Wednesday 29 February 2012

WOYWW #143

Good morning
Well, I don't want to share my desk this week but in the interests of providing a fair and unbiased and non sanitised overview of my creative life I guess I had better........
 Just one big happy mess really! A lovely pile of inks, paints, pre-embossed tags, mountboard cut tags and in amongst it all some little gems; like these
 Faux leather, partially aged copper and really really oxidised copper - all paint effects..... then , there's my current favourite, rusty metal.  I did the tag, the washer I picked up on the beach the other day.
 Speaking of picking up things, look what I found in Brighton, proper old printers block letters, I managed to get this one word spelled out so just HAD to have it!
 Then there's the beginnings of a journal page from some of the left over paints from some of the tags and a Tando mask.
So there you have my world this morning, If you want to see more creative places head on over to Julia's place to join in the party.
Have a great Wednesday everyone

Tuesday 28 February 2012

Mosaic for Try it on Tuesday

Good morning peeps.
It's altered week over at Try it on Tuesday sponsored by the lovely people at The Craft Barn who are offering a £15.00 voucher for the winner of the challenge. So lets alter something and use mosaic too...... well we want to stretch a bit don't we?
I altered a little wooden tray, you know the type that has lovely little embellishments in? I made my own mosaic tiles by using Crafty Individuals paper glued onto chipboard and stamped it with Family values from The Artistic Stamper before chopping it into little squares. The tray was coloured with inks and colour washes, stamped with a calligraphy stamp and flooded with a thin layer of glossy accents into which I laid the tiles. I coloured the corners with alcohol inks and glued to the tray.

 And then, when I'd finished it, I decide to add it to a notebook cover just for fun to give myself an interesting chunky book cover!
Hopefully I'll see you over at the Try it on Tuesday blog, there's loads more inspiration there; and don't forget the £15.00 Craft Barn voucher up for grabs!
Have fun today.

Monday 27 February 2012

Another page in my journal

Hi there folks.
I trust you all had a marvellous weekend and are looking forward to the week. We took advantage of the sunshine yesterday and spent the day in Brighton enjoying the beach, people watching and perusing all the creativity of the city. There are some pretty amazing art galleries there.
Today I thought I'd share this journal page with you.


Some lovely textures and paints, I'm not usually too big on yellow but this evolved and I like the contrast of the yellow and black! A favourite Tim sentiment provides the beginning of the tale.....
Take care and have a fun afternoon.

Saturday 25 February 2012

Journal page

Hi there everyone;
Hope you've been having a creative Saturday. Not had much time today but thought I'd pop some of my Journal pages on to show you.
 I really like this sentiment, I first saw it in a book of poetry about 20 years ago and it struck a chord with me then and I've never forgotten it!

Of course anyone who has a vagabond will recognise these! I popped them onto the machine but they didn't stick well so I took them off and used most of them here along with a liberal covering of distress crackle and glaze!
See you later!

Friday 24 February 2012

Spring Colours at The Stamp Man

Hi there.
It's a new challenge over at The Stamp Man with the Colours of spring as the theme. I used the colours as the springboard for this journal page.
 When I think of spring I always think of pastel shades; pale pinks, greens and sharper blues. Bright shades of green pop up too from all the new leaves on the budding trees too.  The background had been built up with these colours along with some spray masking and stamped dragonflies. I filled my journal spread with scalloped circles and doodled them into flowers. Images are stamped onto them and I've left space on the flowers into which I've written my thoughts about spring; the colours, Easter of course, and that means and then looking forward to the sunshine days of Summer!
 It's a pretty relaxed and casual page, no careful outlines just a page full of the joys of spring.
All the product details can be found HERE on the Stamp Man blog along with more inspiration from the design team so I do hope you'll pop in and visit and join in too. There's a £10.00 Stamp Man voucher for the winner of the challenge as well as the coveted blinkie for the top 5.

