A Year in Crafting - May

Happy Friday everyone! As this goes live, I will be on a train down to London to see family, so I thought it would be a good time to post the next in my series 'A Year in Crafting', since it's almost the end of May now. Yay I'm on time with it for once!

Anyhooooooo,  where has May taken me on my creative journey?

Well it's been a strange mix of a month really. Not too much that's new, but some things that I've revisited or expanded upon.

So....this month I've been doing a lot of shabby chic. My cards often touch on this style as I have a real love for it, though I'm firmly on the side of pretty shabby chic with a cleaner finish. If you look around Facebook and Pinterest, you will see many cards in a shabby chic style, but within that genre they all have their own interpretation of the style. Some are ultra distressed, I quite like to distress my cards, ruffling the edges, even adding little tears here and there sometimes, and I will usually ink my edges too. I personally am not such a fan of the 'tatty' edge, edges that look shredded with little tufts hanging off of them even, that's not for me. Likewise I love to add Gesso and/or white acrylic paint. But I err on the subtle side, with light daubings, washed out or dry brushings, small to medium flicks and splatters. Again I'm not a real of big glops of paint on flowers or great swathes of it. But you know what? That's just fine, we don't all have to like the same thing and that's the beauty of arts and crafts, you can find your own style, experiment, adapt, do your own thing. You discover your likes and dislike and even those can change over time.

Bet it would surprise you to know that when I first started I wasn't a big fan of highly embellished cards......yup, that's right, you read it. Hard to believe huh?

So I've been having a bit more of a play with mixed media, I just haven't had the time to do much yet, but I have enjoyed playing with texture paste and stencils, that's fun! and I've been incorporating chipboard pieces etc,. these are so on trend currently aren't they?

 I'm very tempted to have a go at a canvas, I just can't decide yet on my starting point, so maybe that will be something for my crafting journey in June.

I had a bit of a re-visit to mini albums. Frankly I adore making these but with full time work and other commitments it is soooooooo hard to find the time to complete these. I do have several that I've almost finished, and will have to complete and post soon, but in May at least I did a little one from start to finish and that was lots of fun. I made a video for it too, I really would like to make more videos, more video tutorials even, my main problem is light, as I can only film after work or weekends, (though this should get easier as the evenings stay lighter for longer) and workspace. I really wish I had room for a permanent set up so that I could video whenever the light was good and the mood took me.

I've been making more cards without images, not that I'm ever going to stop using stamps and digis, I love colouring them way too much, but it's nice to play with pretty papers sometimes without worrying so much about covering them up. 

I've not had time for any CAS cards this month, but look out for some coming up in June, I did manage to squeeze out a shaker card though.

I've also been planning my class for the craft retreat in September. Well ok....PLANNING may be wishful thinking, currently I'm still trying to decide what exactly I'm going to be making lol. The trouble is that I want to share so much, I have so many ideas, but I can't fit all that into a 2 hour class. So I'm trying to pare down and decide what to keep and what to cut out or do later in the free creative time . My head hurts....seriously lol.

So that's my crafting journey for May. Not too much on the surface though there is lots going on in the background which I will share with you as soon as I'm able if it all comes together.

Enjoy the rest of May, it might be June before I'm with you again...but then that's not so far off now is it? Once again thanks for taking the time to read and share my crafting journey with me. After all, if you didn't read them I'd just be talking to myself!  ;)