Ally Pally and Just Rite Stamps

Yesterday, after a sudden change of mind during last week, I made a very early start (the sun was just rising) and headed up to London for the Big Stamping and Scapbooking Show at Alexandra Palace,  a place of pilgimage for thousands of avid crafters twice a year!! As always I really enjoyed my day, including meeting up with my crafty friend Jo. As it was such a beautiful day, we were able to sit outside in the sunshine with our lunch and catch up, looking at the fantastic view out across London.

There is always so much to see at the show, including some great demonstrations and importantly far too many lovely things to buy! I managed to find a very nice selection of new stamps and other useful and gorgeous additions to my stash.

Just when I thought I had finished I had another look at the Just Rite Stamps on sale from Once Upon a Stamp. These are not my usual style of stamp. These are very unusual stamps in that they have round and oval wooden mounts with a ridged grid onto which central panels, edge rings and separate letters of the alphabet can be mounted to make customised stamps. For anyone who can remember the old fashioned John Bull printing sets of childhood, these are very similar.

I am a keen baker and love to give home-cooked items as gifts. so seeing a set of designs made for presenting home cooked goodies, I couldn't resist the temptation to add it to my stamp collection! I have had a very quick play with these today. I think there is a definite knack to using these stamps and my first efforts had letters flying across the room, but once I had some practice I was able to get going and this is the first set of results, together with the stamp block in the centre. Once the stamp is set up it takes no time at all to make a batch of labels. I stamped the design in Memento Tuxedo Black ink onto cream card and sponged on some sunshine yellow Adirondack dye ink to add depth. I punched holes with my Crop-a-Dile and threaded them with paper string.

I have several cakes to make this week and think these will add a nice little extra touch to these foodie gifts and I am looking forward to playing with them some more very soon.  

A dusky tree card

Today I played with all sorts of projects, I have various things drying and half-baked, but the thing I actually finished was this card. I have been trying to think of things to do with some of my leafy background papers. This one was done on pink card, sponged with Watermelon and then stippled with Currant Adirondack dye ink. I wanted a design that still showed the background and also reflected the nature theme.

The design uses the Elusive Images Arboretum tree set. I sponged and stippled the background in Watermelon and Cranberry Adirondack dye inks, stamped the bare tree in Rhubarb Stalk Memento dye ink and added the blossoms in white and pink chalk and brilliance inks and added a little heat embossing in pink pearl. The Summertime sentiment is from the EI Poppy Tile plate cut out with Nestabilities ovals. The flowers are cut from a Graphicus Guild Artylicious paper with a Woodware punch, with purple pearls added in the centres.

I love the Arboretum stamps, with the mix and match options of tree shapes, leaves and blossoms, it really feels like playing when you work with this set! I was pleased with the dusky, slightly moody feeling of the finished card.

Yet another Crafty Individuals Project!

I can't take much credit for this project because it was very closely inspired by a brooch designed by Jean Hardy in Craft Stamper magazine, I think it was the November 2008 issue.

My version has some adaptations from the original as I decided to make a little hanging, rather than a brooch. The image is stamped onto Crafty Individuals backing paper and the paper beads are made from the same design, then wrapped with wire and with small beads added. The panel is mounted onto foam mountboard.

The beads hang from a strip of thick purple mirri card cut out using the Fiskar's sunburst punch. I also made a small panel at the top from Ten Seconds Studio purple metal, this was a piece my crafty friend Jo sent me to try and this is the first time I have ever done any metal work. Thank you Jo! I stamped the back of the metal with one of the Elusive Images Delightful Damask stamp set and then embossed the design on the reverse, before sticking it onto card and rubbing a little Viva lilac precious metal paint to highlight the design. I added a couple of pink metallic flower eyelets and pink wire so I could hang it up.

Another Crafty Individuals Project

On Saturday I had a very pleasant day at the Craft Barn Extravaganza. As always there were some excellent demonstrators, but one of the real highlights for me was meeting Jean Hardy and Malcom Noble of Crafty Individuals, who I have mentioned before as one of my favourite stamp companies. They were as lovely as their stamps are and the samples of work they bought along were really fabulous and very inspiring - see the link to their website on the right and their gallery - to see some of their brilliant projects. 

I bought two more CI stamps, one of their new door designs, I just love doors and gates, and also a set of ferns and plant designs that I thought would work well with some of my leafy backgrounds as posted earlier. Here is my first effort. It could do with some refinement, but its not too bad for my first effort with this very nice set of stamps, which has so much potential.

I have a week off work now, so hope to be posting plenty of craft projects over the next few days.

Beeswax stamps

This post is about Beeswax stamps (as per the link on the right hand side) and not using beeswax - a popular craft material at the moment.

Some time ago I saw a reference to someone who had used a Beeswax stamp in a project and I went surfing to see what they had to offer. I was amazed at the selection and range of stamps from this US company (in mounted and unmounted options), they are very reasonably priced and I placed quite a large order. I thought I would post a couple of the cards I have made with their stamps as I was really pleased with the quality and designs I received.

