Embrace Possibility

Hello everyone, happy Sunday to you all and welcome.
When this post goes live I will be at Ally Pally and really hope to catch up with some of you there.
Meanwhile, here is a snippet of my latest project for The Artistic Stamper.

Hope you'll take a minute to hop over there, and of course I will love it if you leave me a comment there.
Have a happy, inky Sunday and a great week ahead!!

Dare to Dream

Hello all and lovely to have you drop in here. A short and quick post from me today: Those that visit regularly here will know that I love Tim Holtz's new paper collection Wallflower. I took the firm resolve to stop stroking these papers and to start to use them for many different projects. (Some of which you may have seen already). But here is a card: I've used a stamp from the new Mercantile set, a saying from Simple Sayings, Remnant Rubs, the mini feather die and stencils.

And a couple of close ups:

 The bottle was stamped in Wateringcan Archival and then coloured lightly with Antique Linen and Frayed Burlap. I bent it round a bit for some dimension, coloured the feather with Pumice Stone and Frayed burlap and then glued it behind.

The sentiment was also stamped with watering can and then adhered with foam tape.

This was quick and easy, as really, the lovely papers do all the work for you!

Hope you are having a good week and thank you for visiting!!

Shabby ATB

Hello everyone, welcome to friends, followers and visitors alike! Lovely to have you drop past here today!
After playing with my ATB die a while back, I wanted to have another play and this time I created one of these Artist Trading Blocks in a more shabby chic style:

I cut the largest of the three blocks out of white mount board and added some texture with the help of Wendy Vecchi Embossing paste and a stencil. I also added some inking through the Tim Holtz Lace Layering Stencil I then did some background stamping with an Artistic Outpost text stamp..

Here you can see the stenciling a bit better. I also stamped the egg from The Tim Holtz Nature walk set on two of the sides. I inked the stamp with a Faber Castell Large Brush pen and the texture on the egg appeared all by it self!

Have to say, I really like how it turned out, all speckled, without even using the second spotty stamp. No idea why it happened like that, it just did lol, lucky accident?

This time I left the lid of the box open and lined the inside with some pretty papers from the Tim Holtz French Industrial paper collection. I adhered a heart (this comes with this particular die set). I had painted the heart with burnt umber acrylic paint and when dry put Picket Fence crackle paint over it. When that was dry and the cracks appeared, I sanded the edges a bit, to shabby the heart up a bit more still.

I glued a pearl brad to the center.
For the top of the box I created a flower cluster and added some greenery from the Tim Holtz strip die.

Here you can see the box from the back with some of the greenery trailing over:

Well, that's pretty much it. Hope you like the shabby  ATB version.
I stuck to a limited colour palette this time: Pumice Stone, Frayed Burlap and Bundled Sage and Iced Spruce for the greenery.

These ATBs work as home decor or as gift boxes, and I have to say, I absolutely love putting them together!

Hope you are finding some time to be inky and creative! Here's hoping for some more sunshine!!

A little bit French for A Vintage Journey

Hello everyone and lovely to see you.
I am super excited to be hosting the 3rd challenge over at A Vintage Journey. The theme I chose was "A little bit French. You can read all the details over on the blog there.

For my project I created a little mini book inspired by Tim's new Collection Folios, only as I don't have one yet, I decided to create a kind of mini version myself.

The little book tells the love story (Histoire d'Amour) of the dashing young Francois Du Pré. You can see him here on the cover (ok so I found him among Tim's Found Relatives....).
I made the cover for my little book out of Ranger manila card stock.

 I cut it to 6" by 11 3/4" (I did not want it totally square) and scored at 5 1/4 from both sides leaving me with a 1 1/4 spine.
The inside of the book was constructed following Laura Denison's Stack the Deck method. Here is a link to instructions on how to do that. I made mine out of Kraft Card. This is what it looked like from the front and the back:

I used two 6 x 6" envelopes and some tags and tickets to make the inside. You will need to glue the envelopes shut and then trim one side to the size you want the pages to be. The opening will fit over the hinge bits as you can see from the photos below:

 Envelope trimmed to size

And slid over the hinge bit. Please note, only do this after you have covered your envelopes with your chosen papers and decorations.

Alright, let's look at the pages now and hear the story of how Francois found the beautiful Rose Delieux...

Here you can see Francois, born just outside Paris, the son of a well to do industrialist. He is an avid writer and writes the most wonderful love letters. Hence one of his many inkwell and quill pens on the cover.

One day on a trip to Paris, while visiting friends, he met the beautiful Rose, dressed in all her finery, still young and demure, but oh so lovely, Francois fell in love with her on first site:

Here is one of the many love letters he would subsequently write to her, but alas, for many a month, he never got a reply...

As the months and years passed, Francois started to pine away, until one day he decided he must return to Paris to meet her again, he asked his friend and mentor to come along with him...

On the left a tag, depicting this trip and on the right, his mentor, the stern monsieur La Blanche. This is how they fit into the folio:

Now on this trip, something special happened, you will see it on the back of these tags: (I will only give you a brief outline of a very long story)...They met Rose's younger sister, sweet Geraldine. The moment she saw Francois she remembered him, and with a twinkle in her eye told him to just be brave, go and see her big sister and ask for her hand in marriage. The reason she had not written back was only because she was not sure that his intentions were honourable, but really she had been pining for him terribly too... You see Geraldine below, when she was still very young

Well, Francois, did not need to be told twice, and off he went to see Rose again, this time much more mature but just as lovely as before.

As you can imagine, what happened next was wonderful, - he fell on his knee, proposed and soon the wedding was celebrated. Below is one of the pictures of the wedding, unfortunately a little damaged by time. Rose still looks a little uncertain, but in her heart she was blissfully happy.

