Finally back and some blogger news

Hello everyone and thanks so much for popping in.
I have just returned from quite a long blogging break, so it's good to get back into the swing of things.....

Like many of you I decided to join Wanderlust 2016. A year long event of art classes and exploration, and this is the project I created after watching the first video. If you don't know about Wanderlust, do check it out here.

I will not share the techniques with you in detail, as that would not be fair to Kasia, but this spread was very much inspired by her prompt and great example.

Unlike Kasia I used Paper Artsy Fresco paints for my background, and used a mini brayer, a brush and my fingers to blend my colours.
Kasia shares a great technique of scratching into the paints, using part of the Prima Distress tool and rubbing alcohol (surgical spirit). I've owned this tool for years and had never even discovered that particular part of the tool. I found the technique works really well with Fresco paints.

Here is a close up of some of the scratches, I kept them quite thin, but like the texture it creates.

Kasia suggests using chipboard pieces as focal points, - a great way to use up some of those chippies that many of us have flying around in our stash.
Below some close ups of how I coloured them after having covered them with gesso.

A mix of Fresco and Golden fluid acrylics paints and Lindy's Stampgang spray with some Treasure Gold in Pewter highlights.

I also used stencilling and background stamping to add more interest to my background.

I used a Tim Holtz stencil and Watering can Archival to stencil with.

Kasia suggests to choose just one word to express how you are feeling at the moment. I chose Explore for that's what I hope to do while following along with Wanderlust....

And then of course the challenge of using your own handwriting on your page. I always need to take a deep breath before doing that, and also found out that really I need to invest in some better pens.....

Well, that's pretty much in as far as the journal page is concerned......

Now as to the blogger news, - some of you may have heard this already, - I found out about it a couple of days ago from my lovely and talented friend Alison/Butterfly.

As Alison says:

Apparently it's in order to make life better for everybody... Don't you hate it when they "improve" things?! "New and improved" is my least favourite proclamation to see on a much-loved product.


Here's the announcement they made on Blogger Buzz:

In 2011, we announced the retirement of Google Friend Connect for all non-Blogger sites. We made an exception for Blogger to give readers an easy way to follow blogs using a variety of accounts. Yet over time, we’ve seen that most people sign into Friend Connect with a Google Account. So, in an effort to streamline, in the next few weeks we’ll be making some changes that will eventually require readers to have a Google Account to sign into Friend Connect and follow blogs.

As part of this plan, starting the week of January 11, we’ll remove the ability for people with Twitter, Yahoo, Orkut or other OpenId providers to sign in to Google Friend Connect and follow blogs. At the same time, we’ll remove non-Google Account profiles so you may see a decrease in your blog follower count.

We encourage you to tell affected readers (perhaps via a blog post), that if they use a non-Google Account to follow your blog, they need to sign up for a Google Account, and re-follow your blog. With a Google Account, they’ll get blogs added to their Reading List, making it easier for them to see the latest posts and activity of the blogs they follow.

We know how important followers are to all bloggers, but we believe this change will improve the experience for both you and your readers.

Posted by Michael Goddard, Software Engineer

There's not much we can do, other than alert everyone that if you signed up to follow Blogger blogs without a Google account, you'll need to get a Google account and re-follow with that if you would like to stay connected (and/or sign up to Follow By Email so that you get notifications in your probably already overloaded inbox).

It's hard to know what the impact will be. Many of us are Blogger bloggers, and so we have Google accounts anyway, so maybe it won't make much difference - we'll see. I lost about 30 followers in one fair sweep already a couple of weeks ago, maybe they were trying things out then already, - who knows.

In any case, to those of you who are still following, - thank you so much for being here and of course for visiting today!!