Autumn Serenity

Hello everyone and lovely to have you visiting here today!
After a very hectic week, I needed to find a bit of peace in my soul, and what better way than to get out some inks, paints and stamps and have a little play.

The background to this stamp was created with the help of Distress Stains and then toned down a bit with Dylusion Spray in White Linen. Love that stuff, it can tone down anything that has gone too bright. When I was happy with the background, I stamped around the edges with a back ground stamp from Stempel Glede in  Gathered Twigs Distress Ink. The vocal image was stamped in Jet Black Archival and is a stamp I have had for years and years, I thought it was an Oxford Impression one, but I can't find it on their current list. If anyone knows who made it, I'd be happy to know.

The leaves were cut from some papers I made with various inks and sprays and then added salt, to give the lovely salt effect, but you cant see that very much any more.
I diecut them with Spellbinder and Sizzix dies. The idea for this came from the lovely Maria of Maria's Knutsel Plezier. If you don't know her blog, go check it out, she makes the most wonderful cards with amazing backgrounds!

The tag was finished with a little Autumn Quote, stamped on a scrap of paper, some twine,  a charm and button rusted with Rusting powder by Crafty Notions and a hand died ribbon.

I certainly felt a whole lot better after having a little play like this. I'm sure we all know that really, crafting in many ways is therapy for our hectic lives....

Thank you for visiting and hope you get some creative time too!!

Tagbook for Snazzys

Hello everyone and thanks so much for dropping by. It's a busy week here I'm afraid to say. Here's a little sneakpeek of my second project for Snazzys, showing the 7 Dots Studio 9th wave collection designed by the wonderful Finnabair.

To see the full project please click HERE

Hope you'll take the time to look, these papers are fabulous.

I'm excited as tomorrow I am off to Snazzys for a full weekend of classes with Finnabair and hopefully I will get to meet some of you there in person!

I'll remember to take my camera, so look out for some pictures soon.

Thank you for visiting today
Hugs

Journal cover for Sin City Stamps

Hello everyone and I am so happy you came to visit.
Today I am showing you my first project using Sin City Stamps!

I was over the moon excited when they asked me to become part of their team as I adored their stamps just from looking at the pictures of them in the store. But when I received my stamps to work with, I got even more excited as these are the best stamps I have ever laid my inky hands on, - they are so deeply edged you just cannot go wrong. No ink in places where you don't want it with these stamps!

Anyway, on to my project: I decided to finally make the cover of the nature journal I have been working on all through my summer break, the Art Journaling with Terri Sproul set seemed just perfect for this, specially when teamed with the Love of Butterflies set, because of the nature theme of course.
I started by embossing a piece of 5 x 7" white card with one of the new Spellbinders 3 D M Bossabilities folders.

Next I coloured it with the help of some Ranger Distress Stains and Inks in the following colours: Willd Honey, Shabby Shutters, Rusty Hinge and Forest Moss

I squeezed some of the stains onto my craft mat, swiped my embossed piece of card through it, spritzt water over it to blend the colours, dried it with my heat gun and then blended the inks over and around it all until I was happy with the result. By that time I had lost quite a bit of the embossed detail but I did not mind that for this project. If however you do want a deeply embossed background, it is better to colour your card before you emboss it.

Next I cut and embossed one of my labels dies that matches this embossing folder and coloured with the same inks while it was still in the die, I then stamped some of the background stamps of the journaling set in Forest Moss and Rusty Hinge Distress Ink, these little stamps are just perfect to add some interest to a background..
Here you can see some of the detail:

Now for some more stamping to add a vocal point: - I stamped one of the butterflies twice in Library Green Archival Ink, cut them out and blended some Peeled Paint Distress ink around them to colour them further. I then adhered them together just in the middle, bent up the wings of the top one a bit for some dimension, added a pen nib and glued this onto my label

Time to start layering my background to create the actual cover....

This is what it looked like to start with:

I covered it with Kraftcard, inked around the edges with Gathered Twigs Distress Ink and stamped one of the journaling stamps along the left hand  side

Next I made a layering piece from a saved bit of corrugated card, coloured with various sprays and distressed around the edges

I then adhered it all together with a tiny scrap of lace tucked in between one of the layers.

Time for the final embellishments and some more stamping fun:

I cut a piece of plain cotton ribbon, coloured it with distress stains, distressed it a bit and stamped another one of the butterflies in Library Green archival along it:

Then I put it all together with some further stamped and cut out butterflies and some home made flowers and leaves. 

And here finally are some close ups still:

Another stamped butterfly, tugged between the flowers

Two words from the journaling set adhered with foam squares for some dimension

The stamped ribbon attached together with a little key charm

Well, there you have it, hope you like my first project and there are just a few days left still to use a fantastic fun scratch coupon code to get yourself a bargain! Click HERE, hover your mouse over the squares and your code will appear, how much fun is that, - keep scratching and you can get up to 40% off!!

See you next time

When was the last time you did something for the first time???

