Wow such glowing comments! Thank you James, you are right that I did feel intimidated at first, but a couple of things have kept me from saying "Oh screw it" One is my very supportive husband, the artistic stuff I do is not really his thing, he does do ad layout and some design stuff with Xara, but views that mostly as work, not fun. He has always loved my artwork though and while he may be a bit biased, always encourages me in any project I undertake. Another thing that has helped and encouraged me is being able to get help and feedback here from you and others. The 3D discoloured dung heap would be a good description of my first experiment last night with the sculpting brushes But I did learn from my pile O' poop lol and applied what I learned to a real piece which became the depression glass.

@ Rik, I think it's cool that you have decided to give Blender a go. Like James said, start small play around and ask here for help. One thing I found really helpful was to watch the Getting started video tutorials by Jonathon Williamson. I have found Jonathon's videos very good because (at least the ones aimed at beginners) he takes the time to do things slower and his explanations are clear and easy to understand. I often have a video window and a Blender window running at the same time and go back and forth between the video and my blender project. I also like to experiment with stuff and sometimes a project started with one thing in mind will lead me in another direction, for example the depression glass piece I did started out to be a clay pot!
I started playing around with spheres, then moved on to modeling simple objects. I did find Blender's right click to select a little weird at first, but now I have actually on more than one occasion right clicked something in Xara in an attempt to select it!