WOYWW #451

Wednesday again, and time to join up at Julias place, The Stamping Ground, for our regular desk hop.
My desk in all its glory-as you can probably guess, I'm still working with stencils & paste.
 Right at the front, a tub of water for dunking dirty stencils in, on top of an old towel I keep in my room for drying stamps after cleaning, hence the dirty appearance!
 A bit further behind that, a magnetic sheet for helping to keep the stencil still, a few tools and pots of stencil pastes.
 The black tile is for mixing on, I've been mixing glitter into stencil paste, which is a great way of getting a glitter look, with no risk of shedding glitter everywhere.

This is a selection of the pieces I've done so far, using 3 different Christmas Trees from Sweet Poppy stencils.



They look a little dull at the moment, but as the paste dries, you see the glitter sparkle.



The green trees had glitter mixed into Translucent paste, the gold and silver used gold & silver glitter into the same colour paste.

The weekend saw a batch of 21 cards made using a Sweet Poppy Baubles stencil, and laminating with foil. They're in the post below this one.




Has  everyone been following all the new releases coming out of Creativation? Seen some lovely new Oxide colours from Tim, along with new tools,stencils and lots of Sizzix dies, as well as stamps. Particularly like the new Alcohol Ink storage tin- it holds 30 bottles, and will store Stickles & Pearls too.
 Something I keep meaning to mention, and always forget, for those fellow Pinterest addicts. Have you seen the new feature where you can now add sub-folders to a board? I'm loving this, as now I don't need a separate board for each type of Christmas Card for instance. Where I used to have boards for Christmas trees/Santa/ Snowflakes, etc etc, now I just have one Christmas Card folder, with each type in it's own folder. Finally, they've come up with a great new idea, usually I'm not impressed when they change stuff!

 I made this card up from one of the Mixed Media panels, to take with a box of shortbread down to the Oncology Clinic yesterday, as a Thank You for the Doc and staff there for looking after me so well last year when he took one look at me & admitted me, my not feeling well turning out to be Sepsis. I had no idea how serious that was, and since I've been out, I've seen so many news items about people who contracted Sepsis, and have lost limbs, and their sight, some even dying because of it. I'm still shocked that I left hospital without any serious repercussions. I mean, we've all heard about septicaemia, or blood poisoning, but I always just thought it was a bit of an infection mainly picked up from gardening related injuries.  So be aware, everyone, and get any potential infection checked out ASAP.
 

 And finally .................

WOYWW #233

Well our Mistress of the Desks has been redecorating- a nice shiny new blog over at The Stamping Ground, although you may need your sunnies this dreary November morning, lol.
Not a huge amount going on on the desk, so you have 2 shots for the price of one visit today. My usual working desk:

Odds & ends abound- a dead babywipe scrunched up, a piece of kitchen roll (can you tell I didn't tidy for the photo?) a couple of acrylic blocks. Some stamps and a Versafine pad. A try-out for some scene building on scrap paper, seeing if I could mix Stampscapes & a Lavinia stamps cat. I've got a bit of a cats theme on the go this week.( Post below for glittered cats)- no not poor Ambrose, he escaped the glitter storm this time. The two black photo albums at the back hold brass stencils, 5x7, they hold larger ones easily, and I just stapled down the middle of pages to hold thinner/tall ones.



Cheap storage solution, and stops them getting bent.





The 'desk behind the desk'- the long table thats behind me, something I wanted when I put my room together, somewhere to put stamp folders when I got them out, put stuff to dry etc.

Of course, its got all sorts of other stuff on there too- glittered cats, bottom right,  easel,  Indigo Blu Christmas cards from earlier post, Distress Markers, a tub of cotton wool balls, and those little sets of plastic drawers, full of 'stuff' thats too small to store anywhere else, without losing it forever. Underneath are some 4 drawer storage ( from B&Q/Instore), they come with wheels, but I didn't put them on, that have all sorts of stuff (do you notice I have a lot of 'stuff'') I wanted close to where I work in the hope that would mean a) less searching for it and
b) it might actually get used!
 So thats all for this week folks, I'm back on my much loved night shift, so I'll be seeing you all later in the day.

A bit of organisation

The thing about moving rooms, I've been able to re-organise right from the start, rather than  new stuff having to be fitted in around what was already there.
  I don't usually organise like this, I'll be honest, but I did realise how much time I was wasting, looking for stuff. And also how much stuff I was accumulating, simply because I wasn't using up scraps/couldn't find the right colour/forgot I even had!

So while I was moving into this room, I designated one of the drawers directly behind my desk to card scraps, having got ruthless and threw out the bits that really were too small to do anything with. I also figured if it was that close to hand, it would get used.

First off, I just put all the scraps into the drawer, then realised that didn't really gain that much- I'd still have to root about for what colour I wanted. Then I remembered some plastic document storage wallets I had (Poundland, I think), and put one of those in the drawer. Too tall! I couldn't shut the drawer.And it was absolutely crammed, especially when I put the white & cream scraps in. So back out it came, and I cut the bottom off it, put it back in and labelled up each division with a colour. I put the white & cream in the part of the drawer at the front. So now its all easy to get at, and I'm using them up, instead of keep getting out a fresh piece because I can't find the one I wanted. I did the same thing with brayered/sponged pieces too. Sorted them into three bags- brayered, sponged/sprayed and scraps of all of them.
And I'm making myself keep it this way- put scraps back etc- which for me is hard- I'm a naturally ' push the pile to one side' type of tidier, but the bonus is that I'm not hunting for stuff anymore,and I actually have a fairly good idea of what I have & where it is. I've also been labelling all my drawers, so maybe I've found a system that will work for me, instead of against me, for once.
 So far, so good, and a lot of scraps are being used up in the cards over the last few days.