What's On my Workdesk Wednesday No321? Eat Desert First!

Hello fellow Desker from Julia's place over at Stamping Ground.  Welcome to my crazy adventure where I taught fellow convention goers to eat desert first!

I flew up to Johannesburg to attend an event run by Cariena Basson with Frank Garcia from Prima Marketing.  More on him later and if you have the time, go to my previous blog post where I share my day with him.

Here I am with my Lemon meringue cocktail and my taster plate of deserts which I had as my starter (a thing I always do and am known for)

























You can see the taster plate of starters for the rest of the table below, with my desert in the background ...just in case you did not believe me!  I kid you not!  Life is too short...eat desert first!
Below you can see us with our main course and our next round of cocktails.  Jen our gracious hostess and planner of the most amazing retail therapy day at 2 scrap shops is sitting front left, then opposite her is Caroline and behind Carolyn is Jo, both of whom flew up from Cape Town with me.  The event was fabulous, but Jennifer's thoughtfulness and overseeing of every minor detail made the week-end one that none of us Capetonians will ever forget.

Now you know a store is serious about your shopping there when you have a Q of grocery style shopping carts at the entrance...we don't have such things in our little stores in Cape Town!  So here you see me doing my best to just fill one basket at Aquila.

Below is a picture of me with Frank Garcia.  What an awesome teacher he was, I loved his class.

Caught in the act of eating desert first again on Friday night before Jen spoiled us with pizzas of every combination imaginable.  But then seriously?  Who could resist such a yummy treat as a chocolate cup cake?  Thanks to Jen's DH who thought of these!

I actually did do some work...this is my concentration face...

Finally, this is my take on Frank's project.

Franks sample project.

My Day in Class with Frank Garcia from Prima Marketing

This is Frank's project with all the layers of techniques and delicious Prima products.  Gratefully, he encourages you to put your own spin on it.  I saw this was the project on instagram (not by accident...I went looking to see if I could get any clues as to what we were going to do...it makes the control freak in me happy) that he did with the class during the week and so I took my crackled heart (done for Linda's CC3 challenge) with to JHB to add to mine.

Here I am on the plane, ready for my 2 hour flight up north to Johannesburg from Cape Town on Friday.  The event was a two day program with Frank teaching all day on Saturday and Jowilna and Cariena teaching scrapbook layouts on Sunday.

When I got into class, Linda King came to find me. (not hard to recognise me with my hair I guess) as we have been Facebook buddies for a while.  It was so lovely to finally meet in person!

Here I am with Frank in his class.  He is just the best teacher.  So patient, knowledgeable about his products and very clear in his instructions.  His project took all day to make and we worked at a leisurely pace which was divine.  No stress involved at all.

This is my project at the lunch break

A close up of the cracks and the pearls.  They just glow and have such divine colours.

I am a bit of a steampunk fan (in case you had not known that snippet of info) and so I swapped the flowers out for cogs and a bit more bling...  this is my finished project.

I got Frank to sign the back of it for me.  He is just the best...but then I am repeating myself...cos he is so awesome!

Below is the photo of all 100 delegates that took this class on Saturday.  Not hard to spot me!

On the Friday before class, my friend Jen took myself together with Carolyn and Jo (fellow Capetonians) to Pretoria to do a little Scrapbook retail therapy.  We hit Aquila Scrapbooking and Scrap-a-doodles stores then came back to JHB where Jen invited us into her home for pizza and drinks... carbo loading before the event...well isn't that what other marathon type people do?  Our events are like marathons too, only they are creative ones! LOL!

Here is some of the stash I bought at these two stores, the stuff I purchased at the event is buried in my bag still... perhaps it will surface for Wednesday's desk post.

Above is a pic of the dining room.  The conference venue was very unique and beautiful.

This is Cariena Basson (no relation to me) our generous and gracious host for the week-end as well as owner of Scrapbook Studios.  She has a heart of gold and put so much effort into making sure that everything ran as smoothly as possible.  I cannot begin to imagine what pressure and stress she had pulling off an event like this. (I pinched this photo off Facebook, it was taken by Jowilna Nolte  the local teacher for Sunday...more about her and her project in another post) 

These are Cariena's trusty staff: Kim, Priscilla and Kaylene who are featured here just outside their home town of J Bay. (again, I pulled this photo off Facebook from Cariena's page)  They also went out of their way to make you feel welcome and looked after.  I am sure they are all going to sleep for a week!

What's on my Workdesk Wednesday? Chaos!

