felt chain garlands

To celebrate our engagement, Paul and I are throwing a party tomorrow evening - what better reason can there be to make decorations! Infact, I've been very keen to make these pretty felt chain garlands since Alice of Quaint Living had a go at them last month (thanks for the inspiration Alice!).

I made four in total and all have different colour combinations: light blue, navy blue and white (shown here); navy blue with a smaller amount of white; light blue and white and red and white. I think that they look fantastic - and are so simple to make. You can find the full directions over at the Purl Bee.

journal birds

I have started to see a number of Buzzards on the way to and from work recently and because of this, the RSPB Handbook of British Birds has re-emerged from the bookshelf and has inadvertently inspired my recent drawings and sketches.

Flicking back through my journals too, I didn't realise just how many birds of all shapes and sizes (cuttings from magazines, stylised doodles, stamps and even the packaging from the RSPB bird brooches) feature on the pages - I have shared a few of them above.

Speaking of birds, is anyone else completely smitten with the Robinsons Be Natural advert on the television at the moment with the little bird in his little bird house? It makes me go all weak inside! You can watch the advert and even the making of it on the Robinsons website. Adorable.

moose loose

It occurred to me this afternoon that I haven't shared any new artwork on here for a while (and it certainly isn't due to me not creating any!). I think that I have been so caught up with my social activities recently that the whole point of keeping my blog seems to have been lost a little. I will make a conscious effort to get back to art from now on...

This is a commission piece that I created at the end of last year. I was flicking through my first snippets journal last night and there was the first rough sketch of this moose looking back at me. I think it is quite important to keep the little elements that go into producing a piece of artwork, though I do seem to end up with a lot of odds and ends of paper after a while!