Hello all.

It’s been really lovely having family here for the weekend. One daughter on a visit from Uni and my husband’s parents. Generally the house is so quite, it was nice to hear it sounding vibrant again. When you have guests you don’t stop feeding. cleaning, tidying up after them but I did managed to get out the two tangles as promised. These were done in the early hours of the morning while my visitors were tucked up in their beds.  Plus I got to play with my super new cutting machine, not for long though as the dog had to be taken to the vets. Poor thing is getting on and is becoming incontinent. So I have been non-stop washing of pet bedding and floors (Yuk!).

These are the results of my playing about.

The flowers are the images I used from the Tonic flower pairs punches. I downloaded the images and traced them in Illustrator and made them into a cutting file. Not sure that is legal, but I am only playing around with the machine.

The Butterfly was cut out 3 times out of 160 gsm paper and coloured with Kurecolor markers. I added a bit of Perfect Pearls medium. (Note to self, use a heavier card stock next time.) The Silhouette Cameo cuts nicely but the mat is extremely sticky and the first time I used it my paper stuck fast to the mat and ripped when I tried to remove it. I tackled that issue by placing the mat over my jeans and pressing on the fabric to remove some of the stickiness.  I do have an issue with the Silhouette Studio software. It’s really slow and jerky on my PC. I have Windows 7, anyone experience the same problem? I have emailed the support team, they made a few suggestion but to no avail. They are forwarding the problem onto their Programmers. Meanwhile I used  a trial version of SCAL (Sure Cuts A Lot) software. That works like a dream and will except Illustrator files as a cutting file. So I am more than happy with that and purchased a full working copy. It works well with most cutting machines except Cricut.

I had one piece of excitement that happened to me. I was interviewed by Cindy Angiel from http://lineweaving.com and http://rainbowelephant.com/. I will be a featured artist on her new line weaving blog and you’ll be able to hear the interview there. This was because I uploaded all of my Tangle patterns to her new Line Weaving forum. Cindy had seen them and loved them (Yay). I’m so glad that my patterns are being appreciated and incorporated into her artwork. This is a great new site for those who are interested in repetitive patterns.
I was very excited and honoured to be interviewed and hopefully this will drive some traffic toward my own blog.

At the moment I am trying to get a new page organised called Textures. These will be free to download for anyone interested in using them for digital imagery. There will be T&C’s on how the photos can and cannot be used.

One last thing that made me smile. My Mother in Law (Bless her, I love her to bits). presented me with 4 knitted rectangles. I looked at her quizzingly, she said that they were knitted pan scrubbies made from acrylic chunky yarn and when dirty, they can be flung into the washing machine and re-used – very green. They have to be knitted in acrylic yarn as it’s slightly harsher than 100% wool, but gentle enough to not scratch your pans. They work quite well. What a great idea for using up your scraps of yarn.

Take care

Lizzie