Hello everyone, welcome and thanks for dropping by!
So when did you do something for the first time?Well I did,  when I created this card, you can see full details on the Artistic Stamper Blog

This is just a tiny little detail obviously, - hope I have made you curious enough to hop along there, but in any case, thanks for stopping by here and have a wonderful creative day!

7 Dots Studio 9th Wave project for Snazzys

Hello dear visitors and thank you for dropping by.
Today it's my turn to show a project on the Snazzys DT blog.
Here's a little sneak peek

To see the full project with step by step, please click HERE
 Have a creative day

The Verdict on Paints...

Welcome everyone and lovely to see you here today!

I don't know about you, but I have always loved to use paints in my projects, mainly for backgrounds of course. The two kind of paints that seem to be talked about most in blogland, at least the corner of it where I tend to visit, are Tim Holtz Distress Paints and Paper Artsy Fresco paints. Now I do have a rather small collection of the Fresco paints, a slightly larger collection of the Distress Paints, but the colours that I use most often and have by far the widest range of, are Golden Fluid Acrylics. Today I felt like messing about with paints and so I thought I would put all of them to the test to see which ones I liked best.

Now I could write a long resume of the outcome of my musings, but I doubt you would want to read it all, most of us are busy and there are a lot of blogs to visit. So I'll try and keep this brief:
Paper Artsy Frescos: Love their chalkyness and the depth of colour you can reach by layering first the opaque and then the semi translucent and translucent ones over the top. I have 9 different colours in total and I used 8 of them to make the background to this piece
Tim Holtz Distress Paints: Love the ease of application, and  blendability and I was amazed how I could use them to add a few highlights to my background, even though they are so translucent, they stayed on the surface of the chalky Frescos somehow.
Golden Fluid Acrylics: Their purity of colour and high pigmentation are unbeatable, most likely they will always be my paint of choice, though I did hardly use them in this piece.

So the outcome: Well I love them all and found they work pretty well together too!
So here are a few close ups of my piece still:

 Before starting on my painted background I had added some texture paste to my board and stamped into it with various detailed stamps slightly wetted with water.

 The flower was created with a Paper Artsy Stamp (Hot Pick 1004), stamped twice, cut out by hand (I don't have the matching die), shaped and layered. The centre is a Wild Orchid Crafts flower.

 The butterfly is a Spellbinders die, painted with a mix of paints and high lighted with Treasure Gold in various colours.

Stamps were Tim Holtz and Prima, stamped with Stazon and Fresco Paints.

Well there you have it, a little exploration into paints. Hope I haven't bored you too much. Of course many of you, specially Andy Skinner fans, will have Decoarts paints too. I don't have any of them, so I can't tell you anything about them, but I know some people swear by them.....

Hope you like my little board, thank you for visiting and hopefully see you soon again!

Autumn's in the Air

Hello everyone, welcome and I am so happy you are visiting!

This last week I have had a visitor, this meant a lot less time for crafting and blogging, but it did mean two trips into the Highlands which was lovely, but also left me without doubt, that Autumn is definitely in the air in the corner of the world where I am living.

These autumnal colours were the inspiration behind this little mixed media board which I started a while back (when Annie and Rita were visiting, see this post). I made it from a piece of mount board, starting in the usual way: some strips of paper, texture paste through a stencil or two and then playing about with paints, tissue tape, stamping on tissue paper and inks. By the end of it all, it definitely needed a vocal point, that's how the butterfly (a freebie from somewhere on the net I seem to remember) came into play.

And finally embellishing with some hand made flowers and rusty bits

A stamped banner, one of my new Sin City Stamps

And a few remnant rubs to finish it all off.

Hope you like it and have a great weekend, thank you for visiting and I hope there will be some sunshine still where you are, here it's all cloudy and misty, very much like Autumn already.

The end of procrastination....

Good morning and welcome, so lovely to see you here.
Today I am sharing an accordion card, - you may well have come across this type of card in other corners of crafty blogland.

The first time I came upon this type of card was on the blog of the wonderful Red Anne HERE

I left her a comment and this amazing lady then got in touch with me and offered to cut me some dies and all the bits and pieces needed to create one of my own. It duly arrived soon after, with enough bits and pieces to make several of these cards and some lovely papers to use with it as well, how kind was that? Well, to be honest, it all looked pretty complicated, even though Anne described clearly how it should work (and there are videos  you can look at too), but I kept procrastinating. Other projects kept coming in between and it has taken me all this time to finally sit down and make the first one. Trust me, it is quite easy just as everyone says! Here you can see my version:

Even though of course this is a Sizzix die, I found that one of my Spellbinders Nestabilities, fitted it pretty well. I chose a wild flower theme to go with the beautiful papers Anne had included. They are from Chocolate Baroque. I stamped in Versafine Sepia,while still in the die, then sponged with various colours of distress inks and coloured the images further with Distress Markers and my water brush. The bees and butterflies are from an Artemio set.

I had great fun making this and can't wait to do another one soon, and of course I now need that die lol...

Here you can see it on a shelf in my hallway, but it won't stay there long as it will become the birthday card for a special friend.

Well, that's it from me for today. Thank you for dropping by

Hugs