We all do it...

...just some of us do it to a greater or lesser degree.

"What?" I hear you ask.

Buy stuff because we have read about it or seen it demonstrated...it then becomes a 'must have' and when we get it home it gets put to one side...often because we can't remember how we were shown to use it.

Sound familiar?

That was me with the current craze about "Pan Pastels" - I had heard a lot and seen them demo'd on TV. I had even had a little play (probably a couple of minutes) at a local store - I was hooked and had to have some, and some I got. Did I do anything with them? - did I heck.

So when Andy at Pinnacle Crafts advertised a Saturday morning 'try it' session; I booked.

Now Pan Pastels are not the cheapest product in the world...at £6 per pot they become a considered purchase when you take into consideration that there are 80 colours/shades. However, as Andy showed us - you use so little of the product that they will last an extemely long time (most crafters would probably never have to buy a second pot of a colour unless they used it on absolutely everything and went about it very heavy-handedly).

Andy had lots of lovely samples prepared for us to "Oooo" and "Ahhh" over and he showed us how easy it was to obtain super results using a variety of techniques.

Here are the pieces I produced...

This was my first effort and I have to say I was as 'taken' with playing with the stamps as I was with the pastels (Joanne is trying to obtain supplies). The background was created using four different shades of pastel and a bit of post-it note masking for the moon. The scene was then created using the Stampascene stamps from Stampscapes and black Memento ink. I love how you can use an eraser to take the pastel away from areas you want to. I did this on the rocks and part of the water to give the effect of the moonlight catching those areas.

This was my second piece...

...and probably my favourite of the morning. Using the DL card 'portrait' rather than 'landscape' gave the opportunity to create more depth of field. I used a dark grey, orange, dark red and dark magenta to achieve the background colours and instead of taking colour away...I used the orange to colour the rocks a little more.

We also got to play with stamping in Versamark before using the pastels...

...and embossing.

The pastels really pick up the details of the stamps as can be seen here (I used a script stamp to show the crispness you can achieve).

This piece was created using one of the new Cronology embossing folders, a quick swipe of "Teal zeal" Memento and then some pastel shading.

It was a very enjoyable morning and now perhaps I'll actually get my Pan Pastels out of the bag LOL....................