Happy Canada Day!

Happy Canada Day!

Here in Canada we have an even greater reason to celebrate as Canada will be 150 years old!  Dave and I will be celebrating down at the Shuswap Artisan Market in Sorrento today so if you are in the area, drop in and say hi.  We will have a large selection of our handcrafted Canadian themed items available.

To celebrate, we are having a sale -- 20% off all our Canadian themed items.  Enter the coupon code:  Canada150 at the checkout to receive your discount.  Click here or on the photo below to see our Canada Collection:

Vintage Lace Designs

Our friend Linda was helping with the clay this past month, when she was able to.  She has been in a lot of pain waiting for her hip replacement surgery and she found that playing with the clay was very therapeutic and helped keep her mind off things.  Fortunately her surgery is tomorrow (Friday) and we wish her well with our thoughts and prayers.

These past couple of months with her helping has been a lot of fun and a real blessing!  I first taught her how to condition clay and then to mix up my color recipes.  I had several large bins of scrap clay and she had a ball going through each bin, sorting into piles and then mixing them up to create some new colors.

We were discussing what to do with some of it and I happened to mention to her about the air dry clay and ceramic dishes I had seen online made by texturing with lace doilies.  I have been wanting to try that with the polymer for some time now.  Linda was quite excited about the idea and the next day she came over with a bag full of old vintage doilies!  We started experimenting with them and these were a few of the first ones we made (not finished off yet). 

And this is one that I just finished off the other day.  You can see in the photos how large they really are.

We were wondering what else we could create with the lace and I thought switch plate covers could be cool.  We had fun figuring out various designs to see which ones we liked the best.

Some of these items will be going into the Shuswap Artisan Market in Sorrento this Saturday.  It is Canada Day and Dave and I will be there with all of our special Canada 150 themed pieces to celebrate this big event.  If you are in the area, come on in and see us!

Happy Canada Day!

Today is Canada Day and there will be plenty of celebrating across the country.  We will be making our way to the park at the beach in our little village to take in some of the live music and later on, enjoy the fireworks in the evening from our backyard.

It is tradition to wear our Canadian colors on this day which is red and white and that is what these pieces reminded me of.  Can you guess what they are for?

It is a tea towel holder for our kitchen to hang on the stove handle.

I've been wanting to make myself one of these for some time now and this is one of my first prototypes.  Some of the ideas I come up with are basically stemmed from something I would like for myself.  We also had some of the quilt stores ask for ideas on ways to use some of our buttons such as this tea cup one.

The ring that I made is basically a bangle bracelet that was textured with Helen Breil's "Conga Line" texture sheet which is one of my favorite patterns.

Happy Canada Day!

Was seeing fireworks last night -- outside that is!  There was lots of celebrating on Canada Day everywhere and last night ended with a concert and fireworks in the park on the beach which we enjoyed from the comfort of our own deck outside our home.  Most of the fireworks were behind the trees so they looked like they were on fire and throwing sparks.