Getting more from your dies

Good morning everyone
I hope this finds you well. In continuing my search for different ways of using dies you may already have I thought I'd share this card with you.
I'm sure that most of you will guess what I've used to make the Cross, but below are the steps. With Easter coming closer I think it's a good idea for cards and also suitable for sympathy and confirmation cards too. This card for me, with the darker purples, blues and black lends itself more to sympathy, but by changing the colours to lighter ones will give a much fresher feel.
 So, to begin to make the Cross you will need the Sizzix Hardware findings die (of which we are only using the hinge) some mirri card and an embossing folder.
 Die cut four hinges out of the card.
Cut then down as per the (blurry) photo above! 2 at approx 5cm, 1 at approx 6.5cm and one at approx 7.5cm. Run these through your machine with an embossing folder to add some texture.
To assemble the card create your background (This is made with  Impression Obsession Geologic, and watered down distress inks) matt onto a slightly larger card.
The Largest piece forms the bottom, the medium piece the top and the two smaller ones form the sides. Glue into place on your card as seen and to disguise the joins I attached some small adhesive flat gems to the centre and added some square brads through the holes on the ends, though you could use gems too. Mount onto the front of the card blank and you're done.
Another thing to use your die for!
I'll be back at 12 with a new challenge for The Stamp Man so I'll see you then.

Thursday 23 February 2012

Embossed Acetate

Hi there peeps.
I thought I'd go through the distressed acetate steps for those of you who've asked about it. I have to tell you; it's messy and you'll probably go through a lot of kitchen roll!
So to begin you'll need a fairly thick acetate (for this I've used 0.18); your embossing folder of choice; I tend to prefer the sizzix ones as they give a deeper press but I have used a cuttlebug one too; you just need to be a bit more careful when removing the paint. Acrylic paint, paintbrush, baby wipes, kitchen towel and an acrylic block. And of course something to emboss with such as a vagabond, cuttlebug etc.
 Once you've embossed the acetate ; working on the "de-bossed" side, cover the surface with paint. (this is Americana - sand) making sure that you get paint into all the recesses.
 Once you've done that you need to take a kitchen roll and wipe the surface a couple of times to remove some of the excess. Keeping  it on the roll helps make sure you don't wipe paint from the recessed areas. You'll probably go through a few pieces of towel!

 You can also wrap a baby wipe around a block and wipe more off too. Then set aside for a while to dry a bit.
 Once it's dried a bit, if you wrap a bit of towel around the block and gently begin to buff in a circular motion you'll begin to get the rest of the surface clear and bring the shine back.
 In the end you should get something like this; practice and experimentation is the key. But even the ones you are not too happy with will still make good backgrounds for tags and cards. Different colours will give you different effects.
 Some of the colours look good on white backgrounds too!
So there you have the process I use to get the backgrounds.

I hope you give it a go, it gives a lovely texture to your cards and projects!
Have fun.

Wednesday 22 February 2012

WOYWW #142

Hi peeps,
Time to share your desks with the world again courtesy of Julia at Stamping ground. I took my photo's yesterday because I was feeling lousy and ended up in a dark room all afternoon. Hence the daylight sneaking in! Hopefully I'll cope with today better. I hate feeling under the weather. But you're not here to hear me whitter away so here's my place...
 Slightly different angle this week.
 I got fed up with having to open the cupboard everytime I wanted to get something out so I took it away and now its much easier to access, once I sort it out properly, that is.
 Aren't those union jack buttons lovely? All different sizes. The tag (for Try it on Tuesday) is waiting to be put into my tag album.
 Isn't this oversized spool of string brilliant? Susan got it for me over the weekend; next to that there's a little accordion book with an Egyptian theme. I love the face, from a polymer clay mould.
 Then there are my goodies from the weekend. I have some stuff I want to try with those markers but not got round to it yet. I'm enjoying the masks and have had a bit more of a play with them.
 Of course, having actually met Tim and Mario now; they are going into my journal, here you can see the beginning stages; again, I have an idea but not had time to do much.
And just a slightly different overall view! So there you have it; my place this week; now I think I'm back off to bed!

