Tag Friday at A Vintage Journey

Hello lovely visitors, - it's the last Friday of the month and in a month where there are 5 Fridays that means tag Friday at A Vintage Journey.

When it's a tag Friday members of the Vintage Journey DT post a tag just for the fun of it and to hopefully give you a little inspiration. But, and here comes the fun bit, with the changes we've brought in for the new birthday year we thought you might like to join in and share what tags you have been making. There isn't a prize and we're not promising any comments but the host of this month's challenge (Brenda) will choose one of those submitted as a Pinworthy and it will be pinned on our Pinterest Board and showcased in next month's Winner's post. To enter link one or as many tags as you want that you have made and blogged in this month (ie  between the 1st to the 31st March). The linky will close midnight on the 6th April which is when the new challenge begins so you have one week to get your entries in but remember they can come from any March 2018 blog date. Have fun.

Now to my tag, I recently discovered Foamiran for flower making. Now I have never been very good at making flowers, but I love the realistic look this stuff gives to your flowers, so I watched a great many youtube video tutorials and here is the result of my first attempt:

The little flower was made with an old Spellbinders die, the larger rose, was created with the help of single petals from a die that is actually meant to create peonies. I coloured them with Distress spray and hot glued them onto a Tim Holtz Layered Leaf.

The background to my tag was created by speading texture paste over the tag with a palette knife and then pressing some lace and a text stamp into it to create some texture.

I then sprinkled some Stampendous embossing powder into the still wet texture paste and dried it all with my heatgun.

Next colour was added with the help of acrylic paint in Titan Buff and Burnt Umber and some Ground Espresso Distress Spray.

Then all I had to do was adhere the leaf and flower spray to the tag, add a sentiment using Tim Holtz word chips, some ribbon at the top and  was done.

Below a few close ups still:

Well, that's it from me, I hope you'll add a tag or two that you have made to our Vintage Journey post, we would love to see them! Thank you for your visit like always and happy crafting!

xxxxx

Nature Journal and a blog break

Hello friends and thanks for dropping by. Today I have another spread in my nature journal to share:

I keep hoping I can share more Spring like pages, but Spring still keeps us waiting here, so today another more wintry page to share, though I suppose the catkins are in a way little harbingers of spring.

We have had a lot of stormy weather and seagulls tend to come a bit more inland. There are a lot around where I live and I have tried to capture some in flight.

I love pussy willow and have several branches around our house, so here is one painted in watercolour.

I always like to decorate the empty corners of this journal with random collage elements, just to add a little more interest, on this spread I have used mostly washi tapes.

Once I had finished painting and drawing I did some stencilling across both pages to tie them together.

And that is pretty much it for today's page.

This will be the last time I am posting for quite a while as I am off to Australia on Wednesday with a stop over on the way. We will arrive on Saturday but there is no internet in the place we are staying...

I have a very few scheduled design team posts, but that will be it pretty much until I am back at the end of April. I will try and catch up whenever I can, but meanwhile wishing you all the best for the next few weeks and like always, thank you for your visits! They are always appreciated!

xxxxx

The Egg of the Phoenix for MMM #46

Hello lovely visitors, today I am sharing a project that took me right of my comfort zone 😉

I made it as a mid month project for the Mixed Media Monthly challenge blog where our sponsor this month is Marabu. They very generously sent each member of our team a stencil, Acrylic Art Spray, an Art Crayon, and Acryl Mousse. Unfortunately mine did not arrive for the start of the month, so that is why I am only posting my project now.
On the graphic this month you can see our theme:

My stencil or rather mask was the quirky bird, and my colours were kind of dark red and pink, which I mixed with some gold highlights.

I have acouple of step out photos:

I spread the mousse over my panel with a pallette knife, mixing it with some gesso. I added some strips of old book paper and a torn bit of rice paper.

More colour added, trying to blend the collage elements into the background.

And here the finished piece. I placed the mask on the background and then blended around with the art stick and spray, also using part of the mask to add the additional flowers. While working on the background, I completely lost my bookpaper strips, so I decided to add a paper crown which I just hand drew around the head of the bird on some bookpaper, cut out and then adhered to the bird on my panel.

I computer generated the quote and added some gold acrylic paint still with my finger.

A few doodles and white paintsplatters, plus a little shadowing with a Stabilo All pencil finished it all off.

