Kate Crane PanPastel Class

On Thursday I had a great day at a PanPastel class. It was taught by the very talented Kate Crane at Art  From the Heart in Harrogate.

This is the little tag book I made.

These are the individual tags before they were made into a book. They are a great way to try lots of different techniques. We did blending and sponging, stencils with a watermark resist, stamping with pastels, building layers with moulding paste, and patterns e.g. plaid.

Most of the other ladies in the class were art journalers and used to this style of stamping. Their work was fantastic....then there was me! It's very different to what I normally do but I really enjoyed the challenge. My tags aren't as "arty" as the others but I was pleased with what I ended up with. At one point it was looking decidedly dodgy, but I think it all came good in the end.

There was a huge collection of stamps by Stampers Anonymous and Tim Holtz to choose from and I was totally spoilt for choice. You can probably see that by the random nature of what I picked. I can't resist snowmen so I had to use that, then I saw the soldier, and I love Geocaching so the compass got chosen. I'm not quite sure why I picked the Halloween ones, I guess it was because I was using orange, but they are fab!

My moulding paste tag went a bit wrong so I cut that one up and rescued the parts I could. I decided to keep the paste part in as it will remind me what not to do - my paste was too thick and I was heavy handed with the PanPastels. My placement was a bit dodgy too, before I cut it up the poor woman looked like she had a giant booger coming out of her nose!!!!!!

Once we'd finished the fronts we stuck pages of an old book to the back of the tags. It was fun trying to find interesting bits to use!

I arranged the tags so that the different colours and sizes could be seen. Everything started to come together then.

I was sat next to a really talented crafter, Michelle Webb, and she was a great help to me. One of her tips was to use a black Adirondack Paint Dabber to edge the tags with. The front and back covers are stuck to mount board and this gives them a great finish. 

My favourite tag was the snowman one, so I made that into the front cover. That stamp is now on my Wish List.

If you would like to read more about these techniques Kate did an article on her tags in December 2012's Craft Stamper magazine. I'm sure a lot of you will have it.

I'll have to have another go and use my Clarity stamps. I think it would look good and I have a bit more of an idea what to do now.

Lynne
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