For their honeymoon they decided to go to London; not long after Rose fell pregnant and gave birth to a beautiful little girl, they named her Geraldine, after her sister, because she had been instrumental in bringing them together.

Their trip to London, you can see one of the tickets of a theater performance they saw, and of course they also saw the changing of the guards and Big Ben.

Little Geraldine aged 3. (This was a photo transfer using gel medium. Shelly Hilcox has a brilliant tutorial on how to do this, you can see it here: )

The back of the tags and the end page showing some of Francois's illustrious ancestors, all worthy industrialists too.....

Here you can still see the outside covers when the book is open and with that I have come to the end of my story.

Hope you liked it and that you could see more or less how I put it all together. The papers were from the French Industrial and the new Wallflower collections. All photos from the Found Relatives cards,  I used several different stamp sets, but mostly Paris to London and Nature Walk and of course loads of different bits of Ideaology. Almost all product used can be found at Country View Crafts who are the sponsors of our challenge.

Well, thank you so much for dropping in and maybe some of you even stayed with it until the end. Hope you will check out the Vintage  Journey blog and see the amazing projects my team mates have created and of course we all hope you will join in the challenge!

I apologize for this very long and photo rich posts and hope you will have a great weekend and enjoy some inky creative time!!

Where is Spring???

Hello everyone and welcome!! Well here we are, the 3rd of April, it's meant to be Spring, but here in Edinburgh it's just another grey and drizzly day.....
If you are in a part of the world, where Spring is hiding still, I made a tag, full of flowers as a reminder, some day, they will hopefully appear.
Here is a sneak peek

If you want to see more and how I put this together, please head over to the  Calicocraft blog.

Hope you like it and maybe you are lucky enough to have some sunshine where you are......

Dragonfly Fly Free

Hello everyone and lovely to have you visiting again!
Today I am sharing the details of a tag which was shown yesterday on the ARTISTIC STAMPERS BLOG, where our challenge this month is Texture and Embossing.

This is the second of a series of three tags that I will be sharing this months. All of them will eventually  be included in one of my journals.
For this one I started by doing some background stamping with the Swirls, Splats and Dots stamp set, to form a kind of resist to the rest of the background. You can't see much of it any more, but here is just a little glimps:

Next I added some texture with the help of one of the new Crafters Workshop stencils. This one has already become a firm favourite. You can see a bit of it here

and here:

The actual background was created mainly with Dylusion Sprays, the colours I used were Vibrant Turquoise, Melted Chocolate, Black Marble, and a colour called Cyan, which dates back to the time before Dyane started to produce her sprays with Ranger. It's probably not that different from London Blue. I also added some Bundled Sage Distress Paint and some Picket Fence here and there and blended it all with a baby wipe.

The dragonfly which can be found on the Insects and Butterflies Plate,was stamped on some smooth card, first of all in Forget me not Archival ink I covered it in Clear embossing powder and embossed it. I then cut it out, inked the stamp in Jet Black and very carefully laid the central part of the cut out dragonfly onto the stamp to colour the body part black but leave the wings more blue. Next I covered it in Glue n Seal and when dry coloured it further with Distress Markers. Finally I spritz it with some home made Gold glimmer spray, for some shimmer.

The final touches were to add some label letters to spell my sentiment.

I also added some shadows still around the dragonfly and the words with a black Distress Marker and a water brush. The final step was to highlight some of the raised bits with my beloved Treasure Gold in White Fire.

Well, hope you like my tag and of course it would be wonderful if you decided to play along with our challenge. You could win a great price of an Artistic Stamper stamp set of your choice!

Hope you'll have an inky day!!

With a Song in my Heart

Hello everyone and lovely to have you drop in!

I am delighted to let you know that after a month's break, the Our Creative Corner challenge blog is re-opening with a new challenge set by the wonderful Alison from Words and Pictures. The theme she has chosen is "With a Song in your Heart". Each of the design team were asked to choose their favourite song and create a project around it.

I created a tag, dedicated to one of my favourite song writers, Pete Seeger, who passed away this February.

The song I chose is called Garbage. It is quite a dark song, but I chose it because I wanted to show how ahead of his time Pete Seeger was when he wrote this song in the 70s. It's as relevant now as it was then. Here is a link to the song, if you want to have a listen:

GARBAGE

Below are some of the Lyrics:

But onto my tag: I created the background with a mix of Dylusion Sprays in various Blues and Black.I also used  some Distress Paints in Bundled Sage and Picket Fence. Some texture was added with the help of a couple of Crafters Workshop stencils, Gothic Romans and Specimens. I used Decoart texture paste as it is pure white.

Here you can see a bit peeping out underneath part of the song text which I computer generated and then distressed with a Tim Holtz pen nib added.

My vocal stamp was a La Blanche steam punk one, for some reason I thought it fitted my theme.

I added a Melissa Frances resin crown, distressed with some paint and a bit of treasure gold. For me Pete Seeger will always be the king of Folk Music. The stamp was stamped on smooth card and then fussy cut and adhered to the tag. I added some dark drips with more Dylusions and a small brush.

Some Tim Holtz letter stickers, some Tissue Tape and a few scraps of old book paper finished it all off

Well, I hope you like my tag. You can probably tell, I am a child of the 60s when I was a teenager and walked on many a protest march campaigning for a better world. Bittersweet memories from long ago.....

Make sure you hop over to Our Creative Corner to see all the amazing projects my teamies have created, and of course we would love it if you join in our challenge and share your favourite song with us all!
Happy April everyone!!