Pottery Painting at Blue Owl

Last summer my sister and I visited Blue Owl, a pottery painting studio, cafe and gift shop, in Great Horkesley, (just outside Colchester) Essex. We really enjoyed our visit and would definitely recommend taking a trip there yourself if you are in the area!
The building itself is a converted country pub - a beautiful old building, full of character (including wood beams). Everyone at Blue Owl is very friendly and the place has a lovely, relaxed atmosphere. We enjoyed sampling the cakes on offer and browsing the gifts before choosing some pottery to paint. There is a very wide range of pottery items to choose from: coasters, mugs, plates, figurines, tea pots, vases and much more! With so much choice it was hard to pick what to paint, but after a lot of pondering we each decided to paint a plate.



My friend, the talented illustrator Helen Smith, works in the kiln room and is Blue Owl's resident artist so she was able to give us a tour of the kiln room and show us how the pottery painting process works which was very interesting! I had never done pottery painting before, only having worked a little with ceramics back at school and in art college, so I really enjoyed learning something new.

Printable Advent Calendar Town Tutorial (video!)

I am excited to introduce my latest design - a printable colour-in Advent calendar town!  You may already have seen (or even made up yourself) my Advent calendar village and the houses in the new town are larger than the village houses.  They are all designed to the same scale though, so you can mix and match small and large houses to create your own Advent calendar with space for different sized sweets and gifts!
You could also make up the houses to use as gift boxes, or decorations at Christmas.

I have created a video tutorial sharing tips and instructions on how to make up the town.  I hope that you enjoy it!



If you have questions or comments please leave them below! :)

Visit my Etsy shop to buy the printable kits and make up your own:
Colour-In Advent Calendar Town
Colour-In Advent Calendar Village

Quick and Easy Watercolour Valentine's Day Card

I couldn't let Valentine's Day pass without sharing a card with you.  This one's really quick and easy to make - it's also a good excuse just to play with some watercolours!

How to Finish Tea Towels From Spoonflower

If you are inexperienced at sewing you might be unsure how to finish off tea towels from Spoonflower - it's really quick and simple when you know how, so this tutorial is for you!  There is a great range of tea towel designs available to buy for Spoonflower (I have 3 in my shop including the Toucan design featured in this blog post).  You can purchase them either as a single fat quarter of fabric, or 4 on 1 yard (Linen-Cotton Canvas is the best fabric to choose for tea towels).  When you receive your tea towel you will find it comes as an unfinished piece of fabric, which you will need to sew a hem around to neaten the edges.

2016 Review and Goals for 2017

Happy New Year!  I hope that I am not too late to say that, as we are now already starting the third week of 2017!  The start of a new year is a good time to take stock of things, remember achievements from the previous 12 months and look forward to planning the next.  I've not really made new year's resolutions but instead thought about goals I would like to achieve, or work towards.

So first, here's a quick look back at some of the things I did in 2016...

The top 5 most popular blog posts for 2016 were mostly craft tutorials...

5.  3 Techniques to Decorate Pencils


4.  DIY Matchbook Notebooks


3.  Rainbow Colours and Free Printable Planner Page


2.  Learn How to Make Your Own Sketchbooks


1.  Origami Box Tutorial

Hot Air Balloons Birthday Card

Do you find that you go through phases of using different colours in your art or crafts?  I notice that I do - I could pretend that this is planned to look good on Instagram, but it actually happens quite subconsciously.  At the moment I'm going through a rainbow phase and want everything to look as colourful as possible!  So I used a rainbow colour palette to make this birthday card.

I made this card with the following materials:

• white card blank (A5 size when folded)
• printables; hot air balloon digital stamp, cloud and rainbow chevron background paper, rainbows border strip
• white card
• blue coloured paper
• watercolour paints
• coloured pencils
• black fine tip pen
• sequins and gemstones
• double sided sticky foam pads, double sided sticky tape and glue stick
• craft knife and Silhouette Cameo 2 cutting machine

First, I created a splattered rainbow background on the card blank using watercolours.
I printed the hot air balloon digital stamp onto white card, cut out with a craft knife and coloured it using coloured pencils.
Then I cut a ring of white card with my Cameo cutting machine, I also used this to cut a scalloped border from white card.
I mounted the white card ring onto cloud patterned paper, as a background for the hot air balloon.

A strip of blue coloured paper was mounted behind the scalloped border strip and attached to the card blank, followed by the rainbows border strip.

