Baffling with craft!

My youngest son's friend came round after school today and looked on in astonishment as I got out my Cuttlebug and Spellbinders cutting dies. I explained to him what they were for and showed him how they cut out shapes that I couldn't possibly manage to cut with scissors. He was polite and vaguely interested but I could see he really didn't get the point of it. He quickly went back to playing Pokemon games on the DS handheld console. It's left me thinking though. Do non-crafters watch in bafflement at the effort we crafters put into our hobby? Do they wonder why we bother?


So why do I bother? What do I get from crafting? Well the answer is so many things. Firstly, I cannot sit still and do nothing. I feel life is too short to sit around and waste time. Secondly, if I do sit and do nothing in the evening I'm usually so tired I quickly fall asleep and then don't sleep at night. So I have to keep busy, doing anything and everything  I feel like, but basically I never sit still. I'm always fiddling with something. My husband calls it "faffing" (he's from Liverpool and this is one of those regional type words that I hadn't ever heard of until I met him). The other side of crafting is I like to actually make something I can keep or give away. It is something I can do, and it makes me fell good that people have always liked what I make.


I am not an artist, my school art teacher could think of nothing good to say about my school art except that I had a good sense of colour. Not the most encouraging comment! But perhaps  life has come full circle because colour is now a major part of all I make, particularly my current love of inking and colouring stamped images. The pictures below use a teal green, blue and purple colour scheme that I particularly like for fantasy work.

Star Fall

Twin Cities 

These are encaustic art pictures, made by using a hot craft iron with pigment waxes.  I have no idea what will happen when I start each picture; it's a matter of looking to see what is possible from the way the wax melted and formed patterns, and then scraping or drawing wax images to make a mini scene. It's a real case of serendipity, which is why I enjoy doing it so much!

Until next time

Gillian