Hello fellow desker... I forgot it was Wednesday!  Shock n horror! Here is my studio desk as I am already at work...the admin one above and a view of the one room in the studio itself, complete with all my lights on charge lying on the floor and 3 of the small ones on the table waiting for a gap on the multi plug as we had load shedding last night during my evening lesson...

What is load shedding?  It is where our electricity gets cut off for two hours at a time during peak usage periods as we do not have enough capacity as a country for every one to be on the grid at the same time...so we are on a roster and get allocated power outages...hard to comprehend for some of you I know, but this is what we have to deal with, so we do!

Bloom where you are Planted

I have recorded another art journal page.  This time I have managed to speed it up so it is only 13 min long.  I ran out of memory space on my iPad while recording and did not realize that it did not capture it everything I created till I was doing the voice over.  Please let me know what you think of my video efforts and how I can improve...apart from making more space on my device! LOL!

Art Journal Page

I often play in my journal for fun, testing ideas and products to see how far I can push things.

This page started as a place to play with two of Tim's new colours in his range of Distress Stain sprays.... Mermaid Lagoon and Cracked Pistachio with water.

I went for "geometric" style stencils and played on top of the dried sprayed base.

Then I added the chipboard letters which I purchased to use as masks followed by the Hazel and Ruby mask letters and over sprayed them with neat Mermaid Lagoon.

Here you can see that I have lifted off the chipboard letters and decided to spray Picket fence Distress stain through my dot stencil while the R&H letters were still on the page.

I lifted some the R&H letters to find that there wasn't enough of a contrast between them and the background so I rubbed over them with some black soot Distress inks and gave them a drop shadow using black soot distress marker while they were still stuck to the page as this makes life easier.

Finally I added a highlight on the right hand side of the letters with a white Poska pen and a drop shadow on SOME TIMES with the New Hickory Smoke distress Marker.

Lastly I filled the empty space with my new Finn stamp...Trust the Magic.

What's on My Workdesk Wednesday 319? Samples for Class

Hello fellow Desker.

(skip this paragraph if you are speed desking...)
Welcome to my space in a FREEZING Cape Town, South Africa.  I am on the coast so we don't get snow on the ground, but we have some very tall mountains not so far away...about an hours drive and they have a goodly blanket of snow on them which fell this week and so the wind chill factor makes it feel like we are in the Arctic even when the sun is shining!  Here we kid ourselves as a nation that it does not get that cold or even ridiculously hot...therefore we do not have central heating or double glazing nor air conditioners automatically built into our houses...and so we either freeze or fry!  The only time that is normal around here is spring or autumn.

But you are not here for a weather synopsis...rather to see my desk.

I have been making samples to show my students what they can do with the techniques I am teaching this Saturday.  Here are the tags they will be making and they have the instructions printed on the back for future reference.  My examples are using the same techniques but with different colours, stencils and stamps to show how different it can look depending on what you use to decorate your card, art journal or scrapbook page with...

 I was sad to see that our fellow desker Eliza died suddenly as I always enjoyed her posts which had obligatory pictures of her dear Yoda cat in them cos we all demanded to know where he was if she negated to post him in her desk blog.  Funny how even though most of us WOYWWers have never met IRL, that I do think of you all as friends.  I have been around for 5 of the 6 years that this has been a phenomenon all be it sparsely of late, but Wednesday, just doesn't feel right till I have posted or read a few posts on WOYWW.  So thanks Julia for the Community you have built here in Blogland and to you special Deskers who make it the special place that it is.  May Eliza's family know she was loved around the world and that her passing leaves a hole in Cyberspace too.

Steampunk Hat for Me

Hello there
Or should I say Servus?  I have been in steampunk mode for months now as I plan and prep for a large art installation.  I decided that as I install the project at the shop, I should wear my own hat to create the right ambiance... so I set about creating this...

The goggles started off as normal cheap swimming ones...which I took apart and sprayed with copper spray paint, then put back together and doctored with some alcohol inks.

the left hand side is just the normal spray paint and the right has the alcohol inks on already...

Here are close ups of the before and after alcohol ink

 I even did the inside of the goggles as you can see through the perspex

Then I started on the hat which I bought at a fancy dress shop.

 I sprayed it copper.

When this was dry I used the Wendy Vecchi black embossing paste through Tims clock stencil on the sides and over his masks on the top of the hat.

I then started adding all the decorative bits and bobs....

By the time I was finished I was working on top of everything I had used on my desk and to show you how engrossed I was, I was hemmed in on the floor too...all this is now back in its place and the floor and desk are visible again, but I thought I would show you the fall out I created while having fun!