I guess many of you have been to the challenge blog already, but if you have not, do check it out, and if you would like to play along don't forget to add our graphic to your post so that you can be in with a chance to win.

Thanks for your visit like always and have a creative week!

xxxxx

Fairy Boxes and a new discovery

Hello friends, hope life is treating you well. Today I have somewhat of a personal post. Many of you know that I have two little granddaughters who live in Australia, and as I only get to see them at the most twice a year, presents are always part of these visits.... (I am going over again at the end of this month).

You may remember that I made them each a little mini album with photos of themselves using the G45 Fairydust collection, well, here are a couple of little treasure boxes to go along with them. They are little wooden boxes I purchased at a craft store, I painted them and then used some of the leftover papers to decorate them.

I decorated both the out and the inside of course and tried hard to make them match their little books more or less.

One of their favourite things to do is "craft" as they call it. Anything that involves colouring, painting and sticking, so each of the boxes will have some crafty goodies inside.

I found these great little kits online, and I thought I would just tell you about them in case you are interested. They are basically woodless coloured pencils, some strips of sandpaper and a little wire brush. And this is what you can do with them: You rub the colour on the sand paper over your paper substrate. Some colour will come off, but then using the wire brush, you can scrub way more colour grains off onto the paper, then you rub with your finger and you get super colour effects.
At its most basic you can just blend the colours together, so easy to do and a great tactile experience too:

Here I did a little picture on watercolour paper, but I soon came to the conclusion, smoother paper is better.

The next one I copied more or less from their website, it was done on smoother paper which I think is much better.

Stencilling of course works great too:

I used a slightly different technique for the stencilled ones, on the one on the left I stencilled first and then blended colours around it, on the one on the right I put colour down first and then used the stencil on top of that, it creates a slightly softer effect.
Any smudges can be removed with the help of a normal eraser.
 Here is a link to a video that shows you many more techniques.

The website is in German but here  is a link that takes you to an English pdf. There are many more gorgeous examples in their online shop. And they ship internationally too.

Now before I finish I want to make clear I am not affiliated with this firm in any way, I just thought it would be fun and something different to share. With the little ones we will use them for colouring Easter Eggs, we will also make some little lanterns, I may post some of the results at a later point.

Thank you for popping in, your visits are always very much appreciated!

xxxxx

Geliplate fun

Hello lovely visitors. After watching some videos on youtube I decided to dig out my geli plate and have some fun making backgrounds. I had a couple sessions and landed up with a bunch of prints, but then, what to do with them all?

Well another video by Kate Crane gave me some ideas and here are the results:

I used Paper Artsy and Decoart Media paints, stencils and stamps, and with one of my prints created these 3 cards. There will no doubt be many more projects to follow, so stay tuned...

I added some more stamping (the heart is a Finnabair stamp which I fussycut), some messy stitching, some washi tape and some words computer generated. The cards are tiny only 3 x 3 and then double matted on manila crd stock to make the fiished cards 4 x 4".

Here basically exactly the same idea, some further stencilling and stamping scraping with a credit card and just having some messy fun.

And here finally a third one. These little cards will be handy for quick gifts and will also be easy to send through the post, always a good thing. While I was at it, I made some matching envelopes. As I had used some of the Prima Lavender collection to embellish my cards, I used some more of those papers to make the envies.

Well, that's it for now, - hope you are all having a good week, and thanks for your visit like always!

xxxxx

Rabbit in the snow

Hello friends. As almost all of you will know, the UK was hit by the so called Beast from the East, - icy blasts and piles of snow. It was this wintry weather that inspired this latest couple of pages in my nature journal.

On the left, my attempt and wintry thistles

And on the right a rabbit in the snow, wearing its wintry coat...

To tie the two pages together, I used some background stamping, stencilling and washi tapes, like usual in this journal.

I tried to choose washi tapes that had a wintry feel to them, so mostly monochrome in colour.

I found that when you take close up photos of your work, you suddenly notice things you had not seen before, some are good, others not so good. Here I am happy with the way the eye has a 3D look, while the inside of the ear and fur could have done with more careful painting. Ah well, you always learn more, that's what this journey is all about.

Because the cover of this journal was made with the Eileen Hull journal die, it's great that I can slip it out from underneath the elastic when I am working on it, and then when I am done, I can slip it back like you can see above.

Well, that's it, I can't wait for this weather to stop and some sunshine to return, meanwhile, stay warm and cosy and thanks for your visit like always!

xxxxx