I attached the white circle with the clouds paper to the card with double sided sticky foam pads, then added the balloon - again with the foam pads to add dimension to the card.

A small piece of the chevron pattern paper was glued above the borders on the right side of the card, then I wrote 'birthday wishes' by hand with a black, fine tipped pen.

Finally, I added some sequins and gems for some sparkle!

You can find the Hot Air Balloon printables used in the project, and more, in my Etsy shop hfcSupplies.

PS. Have you seen the craft challenge I am hosting on my blog?  I have extended the deadline for entries to Thursday 21st July so you still have time to enter!  All you need to do is make something using my hot air balloon designs (some free printables are available through the challenge post!) for a chance to win a £10 coupon to my Etsy shop. Find all the details here > Craft Challenge Hot Air Balloons

Penny Slider Butterfly Birthday Card

It was my sister's birthday recently, which provided me with a good excuse to try out a new paper crafting technique on her birthday card!  Inspired by this penny slider card on PaperCraft Inspirations website, I decided to try making one for myself.  I had never made a penny slider card before, but it's quite straightforward to make one and they are really effective and fun too.  I will definitely be trying out this technique again!

For my card I used:

a white card blank

scrapbooking papers from DCWV's Citrus stack

the butterflies are my own designs, taken from my Butterflies Digital Papers set

lime green 3mm wide satin ribbon

rub-on happy birthday message

As this card involves moving parts I thought it was also the perfect opportunity to try making a (very) quick little video.  One of my goals/ dreams is to make craft videos to share on Youtube.  So this is me taking the first step in learning how to do this!  Have you made videos for Youtube? Any tips are welcome!

Mother's Day Card - Floral Heart Digital Stamp

Yesterday was Mother's Day here in the UK, so I thought I would share a photo of the card I made for my Mum.

I used the floral heart design from my 'Decorative Hearts' set of digital stamps (available from my Etsy shop).  I printed the heart onto white card and coloured it using watercolour pencils and watercolour paints.  By using shading, I have given the heart a 3-dimensional appearance.  (This design would also work well with decoupage, if you printed and coloured multiple copies of the heart.)

I cut the heart out and attached it to a white, hammer textured card blank using double sided sticky foam pads.  Finally, I hand wrote the message 'Happy Mother's Day' on the front of the card using a black PITT artist pen.

'I think you're purr-fect' Valentine's Card

Only 2 more days until Valentine's Day, so I'm just in time to show you this Valentine's card project! It's made with my new 'I think you're purr-fect!' set of digital stamps and Watercolour hearts scrapbooking papers (see more about these below), both of which are available as Instant Download from Etsy. Printables are great for last minute projects because you can download and print them straight away, so if you've not got your Valentine a card yet you still have time to make one!

Materials used:

• Hearts patterned printable scrapbooking paper
• 'I think you're purr-fect!' digital stamps set
• Card blank (I used one which was approx. 10 x 15cm when folded)
• White paper / card stock
• Scissors / craft knife
• Round corner punch
• Double sided sticky tape / glue
• Double sided sticky foam pads
• Watercolour paints / coloured pencils

1.  Print the scrapbooking paper background and the cats digital stamp onto white paper or card.

To do this, I first set up a document the size of my card in my photo editing program (I use Photoplus).  I copied and pasted in the scrapbooking paper background.

I then copied and pasted in the 'I think you're purr-fect' text digital stamp (.png format with transparent background) as a new layer.  The stamp is larger than my card, so I reduced it in size and positioned it to where I wanted it to print on the background.

I then pasted the cat image stamp and also resized this to fit my card.

Next, I opened a new document the size of the paper I would be printing on (A4) and copied in the background with the text stamp as one image and the cats separately, so it looked like this... 

2.  Cut out the scrapbooking paper background and glue to your card blank.

3.  Cut out the cats image as a square, round the corners with a corner punch.

4.  Colour the cats image - I used watercolour pencils and paints.

5.  Attach the cats image to the front of your card with double-sided sticky foam pads.


About the papers used in this project...
I used the green and white hearts patterned paper from my 'Watercolour Hearts Blue & Green' set of scrapbooking papers and my 'I think you're purr-fect' set of digital stamps.  Both of these are available to buy from my Etsy shop - I also have more heart themed scrapbooking papers in other colours and other Valentine themed digital stamps.