We started with a wooden head and a packet of rub-on faces and made a body from pipecleaners, with beads for hands and shoes. We wrapped ribbon around the body, gluing the ends.

The girls chose wide ribbon for the skirt and we folded it in half and they sewed a running stitch along the folded edge. My six-year old has done a bit of sewing before, but this was my 4 year old's first bit of sewing and she did really well.

We wrapped ribbon around the top to make a bodice and I stitched the skirt in place.

Some more running stitch down the centre of some wire-edged ribbon, which was gathered to make the wings.

Finally some of the doll hair was glued on and tied into bunches.

Crochet - at last!

I've been very quiet on here for the past few weeks because the summer holidays are so surprisingly busy. I'm feeling very happy with the time spent with family outside - as Shimelle says "Live first, Scrapbook second". I've got lots of photos to scrap and stories to tell and the time spent doing something different has definitely been inspirational. I now have a very long "To Do" list!

I found myself with a quiet afternoon a couple of weeks ago and saw a Let's Get Crafting magazine about knitting and crochet which came with six balls of wool and knitting needles and crochet hook. We were away on holiday at the time so I only had my patchwork sewing with me so I bought the magazine. I've been promising myself that I would learn to crochet for nearly two years. I've had some beautiful books for the past two birthdays and I've been reading the fantastic Attic24 blog (very inspiring) but just haven't got around to it.

Here are my first attempts at crochet. The first is a little bear from the magazine and the second is a flower from the front cover of the Mollie Makes magazine. I am hooked ( pun intended!). I am particularly pleased with the flower and this morning I found some fine felting wool online called Wash+Filz-It which you crochet (or knit) and then wash in the washing machine to felt it. It even comes in some lovely multicolour versions.

So there's another craft I going to try to squeeze in!