August Bank Holiday weekend here at Sir Stampalot means lots of Christmas free demos :)

We've already had the very talented Clare Rowlands in on Saturday (and running classes today), but still more to come....

....tomorrow, the lovely pair of Chris and Crafty Lou will be joining us for demos from 10am  - 4pm.  It's always such a real treat to have this duo and they never fail to inspire us.

Here's a selction of artwork the girls have been working on..

Hope to see you all tomorrow - 10am - 4pm. 

Festive Antics

During the Bank Holiday weekend in August, we at Sir Stampalot held our annual Christmas Launch.  We had 3 days of wonderful demo's from 5 different, wonderfully creative, crafting ladies.

CLARE ROWLANDS

We started on the Saturday with Clare Rowlands and Gina Martin.  Clare, who is the designer and inspiration behind the cute Molly Blooms stamp range, demo'd for us with lots of beautiful projects as always:





Clare's eye for colour combinations is something else:

 

This card features Clare's mitten border which has been paper pieced, along with Molly at Christmas and the Jolly Snowman postmark.


And Clare often has a little comical aspect to her projects, below, you can see the gingerbread man is disappearing into the Snowy Postbox!.   The winter cabin makes a great background scene behind the aperature featuring Molly with Lantern.

 

Here's a selection of cards and projects Clare brought with her to share at our demo day:
 

GINA MARTIN

We gave Gina a little bit of a challenge to try something other than her normal routine of stamp range.  This time, Gina was playing with Rubber Stamp Tapestry peg sets and clear sets and she came up with some wonderful cards.  Of course there had to be glitter too!
 
 
This card features the peg set Winter Night Sky and the clear set Flourish Plate 2 which has this gorgeous font - love it.

Gina's taken a normal easel card to the next level here, and has created a double easel card using the Deer Forest peg set and again that lovely font clear stamp set.

Gina also demo'ed how to use the Marianne Creatable dies and embossing folders:
 

This mini poinsettia die set looks great with patterned paper and the framed embossed die just on white paper is really elegant.



LINDSAY MASON
 First time appearance at Sir Stampalot for Lindsay Mason, and hopefully not her last.  
 

Lindsay was demonstrating some wonderful techniques using the Staz On Spritz Cleaner and alcohol inks.  Check out this background sky effect:

The stamps are her new stamps she's released for Christmas and the star has been created merely with a white gel pen.


here's some other creations Lindsay created especially for our Christmas Launch weekend:


This set by Lindsay is called Build a Snowy Scene.  Such a wonderful wintery set of stamps.




These elves are sooo cute.  The holly punch around the page set is from Martha Stewart and I'm loving it. Lindsay has coloured it with distress inks and used red stickles to make the holly berries stand out.


CRAFTY LOU AND CHRIS

These two are just amazing, they keep you all entertained for hours!

 

Crafty Lou was demo'ing the ever popular Tilda stamps from Magnolia.  Here's a selection of her artwork:






clicking on each card images above will take you to the online gallery, i'm hoping to detail the cards this weekend so you can see exactly what Lou used on each one.

And Chris was having too much fun playing too, here's some of her cards.

Again, if you click on the card it'll take you to the online gallery and i hope all cards mentioned here, will be detailed over this weekend.  

Chris also created a wonderful wreath made out of lots of yummy Christmas papers and stamp designs, which deserves a blog post all to itself.  More on that to follow.....





Date for your Diary
Sir Stampalot's 4th Ultimate Rubber Stamping Demo Day usually takes place the first weekend in December here at Sir Stampalot, Peterborough.  Due to recent years bad weather, we've brought that date forward.

The girls will all be back in action on

Saturday 29th October

if you can only visit Sir Stampalot one day this year,
this will be the date you really wouldn't want to miss.


happy crafting

- janicex

Christmas Comes Early ...

What a fab weekend we've just all had. It was the Sir Stampalot Christmas Launch weekend and we had 2 days of demos from 4 very talented ladies.

