I've gone all dotty!

The theme over on the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge is "Dotty".  I love dots... dots and stars... and I really should use more of both!  Hopefully today's offering has topped up my dots quotient for a little while to come!  Among my many talents (ok, ok, my 1 or 2 talents - it's ok that you thought it but you didn't have to point it out! lol)  is the highly prized skill of being able, whatever the location or circumstance, to lose a pen.  What's that you say?  You too?  I think there are a lot of us around!  Given my crafty hobby, I obviously have a house full of pens, but can I lay my hands on one when the phone rings?  Can I billy-o!  Hopefully this dotty pen pot which will live next to my phone can change that.  (The fact that the handset is never on the cradle and keeps running out of charge is another story, let's not pull at that particular thread!)

I started out with a plain MDF pen pot and used a couple of coats of picket fence distress stain to give it a limed look.  I cut my white card sides to size and blended mustard seed and spiced marmalade distress ink as a background colour before edging with gathered twigs d.i.  I overstamped with the Memory Box blank ticket on each piece, adding dots from Tim Holtz's mixed media stamp set, stamped with mowed lawn d.i.  Finally I stamped the numbers from the Classic Collages set with black archival ink onto each side panel.

I stamped the memory box index card onto a manilla tag and cut it out, edging it with gathered twigs distress ink before adding the same dots with fired brick distress ink.  The "hello" is from a Simon Says Stamp exclusive clear stamp set called Apothecary Labels.  I stamped it twice, once onto the index card and then again onto white card, cutting out the central panel and fixing it in place on the index card.  All sides were then fixed to the pen pot.

I had a bit of a brainwave with the striped border - I stamped the notepaper from Tim's School Desk set onto white card and then coloured alternate lines with a Ruby Promarker before using my paper trimmer to cut 1/4 inch strips from it, which I then distressed with a little gathered twigs ink before fixing them to the pen pot.  I thought that was a neat idea and was pretty pleased with myself! lol


Supplies I used included:

InLinkz.com

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! :)



Don't forget, Simon Says Stamp have a great Facebook page too!  Check them out here!

Scary Clown Alert!

The theme over on the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge is "Carnival", which I was so looking forward to when I learned it was coming up!  I find clowns fascinating, particularly the creepy looking ones, which those of you who visit here regularly will already have gathered.  Naturally I took the opportunity to play around with that theme again for this week's project!

I dabbed some green and brown distress stains onto my craft mat, spritzed with water and then dragged my manilla tag through it to colour it.  Using Gathered Twigs distress ink I stamped images from the mixed media and spills and splatters stamp sets to "rough it up" a little.

I took my David stamp and placed it on my tag in the position where I was going to stamp it and ran my thumbnail along the right-hand edge, making a faint score line on the tag.  Using that line as a guide I painted a couple of coats of picket fence distress stain onto the tag to lighten the colour where the face was going to go.  The face was stamped with black memento ink and then coloured with ruby, cornflower and pumpkin Promarkers.  "Cirque" was also stamped with memento ink and coloured with ruby and yellow Promarker.

The final touch was the poem, which was printed from the computer and then inked and stamped with spills and splatters to distress it, before mounting it in place.  A layer of black card under the tag gave it a sense of definition around the edges.

Supplies I used included:

InLinkz.com
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! :)

Don't forget, Simon Says Stamp have a great Facebook page too!  Check them out here!