Steampunk for Our Creative Corner

I was more than a little excited when I was invited to become part of the Our Creative Corner design team, and today is the day I will share my first project. Just click on the link to see the amazing projects my teamies have created also.

As you may know Claudia chose the theme of Steampunk Tic Tac Toe and I decided to go with the top line, wing, gears and wire. I made a wall plague out of mount board and started by making my background using Tim Holtz's Eroded Metallic technique as explained in Creative Chemistry 102.

Though I was pretty pleased with how it came out I added some Wow Blended Verdigris for some extra texture as well as some rusting powder to the corners.

Next I ran a piece of card through a Spellbinders Cogs and Gears embossing folder, layered a piece of 7 Gypsies printed tissue paper over the top and darkened the raised bits with Walnut Stain Distress Inks,

The next layer was some corrugated card, painted with Antique Linen, Weathered Wood and Walnut Stain Distress paints and then rusted with a thick layer of rusting powder.

Time for some stamping: these are both La Blanche stamps, stamped in Jet Black Archival onto smooth stamping card and then fussy cut and inked a bit with Vintage Photo DI.

Some rusty cogs (love that rusting powder, two of these are metal the other wood yet with the powder all beautifully rusted they look just the same).

A little plaque created with a metal filigree charm, treated with a bit of verdigris gilders paste, a piece of dry embossed metal and a word created with a Spellbinders die.
Ok, now for some wings..... a butterfly image with a rusted pen nib came to the rescue.

And of course no Steampunk piece is quite complete without the Victorian inventor, a vintage freebie I had in my stash.

Finally a piece of rusty wire to attach the charm to the plaque

Well, there you have it. I am not usually a steampunk sort of girl, so this was a bit of a challenge for me, but I greatly enjoyed it. Hope you like it.....

There is still plenty of time to play, so I hope you will come and join us. Click HERE to find all the details of the challenge, hope to see you there!!

A Card for All Seasons

Hello everyone and thank you for dropping by, either for the first or the second time today. Yes it is busy here right now, as I had two DT pieces both due on the same day. This one is for Sin City Stamps.
Here is a sneak-peek of my project:

If you want to see more, please click HERE
If you like the project and would like to leave a comment, you will have to click on the title of my post, for that is the way the blog is set up there for some reason....
Thanks so much for dropping by  and have a wonderful day. look after yourselves!

A Little Bit of Altering...

Hi everyone and thanks for dropping around here.
Today it's my turn to post on the Artistic Stamper Creative Team blog.
Here is a sneak-peek of my project

If you want to see more, all you need to do is click HERE
Thanks for dropping by and I will be back later with another sneak-peek for Sin City Stamps, - it's busy here today...
Hope you are having a creative time and thanks for visiting!

Chunky Fun

Hello everyone, long time no see (well kind of), but thanks for calling by, I really appreciate it.

The other day I woke up with the idea that I really wanted to make a chunky ATC.

My lovely crafty friend Annie gave me these wonderful wood chunkies when I visited her the other day and I just had to have a go at one, so here is the result.

I covered the edges of the wood in black Gesso, cut pieces of smooth card to the right size for all the different sides and then had great fun with texture paste, Distress Stains, Inks and Collage. It took me right back to my long forgotten ATC swapping days, and it certainly took me to my happy creating place without any pressure. So thank you for that Annie!!
Here are some more photos:

 This is a little Paper Whimsey image, inside a bottle cap.

As you can see, most items are from Tim Holtz, it was so much fun, digging out some of these long hoarded treasures from my stash...

Hope everyone is having a good week and thank you for visiting!

I am hooked.....

Hi everyone and thanks for dropping by here, lovely to have you visiting.
I am hooked, - hooked on participating in Tim Holtz's tag challenge that is. After 3 years or so of not joining in, I am now doing my second one. Well, after being one of Tim's winners last month, I couldn't give up now could I?
So here is my November tag:

As most of you will know, Tim's original can be found HERE, demonstrating the Chalkboard technique  that he showed in the last video of CC102 already.  Unlike Tim I did not want my whole tag to be black, so I basically created a chalkboard panel using the Baroque die, but because for once I had all the right products I followed his technique exactly, just using totally different stamps.
Here's my mini chalkboard cut from a black size 12 tag.

Next I created my background on a size 10 Manila tag, with Pumice Stone, Iced Spruce and Picket Fence Distress Paints using the marbling technique. This was followed by some Distress Inks, Gathered Twigs and Evergreen Bough, a bit of Tissue Wrap and some background stamping, both with Ink and with some Sticky Embossing powder and Clear Rock Candy glitter for a bit of sparkle. Oh there was also some Perfect Pearls Heirloom Gold Spray in the mix.

Now for some embellishments. I cut various leaves with my dies and took a little rose from my stash, coloured the leaves lightly with Distress Inks and gave them the Rock Candy Glitter treatment too.

Time to put it all together with a hand died seam-binding ribbon and some died cheese cloth scraps and a little stamped message.

Now I could have left it at that, but for some reason, even though I had quite liked the original background, I really did not like the way it looked now... what to do, bin it? I did not want to waste all my carefully prepared embellishments, so instead I took a deep breath, brought out my Picket Fence and Chipped Sapphire Distress paints and straight from the little bottles painted right over the background to create a kind of snowy scene, spritzing water and Heirloom Gold to marble the colours and blending it all a bit with a baby wipe. And this is what it looks like now:

Not much left of the original background, but hey-ho, that's life and I am a bit happier with it now...