Saturday we were entertained by Gina with her watercolouring techniques using the Art Impressions range of stamps including the new Shoppe windows that have just arrived:

Gina also decorated some little metallic plant pots with paints, alcohol inks and stamped images, and used them as sweetie pots and also to hold the lovely give-away bookmarks she'd been preparing one night when she couldn't sleep - bless!

We were also blessed with the presence of Kim Reygate:

Kim was demo'ing all sorts of techniques including the wonderful versamagic chalky inkpads, sticky embossing and anything asked of her - thanks kim.

We've been very lucky to have Kim staying up here for the past week and she's helped enormously getting things ready for this weekend along with our other daily tasks - not much of a holiday, I'm afraid Kim but very much appreciated and hopefully we haven't put you off and you'll come back again!!

And the weekend fun didn't stop there, on Sunday, we had the creative duo Crafty Lou and Chris keeping us completely enthralled with their demos of shrink plastic, stamping, inking, colouring etc. As Brigitte put it so lovely on her blog A Stamp for All Seasons, "that Chris and Lou were a double treat" and that, they truly were.

Both Chris and Lou have been busily preparing for Sunday's demo for weeks. They've been creating a festive banner using the latest papers and stamp designs that will adorn the instore Christmas Stamp Shelves. They've also created tree ornaments for the twiggy tree, card samples and display boards for the store. They are true stars. And also thanks to Jo James for helping Chris as Chris has not been too well recently and was nearly not able to come yesterday but I'm so pleased she was able to make it - hopefully not in too much agony today because of it.

Here's Chris in action, note the banner at the front of her table, one of the display boards on the left hand side of the photo, in front of the twiggy tree.

here's the twiggy tree, with the brilliant tags, miniature works of art and shrink plastic creations dangling:

Here's Craft Lou in action, again, with her fantastically created banner at the front of the table along with loads of samples and ideas she was sharing.

The girls were very thoughtful and created hand-made projects for a charity fund raising game.

Chris has a pail full of ribbons. If you guessed how many pieces of ribbon were in her pail and you were the closest guesser, you won some reels of ribbon from me and a beautifully created festive notelet holder and 3 Christmas Thank You Notelets, made with inchies from inkadinkadoo.

Louise Roache from Spalding was the closest guesser. Her lucky number 96 was only 2 away from the actual quantity of 98 pieces, well done Louise - she is one of the ribbon queens of Spalding and obviously has an eye for these things!


Crafty Lou's button jar was the subject of the 'guess how many buttons' game.

Sue Watson from Peterborough had a lucky guess with 2012 (picked as the date of the next Olympics) and was only 4 buttons out from the actual quantity of 2016 (I'm glad I didn't have to count all them to get the actual figure!!).

Sue has won herself, a tilda present stamp from me and Craft Lou has created a stunning notebook using a tilda stamp, swirly stamp from Autumn Leaves and a greeting word stamp from Printworks.


(close up of Chris' project and Lou's one will follow in another blog update).

It was only 50p for a guess on both games and we raised £123.50 towards MS Research. Thanks everyone who took part and big thanks to the girls for their brilliant projects.

We were so busy at the till (thank you my very loyal and lovely customers) that unfortunately i didn't get to watch the demo's. However, the card samples, projects and festive banner from the weekend, have remained at Sir Stampalot and will be on display around the store for you all to see and admire on your next visit.


Here's a couple of pics of the 'Christmas Stamp Wall' at Sir Stampalot, WITHOUT the festive banner made by Lou and Chris:

In my next blog, I'll get another pic of these shelves with the festive banner, once I've put the shop back together tomorrow (should have been done today but we've decided to stay home for some R&R - I'm currently typing this and Andy is snoring next to me on the sofa!)

Right then, time for a cuppa, and search the cupboards for some food!

Happy crafting one and all.
- janice