There's a moose loose aboot this hoose...

... um sorry, my Scottish genes were getting a bit carried away there! I have always rather liked the House Mouse stamps, such cute characters! I think this is such a sweet image of the little mice taking a shower under the spout of a watering can. This is a card I made for someone's birthday and as it has now been received I can post a piccy here.

The image was stamped with black Stazon because I planned to use a wet medium to colour the image. Once stamped I used Derwent Inktense Pencils to colour the image, these pencils are cool because unlike normal water colour pencils they dry permanent. You can use them like a regular watercolour while wet but once they are dry you don't have to worry about the colour bleeding if you want to add other wet stuff such as clear glaze or glitter glues. I did infact add some clear glaze from a Sakura Gelly Roll Glaze pen to the water coming from the spout of the watering can and to the puddle that has form around the feet of the mice to give it a shiney wet look. For some reason the photograph is not showing very clearly that there is a weak wash of blue over the puddle and this was the colour I did not want to have bleed into other areas.

The background paper was made using the 3D2 Card builder CD and Joanna Sheen's Pamela West Collection CD. On the Joanna Sheen CD there was a lovely image of some blackberries, but unfortunately the co-ordinating paper did not incorporate any of the berries so I used a graphics programme to cut a tile of the image out that did include the berries and some leaves. Then using the 3D2 CD I created my own a backing paper. I need to play some more with the 3D2 CD however as I could not figure out how to make the tile big enough that you can actually see the blackberries repeated across the page and I was running out of time to get my card into the mail, so I went with what I had made as the colours were just perfect to match those I had used when colouring the stamped image.

Two Projects - "Christmas" and "Something Funny"

The 25th of September marked the start of another month in the countdown to Christmas and time once again for Fab's Big Christmas Challenge. This month the nutter's challenge would be to make nine Christmas cards. I might even make that many but most of them will be quickie cards with using stuff like, dare I say it "peel-offs" I doubt if I will be adding them to my blog or to the challenge. Whew, OK I hope nobody noticed that shame-faced admission! Anyhow here is my entry for the September's challenge, but who knows, I might manage to make another 8 cards worth blogging about before the 25th of October comes around.

This one was stamped using a lovely Christmas Wreath stamp from Hearth and Home themeplate by Elusive Images. I stamped and embossed the wreath in gold, painted it with Twinkling H2Os, added a touch of red Stickles Glitter on the holly berries and some red Sakura Glaze pen over the bow to change the colour and texture of the bow when compared to the colour of the poinsettia leaves. With my wreath all coloured I decided it would be nict to cut it out. This was mounted onto a circle of gold mirror card with foam pads and then that was mounted onto my card. The card itself is a from some cream pearlised card I bought in the Paper Mill Shop and cut to a 5 inch square card. I covered this with a lovely paper from the Artylicious Season's Greetings CD leaving just a border of the cream card showing and then added some gold strip peel-off borders round the edges of the paper. More foam pads were used to mount the gold circle of card onto this for more dimension and as a finishing touch added a narrow bow of red organza ribbon to provide more contrast with the green design on the paper.

My other project was to make "Something Funny" for Florries Weekly ATC challenge on Craft Swap forum. I have a small set of mini clear stamps by Inkadinkadoo which are definately meant to be humourous so I thought this was the ideal project for giving these stamps and outing. The actual text on the stamps says "I gave up coffee, sex and chocolate" but as I had decided to make a chocolate bar for my background I only stamped the bit about chocolate.

The chocolate bar was made by inking a white ATC size piece of card with some brown ink from a Petal Point ink pad then I used the box making side of my score board to score grooves into the card to form a grid. I used the edge of the same ink pad to darken the brown colour in the grooves so as to create the appearance of more depth and a chunkier bar of chocolate. The stamps were just stamped onto some pink card with Adirondack dye in (Espresso), cut out and adhered to the chocolate bar background with foam pads.

Edit : Perhaps I ough to own up and say my comments about peel-offs were meant to be rather toungue in cheek. I do use them, mostly I use borders and/or corners, also sentiements. There are infact both a gold border peel-offs and a "Merry Christmas" sentiment on the Christmas Wreath card.

Peacock Fan - Getting A Round Tuit

Well, it only took me four months to make this card - for me it's been a bit of an epic, in fact you might even describe it as an obsession! I saw the Peacock Fan themeplate by Elusive Images with it's beautiful stamp of a single fan blade at the end of May this year and as soon as I saw it I knew I wanted to make it into a fan and add real feathers behind each blade, but as the stamp was the Graphicus Guild members offer of the month at the end of July I waited to buy it at the offer price. I finally got my themeplate when I was at Graphicus for some workshops during my summer holiday. By this time I had a copy of the Artylicious Peacock Summer Party CD which has been designed to co-ordinate with all the lovely Elusive Images Peacock Stamps so now, early August, I was all set to roll.