I made this card for my sister's birthday tomorrow. She doesn't know about my blog yet, so she won't see it! It was quite hard to get a really good picture of this design The main lady is a Beeswax stamp called Mollie and I love her already. I made a background on white card, coloured with Distress Inks and overstamped with the Crafty Individuals Crackle stamp and then sprayed with pearlescent gold glimmer mist. Mollie is stamped in Olympia Green Versafine. The butterflies are another Craft Individuals set - I love these - stamped in a mixture of Versamagic, Versafine and Encore ink and the unknown bargain bin sentiment was added in Versafine again. As I didn't want to distract attention away from the main design I mounted the main design with plain green card as a background.

This design uses a Silver Birch Beeswax stamp on the smooth side of watercolour paper. It is stamped in Versamagic ink and then heat embossed with clear powder. The image is mounted onto brown card and the backing paper is from the lovely Basic Grey Wisteria range. The sentiment is a Penny Black stamp and is backed onto a purple card stamped with a lilac Versamagic ink flourish, sadly this hardly shows in this picture. The flowers are my favourites - Prima hydrangeas.

I would definitely recommend a visit to the Beeswax website, but be warned, your stamp wish list is bound to grow!!

Leafy backgrounds

For some time I have been looking at the leaves of my plume poppy (macleaya cordata) thinking they would be good for a craft project, so when I saw the Branching Out article by Jo Capper Sandon about using real leaves to create backgrounds in the October issue of Craft Stamper magazine, I was reminded to have a go. As well as trying to spray over fir tree branches as Jo did, I picked some macleaya leaves to use as masks. The leaves of this plant can grow quite big. Here is a picture of one leaf with my hand to give you some idea of scale. This is a dramatic plant for its foliage, the underside of the the leaves is beautiful too, being soft and downy white like velvet.

I picked some smaller leaves and used them as masks with mostly adirondack dye inks to make some interesting backgrounds. Firstly I sponged two colours onto white card, before stippling with a darker colour to repeat masking with the frilly leaf edge all over the card. I am usually hopeless at doing backgrounds, so I was really pleased with the results. Each sheet took no more than 15 minutes. The first I did was on a Willow and Lake Mist background, stippled with a Colorbox pigment ink. This is greener in real life!

Next I did a bluey version, using Juniper and Pool for the sponged background and Stream for the stippling.

Last I did a red and orange version, with a Sunset Orange and Watermelon sponged background and Cranberry stippled leaf pattern.       

           

                                            

Now I just need to incorporate these designs into some interesting projects!

Craft Shed Revisited

Some of you are hopefully like me in enjoying nosing in other people's craft rooms, so I am blogging some more about mine. The magazine Cloth, Paper, Scissors, Studio special editions could have been made for me and I just love Paula Pascual's http://www.craftystorage.blogspot.com/. Anyway, in the hope it will be of interest to some of you bloghoppers, I thought I would post some more about my craft shed.

I had a great Bank Holiday weekend blitzing my shed, evicting spiders and having a good vacuum and dust through before the autumn chills really set in. So here are a few more pictures of the work and storage areas in my shed which has been furnished with an eclectic mix of cast off furniture from the house!

My pictures start at the door and work clockwise.

This is my main craft desk where I do most of my project designing, stamping and glueing. This is where I keep my main sets of inkpads and my most frequently used tools on a lazy susan turntable I pinched from the kitchen! Well I will use it much more often for crafting than entertaining!!

Next is my pegboard storage area. I am still working out the best way to use this space, but so far, as you can see I have containers for punches, my nestability dies, cuttlebug folders, pens and other tools.

This is my old oak tea trolley which is home to my ink pad drawers where my dew drops and other odd ink pads live. On top is a wooden tray recycled from a Christmas present which holds all my tapes, foam pads, glues and adhesive and fixative sprays. The plastic drawers hold my acrylic blocks, sponges etc. Underneath, I have large plastic boxes for my card blanks and special card.

This is my comfy corner with bookcase, easy chair and trusty radio and CD player. Although the TV lives here I haven't switched it on in the shed since the Wimbledon final! I must confess I don't spent a lot of time sitting here there are just too many distractions!

Here is my big storage cupboard. This is home to my larger stamp sets, card and paper boxes, envelopes, fabric and other craft materials. Another trolley next to the cupboard is home to some more plastic drawers where I keep my embossing and mica powders and glitter. I really like trolleys because they can be moved to exactly where I need them.

This is my spare table where I cut large sheets of paper and use my cuttlebug. I love this little drawer unit that was an impulse buy in an antique shop and then I struggled to find the right place for it in the house, so it found a home in my shed. The drawers are used for oddments, while the shelf houses unsorted stamp sets, stamp sets indexed by subject in recycled DVD cases and some favourite craft books. Above this table is a brand new addition this weekend - more pegboard and an Ikea curtain rail and curtain clips which has given me my own version of the Clip-It-Up for my alphabets, embellishments, bling etc.

Last, back by the door is my messy bench, made from a piece of recycled kitchen worktop. This bench is higher and best used standing, rather than sitting. The Ikea spice racks make great storage space at the back of the bench for all my Glimmer Mists and sprays, metallic paints and various mediums. This is where I do my heat embossing and spraying.

I now have my craft shed pretty much as I want it. I feel really lucky having such a lovely place to work and be creative, the only downside is that it is really freezing in winter, but it is only a small niggle really and thermals, cosy slippers and a heater help!