Our embellished pieces - ready for some stitching and beads!

The lovely flower stencil that we all want!

A heart stencilled quite thickly over the background

A close up of the lovely flower stencil

Hearts stencilled in acrylic medium

Wine bottle labels and butterflies

The lovely flower stencil...

Stencilled acrylic paint

Gold acrylic paint, embossing powders and glitter

Well, that's one corner done...

The lovely flower stencil again

Metal and paper flowers, Expanadaprint...and some sewing!

Hearts and flowers, with added Expandaprint

And then....

Over lunch, we watched part two of the instruction provided by our "hostess" Beryl, and her assistant 'Pokey' (American, what can I say?) which gave us inspiration for embellishing our background fabrics with stencils, stamps, embossing powders, metals, acrylic medium and glitter (OK, that was just me.) Wyn gave generously of her expertise and materials and we all learned lots of new techniques, going home with lots of ideas and coveting the lovely flower stencil...

Some of our Beryl Taylor "background fabrics"

Torn paper and book pages glued onto calico (or similar)

Torn up cherry blossom serviette, overlaid with tissue and painted

A vibrant flowery piece

Torn images laid on a backing of calico

Tissue overpainted with diluted fabric paint or acrylic

A serviette overlaid with tissue and painted

Beryl Taylor Workshop

A lovely day today at the MJC, we hired the room for our own workshop. We watched a Beryl Taylor DVD kindly supplied by Wyn and then followed Beryl's examples and produced some Taylor-esque work of our own, with varying degrees of success. First of all we painted our background fabric with diluted PVA glue, then we laid various paper products on top, including serviettes, torn wrapping paper, book pages, magazine pages and sweet wrappers. These were also brushed with watered down PVA, then torn strips of tissue paper were laid on top, again sealed with PVA and finally painted with diluted fabric paint. These were left to dry, or helped on their way with a combination of heat guns, hairdryers and sunbeams! They were quite wet, as you can imagine, and we found that some of them separated from the backing when they dried out, probably due to the PVA solution being too weak. They had to be reattached with Bondaweb, but that worked well.