Here we go, here we go, here we go now!

Hello there

Only those of you who had their youth at the same time as me, might recognise the lyrics I've pinched in my post title. Hopefully Gloria Estafan doesn't mind. But indeed, here we go with 2013 on my crafty journey.

Happy New Year firstly to those of you who didn't get to read my last post from 2012. I hope this post finds you well and happy but if not, I hope reading through creative blogs is helping you feel a bit better and hopefully inspired to have a little go at something fun. I'm having a busy old time as ever but haven't had any chance to do anything much creative, other than my endeavours with this year's calendar. I make our family calendar every year. January's page isn't brilliant and I'm doubting neither will any of the other pages, as time has run away from me and energy levels have left me uninspired with it. I'm not going to stress about that though. I'll try to get it finished this week and then I can move on with other things which are feeling more interesting at the moment.

I've joined Nathalie Kalbach's Creative Jumpstart 2013.  It aims to give a tutorial video every day in January to inspire you at this time of year, when perhaps you're feeling slightly 'de-mojo'd'. There are also giveaways apparently, which is always a good draw for me. She's got loads of famous names like Heidi Swap and Dina Wakely to do videos, so I thought it'd be worth a shot. I watched the video from yesterday, today and it has a great little technique using embossing powders and double sided tape which I'd never seen before. Sign up for the event yourself and see what you think.

You start off by putting some strips of double sided tape onto your craft mat and rub embossing powders onto it and then heat it. If you only pull off sections of a the tape backing at a time, you can create multi coloured tape.

I got embossing powder all over the place and alot of it stuck on my mat but I loved it as an idea.

I had to do something with the technique straight away, as that's the idea of the videos and too often, I just look at good techniques and never actually end up using them. I seemed to instantly think of the moleskine I have from over a year ago now. It's from a class by Kirsty Wiseman and I've never touched it.

Once I got started tonight though, I just 'got into the groove' and finished off the whole cover and back of the booklet; the title of the moleskin wraps round from the back.

I used some lovely lace and some Debbi Moore 'metal magic' embossing powder too, along with trying the technique on foam pads too with limited success but I put them on the cover all the same.
Ok, so the technique didn't work very well for me but at least it got me playing and finally doing something with the 'me' moleskin.

Take care out there and play whenever you can.