Who? Me? Wrinkle-free?

This weeks theme on the Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge is "A Tim Holtz Technique".  I used the wrinkle-free distress technique along with some pale spring colours to make a gift box that my niece needed for a necklace she'd made.  I stamped with Picket Fence distress stain, it gives a great subtle effect! :)

Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week, just make something for the challenge and you could the winner! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

Misfit Card

A bit of hybrid messing about for this card today!  The background and stamped image were created separately by hand and then brought together in the computer.  The "misfit" text was also stamped and then scanned into the computer, manipulated and then placed on the composition.  Not something I'm going to do every day, but a bit of fun to try something different for a change! :)

Oh, and thanks to everyone who let me know yesterday that the stamp I wanted was from Lost Coast Designs - much appreciated! :)

It'll be all white on the night!

My friend Hels has been staying this weekend, and what a lot of fun we've been having! We went down to Art From the Heart today to see Dy (and stock up on some stash - I got some of Dina Wakley's new stamps, love 'em!).

Hels hosts her regular Sunday Stamper Challenge, and asked me to be guest "setter" this week, so I chose "white" as the theme.

I had a play with lots of new stuff on this tag - several of the new Distress Stain colours (including white picket fence, obviously), a couple of Dina's stamps and a couple of new techniques! Why not pop over to Hels' blog to see her piece for the challenge?  She made it while sitting at the desk next to me, and it's a stunner!!  Even better, have a go yourself! :)

I've got the blues!

But not in a sad way :)

The theme for this week's Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge is "some embossing".  As I've done quite a bit of heat embossing lately, I thought I'd use embossing folders for this one!

I'm going to make a set of these colour-themed boxes to store my Promarkers.  Obviously, this is the one I've made for the blue ones!  I also thought that as the pens would be brightly coloured I wanted to make the holder fairly monochromatic, to balance things out.

The main panels were embossed then spritzed with Denim colorwash spray and Heirloom Gold Perfect Pearls spray, before the raised parts were highlighted with a black versafine ink pad.  It was edged with tissue tape and monochrome images from the Artistic Outpost Generation Redux plate were added.

Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

Fee, Fie, Faux Stitching!

The theme for this week's Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge is "stitches - faux or otherwise".  My piece is very definitely in the "faux" department on this one - needle and thread are not my forte! :)

I cut this purse-shaped favour box from kraft cardstock, on my Cricut, then decorated it with stamped panels and stamped (and hand-drawn) faux stitching.  Finished it off by dying some cheesecloth using Adiriondack ColorWash sprays and using a strip from it to tie a bow closure.

Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

Time to Breathe

I don't know about you, but after CHA, when loads of new products flood the market, I need to find some time just to sit down and mess around with them, to get a feel for their properties and how I might use them in the future.  This card is the result of such a session - I sat down with a square of Tim Holtz's Kraft Resist pad and just attacked it with Distress Stains, Color Wash sprays and acrylic paint, to see how it reacted and performed.

It doesn't really matter what kind of mess you end up with, you will have learned a lot, and you can always mat the result and make a "men's card" out of it! :)

Not all cards are made with Retro Grunge

... but this one certainly is!  When I sat down at my desk I found a square of Retro Grunge paper left from another project, so given my current campaign to use up some of my patterned cardstock, I decided to make it the base for this card!

Add on some swipes of white paint dabber and wild honey distress stain, some splatters of butterscotch color wash spray, a Sharpie white paint pen and some Tim Holtz stamps and Bob's yer uncle! :)

The Red Shoes

Not only the title of this card, but also a great classic British movie and a fantastic album by the amazing Kate Bush! :) In both of those cases, the red shoes are ballet shoes of course, not a battered pair of Converse sneakers! I doubt that they make ballet shoes to fit my canoe-sized feet and I wear Converse Chuck Taylors ALL THE TIME, so it was always obvious which way I was gonna go with this :)

All of the stamps are from Tim Holtz@Stampers Anonymous (except for the sneakers, which is my favourite stamp and seems not to be available any longer If it was I'd buy a second so I always had a spare, lol).

There's nothing specially out of the ordinary technique-wise here, apart from the red background which was acrylic paint applied with a moist wipe, and the orange which was 2 squirts of sunset orange in a full mini-mister of water to give a softer (and more economical) spray of colour.

I'm really enjoying card-making at the moment, expect more soon! :)

Moi? Je ne suis pas branché!

Which is to say "Me? I'm not trendy!", and believe me, I'm not! LOL (A fact that I'm sure can be vouched for by those who know me!) But I did think this guy from one of the PaperArtsy Urban Snapshot plates is kinda cool looking, hence the "branché" on the tag.

I sat down to start work on this with absolutely no idea in my head as to what I was going to do, other than start out by spraying colour onto a blank tag. I tipped a load of metal stencil letters onto my desk to see what I could spell with them and the word "branché" just jumped out at me, which tied in nicely with the choice of stamp for the main figure :) I've also been listening to a bit of french music in the last couple of days so I'm sure there's a residual influence there too!

