Dala Madness

I have definitely fallen in love with all my new Dala Horse stamps. I had to have a go at them straight away and here are some of my first cards where my liking for Scandinavian folklore is coming to life :) I've made quite a few of them and today is the first portion of Dalas for you :) For a start I limited myself to the three basic colours Scandinavian graphics often comes in - red, white and blue. I kept it deliberately simple focusing on the design to be as much Scandinavian as possible.

The Dala stamps featured on my cards are from noolibird.com and they should be soon on sale. Keep checking the shop. The small Norwegian star stamp comes from a Polish scrapbooking shop craftfun.pl. I also used Martha Stewart's punches and a leafy border from a Scandinavian stamp set.

All 3 together:

And a cherry on a Dala cake: my first ever Dala mug:

Pretty print, isnt it? And I love the colours too. This mug has been designed by Sarah Edmonds and you can find it here.

Dala Horse

After Etruscan Horses I painted another picture of a horse in a different style :) a Dala Horse - folky, colourful, Swedish in origin ...

The picture is painted on an A4 clipframe. I like to use clipframes for painting pictures when I want to give them a frame of my own :) I chose the same colours for the frame as for the horse plus the stripes to deepen the folky effect. So how did I do? :)

A few things inspired me to paint this picture - my interest in Scandinavia, the world-wide fame of the Swedish Dala Horse as a cultural icon and product of Sweden, some lovely pictures of Dalas on the internet, some lovely blog posts like the one of Heather's as well as my own authentic little wooden Dala Horse I bought ages ago at a car boot sale without even knowing it's the one! At the time I didn't quite realize what sort of horse I found, not until I'd become interested in Scandinavia!

Just look at those Dalas off the internet! Aren't they gorgeous?

They wanna make me head north to the cold Scandinavian countries to find one!