I knew it would take me some time because I am not particularly good at cutting out and I knew that cutting the feather detail at the top of each fan was going to be fiddly so I decided that I would make 1 or 2 "feathers" at a time till I had the 7 I needed. In all it took me about 3 weeks to get all my feathers made and painted in between making cards for birthdays, challenges and trying to build up a stock of Christmas cards too. So since the end of August my fan elements have sat with me picking them up at regular intervals, popping my Peacock Summer Party CD into my computer to browse through the designs and pondering what to do next! This is perhaps one of the downsides of Glenda Waterworth's Artylicious CDs - there are so many beautiful designs on each CD to choose from that I often struggle to make a choice over which one I will use and for this fan card I had spent so much time making the fan I wanted to be sure I had the right paper.

I finally took hold of myself today after seeing a challenge called "A round tuit" on the This Thursday It's All About challenge blog. Yes that was what I needed! I needed to get "a round tuit" and make a decision about how I would turn my fan into a card!

Anyway here is the finished result, at the end it just suddenly came to me which paper to use and I hope I got it right, I think I did. With this card finally "out of my system" perhaps I can get my teeth properly into that fabulous Peacock CD because there are so many lovely card ideas I have been pushing away until I got my fan card made.

Each blade of the fan was stamped using holographic black EP, then painted using Twinkling H2Os. The black parts were coloured with a Sakura black Glaze Pen and I used a clear Sakura Glaze pen over Twinkling H2O paint on the gems in the fan to make them look more like facet cut Amethysts, Emeralds and Paraiba Tourmaline. The "Pearls" were created by using Ranger's Liquid Pearls in White Opal.

The card itself is A4 - the fan is too big to fit on an A5 card - and because Glenda creates Full Bleed images on her CD's I was able to print the peacock feather design borderlessly to cover the whole sheet of card. I then lightly spritzed the sheet with gold Glimmer Mists to give it a gentle lustre.

Another "Messy Rabbit" Stamp for Christmas

I like this little snow covered house. It's part of the "Messy Rabbit" series of stamps from Joanna Sheen, but while you can use it along with the rabbit images, it stands up all on it's own to make a simple but fun Christmas Card.

Here I have stamped the house, water coloured it and then used coloured Sakura Glaze pens to make the Christmas lights around the roof of the house stand out and the clear glaze pen on the windows so they appear to have glass in them. Finally I added some "Snow Writer" from DecorArt to all the parts of the image where there was snow and sprinkled that with Crystal glitter.

The backing paper is from my Artylicious "Season's Greetings" CD, and the Sentiment stamp is a little cheap one I got in one of those bargain tubs you see in craft shops. Sorry about the photo, it's just not doing the card justice. Anyhow that's another one for Fab's Big Christmas Challenge this month.... only 2 more to go before Monday!

Bling!

I got a bit carried away with the sparkle perhaps, but what the heck, I had fun making this card for a swap where the theme was to colour in something on your card. I decided it would be fun to stamp and heat emboss one of the big flowers from Elusive Images themeplate onto silver foil card and then colour it in with Sakura Glaze pens, which allow the silver foil to gleam through. I think the name of the themeplate "Diamante Delight" got stuck in my head because once the flower was ready I could not resist adding a ring crystal gems around the inner part. I think there must be close to 40 little gems on it despite the fact it was already sparkling due to being embossed with Stampin' Stuff's "Disco Black" EP which is a holographic powder.

Next I stamped and embossed a stem element and a double flourish from the Diamante Delight themplate onto some green card using the same black holographic EP. This was layered onto some black card and more sparkle was added by appying a thin layer of Stickles "Star Dust" glitter glue to the revealed edges of the black card. Finally I attached my cut out flower to the top of the stem.

With my flower ready to mount onto a card, I made some backing paper by sponging some cerise and purple inks from a Kaliedacolor Inkpad onto a pale lilac paper and then stamped the flourish stamp into diagonally opposing corners and extended this along the top and bottom edges. The paper was then applied to black card and my flower was mounted on top with foam pads. So much sparkle made this a tricky card to get a photograph of but I think the one I did manage to get shows the card reasonably well.