I sprayed the tag with Cranberry and Stream Color Wash sprays and then laid down some of the stencil letters and sprayed again with Sunset Orange. The top panel is a leftover piece from a sheet from the Tim Holtz "Crowded Attic" card stack. The guy was stamped seperately and cut out then fixed in place and coloured with Promarkers. I used the stencils with a white pen to spell out the word, and then doodled a bit with black and white pens. I stamped the star, cut it out and fixed it in place, then finally edged the whole tag with some Walnut Stain distress ink.

As ever, click the image for a better view! :)

ArtsyCrafts Workshops, Part 1

As some of may know (because you saw me there - or heard me, I seem to be recognised by my voice a lot!) I went on the ArtsyCrafts Workshop last week. This was a 2.5 hours class with the awesome Lin and Leandra and a 4 hour class with Tim Holtz himself!

Needless to say, a wonderful time was had by one and all - many, many thanks to all involved for their tireless hard work and preparation for this great event! I'll show the Tim Holtz project in part 2 (I've got a few finishing touches to add to it), but shown above is the project we made in the class with Lin and Leandra. Great fun to make and I got to use some cool new products - PaperArtsy's new range of chalk acrylic paint, metallic "goop" and metal card among them. They even gave me a "boy" alternate to use instead of the dangling pearl embellishment it featured (nice, but not really my "thing" lol)! I have to say, I think it's one of the nicest things I've ever made in a class!

Ephemeron - Who Knew?!?!?

Ephemera is the plural of ephemeron, I had no idea. You probably did, but then you've always been smarter than me! (You're kind-hearted though, and don't bring it up in conversation all the time, for which I'm grateful!)

The theme over on the Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge this week is "Ephemera", and seeing that "tickets" is so clearly mentioned in the dictionary.com definition, my plan of attack for this challenge was clear!

The Lost and Found stack from Tim Holtz and one of his stamp sets provided the tickets, so the ephemeration of this piece was complete! (Ephemeration? Is that right? Perhaps it's ephemerosity or even ephemericiousness? Whatever, you know what I mean!)

The background and tickets were sprayed with Sailboat Blue and Sunset Orange color wash sprays and the clouds were hand drawn. That's probably all the explanation you need, the picture pretty much explains the rest! As ever, click on the pic to see a better view.

Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

Another Day, Another Play!

Day 2 of my ongoing play with the new set of Dylusions stamps by Dyan Reavely that I got just before Christmas. No aim, no rhyme, no reason, just messing about with the same set of stamps again - I love 'em! They stamp so crisply and the designs leave so many possibilities open for testing the creative juices with a bit of fun play :)

Today though, my knee isn't hurting (hurrah! and thanks for the kind wishes yesterday!), so I can take the time to let you know exactly what I did.

I began this tag yesterday, but set it aside immediately to get on with the tag I showed here yesterday. I started out with the Lettuce Color Wash spray by Ranger. I placed my tag on my craft sheet and spritzed a line on my mat, aiming an inch or two to the left of my tag, so I got a graduated fade where the edges of the spray jet hit the tag. (I then left this tag to dry, resuming work on it today. I spritzed water on the green I'd sprayed on my mat and dabbed yesterday's tag on it, to give the jumping off point for yesterdays design).

Returning to the dried tag today, I inked the rest of the tag with Barn Door distress ink, applied with a Ranger ink blending tool. This gave me a red tag with a smudge of green down the left side.

The first thing I stamped was the row of 4 large leaves (all stamping on this tag uses a Memento Tuxedo Black ink pad, as I was going on to use Promarkers for spot colouring). I coloured them with shades of green promarker, as well as the area to the right of the leaves (giving lovely sludgey brown shades where the translucent green shows the red Distress ink below!) . I stamped them again on scrap paper and cut away the area to the left of the leaves, thereby making a mask that would cover the leaves and the area on the right edge of the tag. I placed this over the leaves and then stamped the vine of small leaves slight to the left, making it look as if they were behind the larger leaves. These small leaves were coloured with very light watery shades of green and aqua, so faint that they only altered the background red a small amount. (By the way, you CAN Promarker directly on top of dried Distress ink, it works a treat!).

The scalloped edge was then stamped on the left side of the tag and coloured with a red Promarker. Finally I stamped the column of circles and coloured them with Promarkers, directly on top of the red distress ink finishing the whole piece off with a Ranger white pen. I applied highlights with the pen and then smudged them with my fingertip before they had a chance to dry so that the highlights weren't so glaring and white.

That's about it! Funny how it takes almost as long to type the description as it did to do it! LOL I had a lot of fun anyway, and that's what it's all about, right? :) As ever, click on it if you want to see a larger view! :)