Tuesday 21 February 2012

Dylusions and more......

Good morning peeps and hope you are all well.
Today I've a nice mixed bag of stuff to share with you. Firstly; over at The Craft Barn this week we are exploring vintage and today I'm sharing a journal page in the vintage style. All the details are HERE and a little peek for you!
Then it's a new week over at Try it on Tuesday. This week is anything goes with the addition of acetate. So you can do whatever you wish but you need to include acetate on your project. There is plenty of inspiration from the team over HERE so do pop on by and join in the fun.
I made a tag
 I cut two tags, one black and one in acetate.  I embossed both with an embossing folder and used acrylic paint to distress the acetate. I just love the shabby look that the paint gives. I die cut the bird and stamped and coloured it with distress ink. I attached a small pine cone twig with wire and stuck the bird down.
I attached the sentiments with a tiny attacher and added some ribbon to the top. Can you see how shabby distress it looks in the close up! I love it!
Are you still with me? Now it's back to Saturday's Ranger workshop and session 2 with Dyan Reaveley!

This session was all about altering book pages; lovely, inky and messy! Using her range of spray inks and masks and lots of water we started to alter a book.
Here is mine in progress, I did get a bit further than this on the day but I actually finished it this morning; well, sort of finished it!



Lots of lovely layers of colour and masking and stamping. The little pockets for tags are a great way of adding interest too. The sentiment is very true; it's stamped onto a sticky back canvas ATC and I used the offcuts to doodle on and add to the page too.
So there you have it; hope you are still awake in the back there. Now I'm off, my studio is calling my name.
Have a blessed and creative day !

Monday 20 February 2012

Project over at Katzelkraft

Hi there
Just wanted to let yo know I'm sharing a project over at Katzelkraft today.  Here is a peek but if you are curious to see inside do pop on over HERE
Thanks for looking! Remember, you can get these gorgeous stamps direct from Katzelkraft or if you are in the UK they are available exclusively from The Craft Barn.

Saturday was fun!

Hi there everyone
I hope you all had a good weekend; I certainly did! So here is my Saturday.......... A loooooong one so pull up a chair and grab a coffee! woke up at silly o clock which was to be expected I guess and toodled off to the station to catch the train to the NEC.
Taking a photo of your reflection; that's what you do at 6:30am.......... then I was hungry so ate my breakfast and made a silver surfer to guard my ticket
Yes, I know; there's not much hope for people like me; still, I'm happy. We got there easily enough and ridiculously early so we went outside to the lake and then decided to do some geocaching while we were there. First find of the day was hidden here
Then it was back for a coffee; Starbucks was closed so had to settle for this; more caffeine, as if I was not wired up enough!
We walked around to the LG Arena and I loved all the different textures and colours on this living wall.

Then it was time for me to don my hiking boots and trundle myself over to the workshop room; Being my first time at the NEC, though I knew in my head it was a big place; walking seemed to take forever! I got to the other side at last, found the room and sneaked a peek through the door; yes!!!! Tim was there! So; I met up with Andy Skinner and had a good chat; more coffee with Kathy and then it was time to go in.
 This is what we had waiting for us.
Some of Tim's new distress markers (Fab!), Ranger's new waterbrushes, The new Dylusians masks and a prepped kit. Tim took the first session and this is what we did.
Loads of fun stuff, playing with old favourites as well as some new stuff; I was really pleased to try out the markers; I think I'm going to have plenty of fun with them! I agree with Tim, Ranger's new glue stick REALLY DOES WORK!  I had a good time and afterwards I had a lovely chat with both Tim
and Mario; could not forget him!
I had a fabulous time! The second half of the workshop we started on an  altered book with Dyan Reaveley but I'm not finished mine yet so I'll share that later!
So all super excited I went back to my wife who'd been waiting patiently for me reading a good book (And being chatted up by a guy to boot; honestly, leave her alone for a few hours!) and we made our way back home  with a little side stroll along the Thames..........