Scary times

Have just signed up for my very first craft fair at the Elmbridge Music Festival at Esher Rugby Ground in Molesey, Surrey. Full of enthusiasm when I handed over the cash, now I am suffering a crisis of confidence. I have until 12 June to put together enough quality work to make a good show. Needless to say, with shaking hands it's tough to paint neatly. This week everything I've touched has been a disaster. Must take deep breaths and stop panicking ....

One for the boys

It's my view that one of the few drawbacks of decorative painting and folk art is that most of the designs available are rather girly.

Theoretically, painting on useful objects lets you share the final results to family and friends - you have to really or you build up a huge collection of stuff under your bed.

However, when your family consists of a father, husband, two sons, three brothers, four nephews - and the one sister-in-law - endless flowery items just don't cut the mustard.

So I was very pleased when we started this project in my class. It's a wooden tray with a very liberal interpretation of Mont Saint Michel. The original design was by Linda Lock, adapted by my teacher Maggie Curtis, and adapted again by me to fit the space.

Notebooks and chickadees

One of the pleasures of decorative art on useful objects is that it gives a whole new perspective on day-to-day shopping.
I found these plain brown notebooks on our weekly supermarket shop and bought the entire stock bar six - thought I ought to leave some for others!
I've used a baby chickadee design on these examples, and have others with flowers of various shapes and sizes. It's usual to credit the original designer of anything you paint (unless it's your own of course) but in this case I can't find the name. Apologies to the artist, and I'll update when I can.