Grungeboard Flowers Workshop and Assorted Thanks

Whew yesterday was a blast! I was down at Barnard Castle visiting Graphicus (my fav craft shop) to do a workshop with the lovely and very talented Lynne Robinson-Hunter. Thank you Lynne, you rock, I had a fabulous time yesterday and enjoyed getting very very inky!

So what did we do in the workshop yesterday? Well we made some absolutely gorgeous dimentional flowers with Grungboard and a selection of Elusive Images Stamps - mainly using stamps from the Big Flowers, Diamante Delights and Ruby Tuesday themplates, but a few other's crept in too. I had first seen these last year when Lynne showed me some she had been making, they looked very tricky to make, but in actual fact they are not - well maybe a little bit if you are rubish at cutting out like me - slowest in the class cuz I can't cut out at any kind of speed.


We made 2 projects, a tag with a flower which we then turned into a card and a broach. The flowers for both projects were made by first choosing some of the flower stamps in different sizes and stamping 3 of them onto Grungeboard with a permanent ink. The flowers were then cut out and coloured on both sides using Distress Inks applied with some Cut N Dry foam. With that done we flipped the flowers over and spritzed them liberally with water on the back. Next step was to leave the wet flowers for maybe 10 minutes or so to let the Grungboard soak in the water. The effect of this was to allow us to turn up the petals of each flower which we did by folding it back to the furthest point it would go then, with our thumbs, rolling it back open again. This created the curled up edges to the petals and while the Grungeboard was wet you could continue to manipulate it to get the degree of curl into each petal that you wanted. The leaves were done the same way.

With that done it was simply a case of layering up the flowers, adding some glitter, or spriting with Glimmer Mists or whatever took your fancy to embellish it some, and then mounting it onto a tag, or whatever you want to. My Broach is only 2 layers - remember what I said about being a slow cutter - I figured I had best limit myself to 2 layers as we were running out of time. The rest of the class not only managed to make 3 layers but added lovely flourishy swirls behind their broaches! I love the extra shimmer I got on my broach with the added spritz of Gimmer Mists.

Finally some more thanks to Judith from Judith @ Poppy Cottage and Sally from Crafty Salutations who have both given me an award - the "Makes my Heart Smile" Award. Thank you to both of you, I am very touched you thought of me when deciding who to pass the award on to. As this is an award that has been pased to me before I am going to skip on passing it onwards again, but if you are one of the folks who read this blog, please feel free to take it because your kinds comments always may MY heart smile. You can find the award logo in my sidebar.

Blog Candy over the Elusive Images Design Team Blog

Glenda Waterworth of EI has 4 simply scrumptious new stamp themeplates due to launch and she is giving away some of the new stamps to 4 lucky people, so why not hop on over to the EI DT blog and take a peek - who knows, you might get lucky!

Silhouette Birthday Card

This card was made for a Birthday Swap Group and now that the recipient has seen it I can post it here. The stamps are from Clarity Stamp.

The main image was stamped using dark blue Stazon ink onto some glossy card which I had first coloured with my brayer and Ranger Adirondack Inks. The Bullrushes were stamped onto some light blue card with more of the Adirondack inks. Both layers have been matted onto some silver foil card. The greeting is from a set by Woodware - the set I have shown on this blog a few time, but couldn't recall the maker - I came across them the other day in an online shop so now I know who makes them and very useful those tiny text messages are. The flower and brad are part of a kit which I bought from QVC, they are made by Paper Mania.

Orange and Yellow Challenge on Stamp TV

Having caught up with various birthday card makes I found myself with some time to play just for the fun of it. The Orange and Yellow colour challenge on Stamp TV took my fancy and this is what I came up with.

The Butterfly is by Elusive Images and comes from the Butterfly Daisy Collage Themeplate. It's stamped with Fired Brick Distress Ink onto card that I had first coloured using Mustard Seed, Dried Marigold and Spiced Marmalade Distress Inks.

The yellow background is a piece of core'dinations card stock which I embossed with a Cuttlebug embossing folder and then rubbed the surface colour off the embossed areas with an emery board. This was matted onto some orange card stock that was punched along one edge with a Fiskars border punch. The orange corners were cut using my Cuttlebug.

Apologies and a Tiddley card

I just want to say sorry to friends who's blogs I have not been visiting a lot recently. My old 'puter was getting very wobbly, dying on it's feet actually. Anyhow I had to nurse it along and avoid having it turned on for too long as it was running too hot and getting ready to fry itself. Thankfully the guys in my local computer shop are very cool guys, they kept my old 'puter running for about a year longer than I had expected and they have now built me a nice new one for not too large a number of pennies. Well not too large in the scale of 'puter stuff, but enough pennies to buy rather a lot of rubber stamps with if I hadn't needed the new 'puter.

Anyhow here is a "tiddly" card I made for a swap on Craft Telly Forum recently - the swap theme was to make a small card.. The card is what we refer to in the UK as A7 size - I know I have some American freinds who drop by occasionally so for you guys the card size is close to 1/4 of your American Letter size card which has then been folded in half to make a little card.

The whole thing was made from a piece of lovely pearlescent Moondust card - the butterfly was cut and embossed from some of the Moondust card with my Cuttlebug using one of those dies that has a matching embossing folder. I brayered some ink over the embossed butterfly using a Kaliedacolor ink pad - Calypso if I remember correctly - and finished by adding some sparkle with Stickles glitter glue.

The layer underneath the butterfly was stamped with a small text stamp which I had inked using the same Kaleidacolor pad and the daisy border at the bottom was stamped and embossed with gold EP then painted with Twinking H2Os. I can't recall who made the littel set of text stamps, but the border comes from a set made by Crafty Secrets. The other matting layer was simply another piece of the moondust card which I had coloured with the brayer in the same way as I coloured the butterfly. I did find it was best to give the ink a gentle heat set on this kind of card.