The Andy Skinner Magic!

Hello from a very grey, wet and windy Norway!  Still, I'm mostly indoors delivering workshops, so that's okay I suppose.

I'm just popping in here to share what we made at a brilliant Andy Skinner workshop in Cambridgeshire at the weekend - this is my take on the Book of Redemption.

The workshops were organised by the lovely Nina of It's Crafting Time and as well as Andy, Kate Crane and Michelle Webb were giving classes too, so there was lots of crafty activity in Harston Village Hall that day!

Nina also set up a pop-up shop, crammed with tempting crafty goodies.  The whole event was really great.

Since it's a taught class, I won't be sharing the ins and outs of how this was done, except maybe the bit on the back where we were allowed to go "freestyle"!  But if you can't get to an actual class with Andy, he does offer lots of fantastic online courses which are well worth investigating.












As always with Andy, we ended up with a very cool piece of work to take home, as well as lots of fabulous techniques and ideas to apply in our own crafting (and some leftover cogs too!).











As you can see, texture and distressing were well to the fore as usual, as well as lots of fab DecoArt paints and mediums.















Under all that fab texture, there's just some simple muslin, would you believe?!












All the cogs and gears and nuts and bolts come from Andy's new Industrial Elements release with Tando...












... a selection of cogs and gears and washers and screws of all shapes and sizes...














... not to mention the odd book plate too.  It's a big pack and should keep you going through several projects.











I really enjoyed stamping into the texture paste - something I'd been a bit wary of as I didn't want to coat my stamps in paste and not be able to get it off... but I feel confident in the technique now.











The words on the spine were done as a transfer - a technique I've played with briefly but keep meaning to do more of, so this was a great nudge.













For the back and spine I kept it simple with some spatter over a coat of Titan Buff, and then some very light washes of Raw Umber, Quinacridone Gold, Prussian Blue Hue and Payne's Gray until I was happy with how it balanced the colours on the front.












I'm very happy with the slightly mildewy look, though actual mildew on an actual book would give me conniptions!











And my favourite steampunky tissue tape forms the "pages"...














There was another optional layer to go on the cover but, even though it was text paper, I decided I didn't want to cover up my rippling sea of texture that much - I like how you can see the waves lapping behind the cogs too.










Please excuse the water droplets on some of the photos - it's not another technique, it's just rain.

When we did the class on Sunday the weather was absolutely glorious, but the next day at home there simply wasn't a break in the rain in which to get my pictures - and I had to set off to Norway at the crack of dawn the day after so I had no choice but to take some slightly damp photos!

Big thanks to Andy for another great hit of inspiration - I'm full of plans to apply all the knowledge gained as soon as I can get anywhere near my craft table again...

Thanks for stopping by today, and I'll see you soon out there in Craftyblogland.

The mediocre teacher tells.  The good teacher explains.  The superior teacher demonstrates.  The great teacher inspires.
William Arthur Ward
(I'm pretty sure I've used this one before, but it bears repeating!)