Four seasons in one day

I have been so looking forward to attending the 2nd Country View Crafts workshop run by my great blogging buddie, Brenda, of Bumblebees and butterflies. The theme for this workshop was to make a set of vintage Nature Garden panels. I was up bright and  breezy on Thursday and caught the train to Flitwick and at 10 am the workshop began.

Brenda is an excellent teacher we soon elbow deep in burlap panels, matt medium and alcohol inks, which I have never used before.

Fueled by delicious cake and pastries and lots of tea our projects evolved as the day flew by.

The bases of the panels are burlap, or to us English ladies....twill/hessian/sacking. I remember potatoes being sold from sacks made of this material in the greengrocers when I was small.  We were shown how to build up lovely layers and textures using grunge paste and book pages.

 I decided that I would like my 4 panels to represent Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter so I chose to use inks and colours to suit  the seasons. We added stamping, remnant rubs and inks and some chatty word embellishments.

We also used die cut images using acetate gives extra depth to each piece. These were coloured with alcohol inks and then bent to shape using a heat gun.

And here are my finished panels .....first up is Spring

next is Summer, with a gorgeous dragonfly

Autumn follows with rich  berry and gold coloured  butterflies

and finally Winter with a robin or 2.

And here is a photo showing my 4 panels as a group.

 I really love them and plan to either link them together with hooks and eyes or put them together into a frame. They will smile down to me from the wall of my garden studio.

I would like to enter my panels into the following challenges;

County View Crafts New beginnings my new beginning is my first dabble into mixed media...and it will certainly not be my last.
A Vintage Journey Spring Flowers I would like to enter my "Spring" panel
Pan Pastels Go grungy
Crafty Catz anything goes
Crafty Ribbons anything but a card
Fashionable Stamping flying things
Vintage Stamping anything goes
Rhedd's Creative Spirit  Altered art
Polkadoodles Springtime I would like to enter my "Spring" panel
A little bit crafty the birds and the bees
Penny Black and More blossoms and bows
The artistic stamper embossing and texture
Bunny Zoe Distress

This will certainly not be my only dabbling this art form....I'm off to buy some grunge paste and matt medium as I have lots of other ideas for my newly acquired skills.

It's Friday again so I am now home from work and looking forward to some crafting both card and jewellery making over the weekend. Thank you  for all your support and encouragement with my recent crafting...I really am branching out into new styles and techniques.  I do still love colouring with my Promarkers and my cute cards and I would never stop making them but I just love getting inky, gluey fingers and mixed media is so interesting. And to think that at school art classes held no interest to me at all.

 My art teacher would never have believed  how much my jewellery making and crafting would become such a big part of my leisure time relaxation. On the subject of my jewellery making I have also added a couple of lovely pieces for sale in my Etsy shop.

 A  haematite bracelet available here

and a gorgeous glass  lampwork seashell pair of dangle earrings here ...thoughts of sunny summer days...mmmmmm

Enjoy your weekend,

Back soon,

Bye for now,

Jane x