Craft, Hobby and Stitch Show

I spent a few days earlier in the week at the Craft, Hobby and Stitch Trade Show at the NEC and had a great time.  It was my first visit, so a lot of the first day was spent wandering around looking at all the exciting things going on.

I did a few workshops to test drive some new products.  First up was Pan Pastels.  We used thick sponges to apply the pastels onto card and blend with other colours.  Here, orange, pink, purple and black around the edges were used.  The card has such a silky feel after, though I think there were a few dirty fingerprints on it where I took the pastels with me...

Next we tried stamping with clear ink (Versamark Watermark pad) and then a thick brush was used to get powder from the pastel pad and brush over the stamped images.  The powder adhered to the ink, and then you were free to blend different colours  on top of that.  The stamped image held its colour very well.

Next up was using stencils.  I loved this leaf stencil, and layered it up with different colours of Pastel.

We used some Maimeri gel medium which we added colour from the pastel by brushing from the palette onto the medium.  It mixes into a much lighter colour but the application with a palette knife was smooth. I gave it a bit of texture spreading it around.  It dried quite quickly so I wouldn't make masses of it up - just a bit at a time.

Finally, we used a water brush pen with the pastels.  We rubbed some of the pastel off into a tiny bit of water, and then brushed on like a watercolour.  This just was a quick colouring in of a stamped image:

So all in all, a very interesting workshop. The Pastels seem very versatile, and people are getting excited about them on the web.  There are 80 colours to choose from, so a huge range to choose from.