Handmade U - Giveaway!!

ANOTHER HANDMADE U GIVEAWAY!!

One of our Fabulous Fall 2013 Handmade U Instructors - Lexi Grenzer has provided an AMAZING Handmade Cuff for one of you lucky ladies!!

Lexi is published in the current issue of Jewelry Affaire!! I grabbed a copy so she can sign it this October at Handmade U!!  Hope you are able to join us!!  There are still spaces available.

In the Jewelry Affaire article Lexi shows off some of her beautiful handmade cuffs.  She has offered one of my readers a beautiful cuff that she lovingly created!

I love the texture on the leather!  Leather METAL and LACE! What a cool piece!!  I wish I could enter the giveaway ;)

To be entered in the giveaway you can do one or ALL of the following:

1.  Follow my blog then visit  www.handmadeu.com and check out what FUN we have planned!

2.  LIKE Handmade U on Facebook - www.facebook.com/handmadeuart

3.  On Facebook after you LIKE Handmade U, Share the link with all your friends on Facebook.

4.  Visit my Instagram @rjmcgough FOLLOW, TAG your friends and share the GIVEAWAY PIC with your friends on IG.


Lots of ways to enter!  The winner will be chosen Wednesday 7/24.

Good Luck to YOU!

Walnut, Iowa - My Kind of Town!

Hi Everyone,

Back in June, Jim and I made a quick trip to Walnut, Iowa for the Annual Antique Fair.  Walnut is known as Antique City in Iowa and throughout the year a fun place to shop for fun finds in all the antique shops that line the old Main Street.

The Annual Antique Fair weekend however, is jammed with so many vendors from throughout the region that come back year after year with their new treasures.

We only had a couple hours to shop before the vendors started closing up for the evening.  So we did some Speed-Antiquing!

There were a lot of fun kids tractors...they looked so cool all in a row....

and kids cars..

I don't have anymore wall space in the Art Room but if I did these might have been in consideration...

or maybe this...

Our first find was this bright and cheery Maple Leaf Quilt!  I saw the price...$25!  I thought what the??  There was a small hole from a burn...but I thought for $25 what the heck, I could use it for something.  Luckily I have a Expert Quilter as a Mother -Acorn Ridge Quilting, and she patched it so well you wouldn't be able to see where it had been unless you really searched for it!

The quilt was an approved purchase by Thunder and Bolt when we got home!

In honor of all the gals beginning their first weekend of the French General "French Getaway" Jim wore his Woaded Shirt!  I carried my woaded antiquing bag too!  Hope they all had fun!

As the shopping came to an end we came upon this amazing piece.  It was a small label box from an old pharmacy!  It was FULL of different labels a Pharmacist would have pulled from to add to pill bottles!  I have never seen anything like it!  I also have never seen anything like the Price either!!  Yikes!  It was NOT to be mine :(  I found out later my friend Mollie had seen it earlier when they shopped and sadly passed it up too.  What a fun thing to see anyhow!

Another fun day in Walnut...my kind of town!

RECAP :Handmade U Fourth Semester - Class with Dawn DeVries Sokol

Day 2 of Handmade U - Spring 2013

After our fun welcome dinner and vendor night we had a full day class Friday with the talented Dawn DeVries Sokol.  You know her from her many fun Doodle Books.  She had a new release Art Doodle Love and each student received one as a part of the goodie bag!  It is a fun doodle starter book for those of us that stare at a blank page and FREEZE!  Check it out, it's on sale at Amazon as of this post.

We all were excited to get our ART on!  As you'll see we all had our official Handmade U T-shirts on too for our class photo.  We like to be comfy for our crafting!  Plus why worry where the paint might splatter?!

Here is my table space...clean for the moment...not to last long...

The class was a Doodlicious Tape-bound Book that began with the kit above.  Dawn had brought along cereal boxes, dog treat boxes, cardboard, etc.  This was to be the base of journal.  

We started by learning a bit about Dawn's process.  

We collaged using scraps of ephemera, I just pulled out all my swap goodies from the night before and had MORE than enough fun things to choose from.  Here is what my first layer looked like...

I loved how Dawn showed us how to start with a base then to keep adding more and more layers....I always feel bad covering up a layer I just worked to create...I mean you don't see all the detail anymore?!?....then once the next layer goes down you start to see something wonderful forming...a work of art you couldn't have planned in one try!  So here goes....we also learned a little about color choice...she showed us how not to mix colors together that end up as BROWN and MUDDY...unless you like the muddy look, but I was happy to hear how to avoid that!

Here are a few of the attentive students :)

Then we all chose our colors from my tote of paint and the colors Dawn brought along!

I was pretty happy with how mine was coming together...as you can see here I was still sad to cover up the cool ephemera that I had laid down first...but don't worry I get over it later!

Of course Dawn's was look A.MAZING.

Shelley and Jennifer were finger painting away...they both made beautiful books!

Jayne and Tamatha's also came out so cute!

There is just something about paint all over your fingers!

Next putting the pages into the cover with TAPE!

We used an assortment of masking tapes, duct tape, washi tape, etc. to add pages to our book.

Dawn brought some of hers tapes to share, and nearly all the students had a pile of their own!

They make such fun colors and prints of duct tape these days, hot pink was Dawn's choice.

Then we just added pages and pages to the book.

This is how my cover was coming together..

Of course I had to add some of the mustache duct tape....why wouldn't I?

After we all had our pages in and were at a place to start doodling, Dawn gave us some prompts to start us working.  Here we were to create a Doodle Quilt...

One of the others was to create Doodle Lines...

All in all this was a FANTASTIC Class!!  Just look at all these fabulous journals!  Each one unique to the special students we have at Handmade U!

Thanks again Dawn for such a FUN class, so happy to have you as an Alum of Handmade U!  

XOX Rachel