Thank you for visiting and I hope you are having a creative time yourself. Can't wait for the December tag now! I would also like to thank Tim for all the inspiration he has given me over the last few weeks, and as I said at the start of this post, - I am now hooked!!

12 tags of Christmas Funkie Junkie style 6

Hello everyone, thanks for popping in here. Just a quick post from me today to share my tag # 6 as inspired by Linda from the Funkie Junkie Boutique.

As you can see, I made mine into a Christmas Card again. I love how doing this challenge, for once gets me to create some cards in good time. Anyway, you can see Linda's example HERE
Mine has turned out very different, mainly because I am using a much smaller tag, but there are several things that inspired me on Linda's: Some stitching of a background paper, a bit of paper cut with the torn notebook die, the use of a tree, the number 25, the touch of red of the cardinal and the snowflake, though I did not add a ribbon to mine.
Here are some close ups:

I stamped the Tim Holtz tree stamp with Iced Spruce DI I then embossed it with sticky embossing powder by Ranger and then added Rock Candy Distress Glitter for a bit of sparkle.

The numbers are grunge board, painted with Picket Fence Distress Crackle paint and then I rubbed Walnut Stain Distress Stain over it to bring out the crackle a bit more. The little cardinal was a Tapestry Stamp peg stamp.

The sentiment is another Tim Holtz stamp, stamped with Potting Soil Archival and embossed with clear powder.

A wooden snowflake with a flower treated with Distress Glitter and some little berries, for another little touch of red.

The green Core d'nations paper was run through a snowflake embossing folder, sanded to reveal the core and then highlighted a bit with Treasure Gold in Pewter this time.

Well, that's it, still running one week behind.....

Anyway, if you are interested, there is still time to join in. All the details about the challenge can be found HERE and if you fulfil all of the challenge requirements, there are wonderful prizes to be won sponsored by the Funkie Junkie Boutique

Thank you for visiting today and for all the lovely comments you always leave me!

Have a creative day and look after yourselves

Love what you do, do what you love!

Hello lovely visitors and thank you so much for dropping in here.
It's been a bit quieter here than usual, that's because life has been rather busy as far as my day job is concerned and that made me reflect on the title of this post. I do love my day job, but if I don't get the time to create, life goes out of balance for me, so I knew I had to make time to do something just for me. What I love more than anything is to create little books and that is what I want to share today.

It's like a little mini journal, for me to reflect on all the things I am grateful for....
The whole little book is made out of 1 sheet of 12 by 12 thin card and I'll start with a very brief explanation of how I made it:

1. Score your piece at 6", turn 90 degrees and score again at 4 and 8"
2. Cut between panel 1 and 4 and 3 and 6 as shown
3. Start folding your piece into a booklet: Fold panel 1 down to 2, then fold those two behind 3, fold 3 up       to 4, 4 behind 5 and finally 5 down to 6.
4.  You will now have a fat little packet of 4 by 6" pieces all attached because of the folds.
    Piece 1 and 6 are single end pieces, and 2 and 3 as well as 4 and 5 are double. They can either be glued       together, or attached just at the top or bottom to form pockets, which I did for this booklet.

I cut two separate pieces of Kraft card to 4 1/4 by 6 1/4" for the cover, plus a 2 by 6" piece for the spine.
Here is how I finished the cover:

The main stamps are by The Crafts Meow, I also did a lot of background stamping, but they kind of disappeared in the process. The dies are all Tim Holtz. The flower is from Prima I think.

Here is the first page, I recently bought this stamp second hand, and I just had to use it, can't tell you who made it, but the sentiment is from Donna Downey Empowered Words set by Unity Stamps. As you can see the background is more inky play with book pages, background stamping and stencilling thrown into the mix.

On the left, the inside cover was just covered with some Tim Holtz paper, a bit more stencilling and the sentiment that really informed my whole thinking about this booklet, "Let what you love be what you do"....

Another second hand stamp with a further quotation from the Donna Downey set.

The facing page, this one includes some scraps from paper serviettes and some Prima stamps designed by Finnabair.

Below you can see both facing pages together

And finally the last page, again using similar techniques:

The back cover end piece was kept simple again, Tim Holtz paper with just some stencilling with one of his masks.

And finally the outside  back cover

I used a Sizzix Tim Holtz texture fade for this.

Now because I had made the inside pages into pockets, I really wanted to make some tags to go inside. The backs of the tags were covered with more paper and then left blank for journaling.

This one was created with the help Distress Inks, paper serviette scraps, stencilling and La Blanche and Tim Holtz stamps.

For this one I stamped the beautiful Leonardo drawing (had this stamp for so long, I can't remember where it is from), in Sepia Archival, I then masked it, inked around it with Distress Inks and did further back ground stamping. For the ticket I combined a Tim Holtz Ticket stamp  and a Whimsy Stamps sentiment stamp.

Well there you have it, a rather long post, I'm sorry. Hope you like my little booklet, and like always thank you so much for visiting. Hope you will make some creative time for your self, you will feel all the better for it, trust me!!