Birthday Card

I bought this stamp a while ago and decided it was time to use it for card I needed to make for a Birthday swap list I am in. The stamp is from Stamp-It and was stamped in Black Stazon then coloured with brush markers. I added some Clear Sakura Glaze pen over the flowers and some Sakura Stardust pen over the gift that the sheep are carrying to give some dimension. The paper is one that was included in a craft magazine a while back, but can't remember which one.

Skinnys with a Floral Theme

I joined a swap list recently to swap skinnys, the theme for the swap is "floral" and these are my first three makes for the swap.

From the left the first one was made using a Kaleidacolor inkpad (Pastel)to brayer the background. I was curious to see how this would turn out on porous cardstock so I used 200gsm artist's cartridge paper. It's not as smooth a finish as obtained using coated cardstock but I like it. I the stamps are from and Inkadinkadoo set called "Bohemian Flourish and were stamped with Versfine Onyx Black ink. The white highlights were added with a Sakura Souffle Pen. The finished result was edged with a sliver Pentouch pen and mounted onto black card.

In the middle skinny I used a stamp from the Laura Ashley Contemporary set. I stamped the image twice onto damp watercolur paper. Before stamping I had spritzed the paper with water and then rolled a clean dry brayer over it to make sure it was evenly damp. With this done I first stamped the image using a Kaleidacolor Pad (Desert Heat)the inks bled on my damp paper just a little, blurring the image as I had hoped. Once this was dry I stamped over it again using an Adirondack Pad (Cappucino), this time leaving a much sharper impression as the paper was dry. Finally I made my background layer by sponging ink onto my card using various shades from the Kaleidacolor Desert Heat Pad, and then stamped one of the Inkadinkadoo Bohemian Flourish Stamps around the edge.

The skinny on the right was made using another Kaleidacolour pad (Fresh Greens) to brayer the background. This time I added spritzes of Memories Mist in Mango Lemonade, Orange Juice and Amaretto. I used a stamp from the Elusive Images Wild Meadow Themeplate with Versafine Onxy Black ink and used a Sakura Clear Glaze Pen to colour the and give it some dimension. Finally I edged this with a gold Pentouch pen and mounted it on black card.

On a final note, today I received a lovely surprise with which I hope to make something tonight. If it works out I will share this fun technique tomorrow.

A little bit of Dazzle for Florrie's Challenge

This week the theme is "Sprinkle Some Sparkle" for Florrie's weekly ATC challenge on Craft Swap Forum. To make my ATC I decided I wanted to use some new stamps I bought recently - the Elusive Images "Big Flowers" Themeplate. I started by applying some ink with a sponge to a plain white ATC size piece of card with Yellow, Orange and Red inks from a Petal Point ink pad until I had a nice effect for my background. Once that was done I chose one of my "big flowers" and inked it up with more of the red ink and stamped round the edges to create a border. Also with the same red ink I stamped the word "Bloom" onto the ATC using a stamp from the Flora Bella themeplate which is also by Elusive Images.

Next I chose another flower from the Big Flowers themeplate and stamped it onto some white card again using the red ink, but this time embossing the image with clear embossing powder. I then cut out my flower and coloured it using Sakura Glaze pens, once again choosing yellow, orange and red. I applied the orange to the center of the flower and also in the inner parts of the petals. While the orange glaze was still wet I added the red glaze from the outer edges of the petals in towards the middle, letting the red and orange bleed together. With that done I sprinked on some clear holographic ultra fine glitter then left things to dry. Finally I coloured the stamen parts of the flower with the yellow glaze and again sprinked on glitter while the glaze was still wet. Again I left this to dry, then mounted my flower on some foam pads and stuck it onto the ATC.

Roses Are Red

A while ago I started making some ATCs with one stamp, the idea was to see how many ways I could find to colour the rose red. Here are the first 3 of the series, I have another 3 ideas for colouring my rose still to do and maybe more ideas will happen along the way!

The rose stamp is one I bought on ebay, part of a set I beleive originally sold by QVC UK. From the left, the first is stamped in Stazon and coloured with water colour pencils. In the middle I covered some gold foil card with clear UTEE, heated it, added a second layer and heated again, then sprinkled some red and green embossing powder in the area where I would stamp the rose and heated a 3rd time. Once that was done and with the embossing still melted I stamped my rose which I had previously inked up with Gold Encore Metallic ink. Third along is stamped on acetate with Stazon and then coloured with Sakura Glaze pens. The backing paper is something I came up with when messing about on Hubby's computer - he has Photoshop Elements and I thought it would be fun to learn some of what that programme can do. the rose stem is also from the same set of stamps as the main rose image and was embossed with red embossing powder.