Happy Christmas!

Here I am with my last Christmas card post for this year, timed to wish you a very Happy Christmas.

This is another card made for a special crafty friend. I love making these wreaths of die cut leaves, they take quite a bit of time, but the end result is so satisfying.

I started with my DP which is from a 12 x 12 Christmas pad. I then stamped the sentiment which is a gorgeous Quietfire stamp and embossed it with clear EP before die cutting the circle. My many die cut leaves included Doo Hickey mistletoe and fir branches, Impression Obsession mixed leaves and pine branches, punched ivy and holly leaves using different colours of green card. The Marianne poinsettias are cut and embossed using burgundy velvet paper which shows up nicely in this pic.

The pearls on the mistletoe are finished off with a little pale gold Treasure Gold wax to soften the impact of the white against the darker colours.

Whatever you are doing today, I hope you have a really wonderful day. Thank you for your visits to my blog and for taking the time to comment on my work, your encouragement means a lot.

Elaine x

Christmas cards - 5

This is a card I really enjoyed making this year for a special friend. I can blog it now as I know it has arrived safely.

My aim was to go for the shabby chic look and my main focus was the Poppy Stamps Grand Madison window die. After cutting this I painted it using a baby wipe to get a deliberately uneven coating. The image behind is a Websters Pages 6 x 6 paper and the little dangling heart a Memory Box die. I mounted the window onto a suitably shabby Kaisercraft Christmas 12 x 12 paper. I decorated with more die cuts - the sentiment tag and mistletoe are Doo Hickey dies, the fir leaf is from the Tim Holtz Bigz Tattered Pinecone die. I loved this sentiment which is a Lindsay Mason clear stamp that only cost just over £1.

I finished off with red paper roses, some artifical berries, a ribbon and wooden laser cut snowflakes and hearts.

Well just one more day to get my preparation for Christmas finished. I am still need to get my fresh evergreens in from the windswept garden and do some cooking, but I am on the home straight now!

I hope you and yours are all safe for Christmas following the wild weather of the last 24 hours.

Elaine x

Christmas cards - 4

Well a couple more cards for me to post.

This was a quick design, using some ready made die cut glitter trees and an Imagination Crafts sentiment stamp.

This next design uses a Penny Black clear snowflake stamp embossed in white and ink shaded and the same sentiment.

 

Well I have finished all my outside commitments with family and friends now for Christmas. We have a very quiet Christmas day on our own planned - just what I need - now I just need to get everything finished off for our own stress free celebrations in the next couple of days. That includes finishing our veg shopping, getting our evergreens up and our Christmas tree in place - better late than never and cooking some delicious things!

Hope your own plans are coming together.

Elaine

Christmas Cards - 3

I made these leaf prints a year or even more ago after seeing an article in Craft Stamper magazine written by Jo Capper Sandon.

I used fir branches from the garden as a mask and oversprayed with Glimmer Mist which you can just see shimmer in the pic. To be honest I wasn't that impressed with what I had done at the time, but when I spotted the sheets again this year an idea for these cards started to form.

 

I added die cut snowflakes using a Marianne set, which I have to say is a little annoying as there are no holes to poke out the die cuts, which involved fiddling with blu tack to pull them out!  I finished off with a Waltzing Mouse sentiment and some gems.

I am back to work today after a busy weekend of Christmas prep. Only three days to go before I finish until 7th Jnauary! Hooray!

Have a good week

Elaine x

Christmas cards - 2

Two more Christmas cards from me, they are quite different styles.

Firstly, a die cut snowflake using a gorgeous Memory Box die.

I cut the snowflake out of the Designer Paper which is from a lovely K & Co pad. I recut the snowflake in cream card and inserted it into the gap, matting the panel onto chocolate brown card. I added some thin string and the sentiment which is a Waltzing Mouse one.

My second card is just a one layer card. This is a Penny Black cling stamp and unusual for me as I rarely do cute! This was the first ever image I coloured with my big set of Prisma colour pencils when they arrived. I made it early in the year and then I think my good intentions to get ahead with my Christmas cards went to pot!
 

I hope your Christmas preparations are going well. I have finished buying my gifts now and am well on the way with my wrapping. I am hoping for once in my life I won't feel run ragged on Christmas Eve trying to get everything finished off!

Enjoy the rest of the weekend!

Elaine x

Christmas cards - 1

Well I am motoring along with my Christmas cards now, sticking with some pretty basic designs to be honest. The curse of being a card maker is that feeling that far too many people now expect a hand made card and I find it hard to let them down. Thank heavens for stamping and die cutting is all I can say!

This little batch is a 4 x 4 design. I die cut the bauble using an Impression Obsession die, stamped with a Chocolate Baroque clear tree stamp and then inked with several different Adirondach dye inks to add the glow effect. The pine branches are from an Artifact set from The Stamp Bug and the sentiment is from Waltzing Mouse.

Today is the day I have set aside for blitzing my big food cupboard ahead of the Christmas cooking. It's a big old fashioned cupboard, so if I am not back soon, maybe I am lost in Narnia!

Have a good weekend!

Elaine x

A card for a special friend

It was a special birthday of a special friend recently and this is the card I made her.

I started with her favourite colour purple and used a couple of DPs from My Mind's Eye and Papermania as some of the layers. The stamp is one from a Quietfire set, I love their calligraphy style stamps they are so beautiful and this sentiment is perfect. I used Spellbinder Fleur de Lis Squares and a Doo Hickey flower corner dies as part of the design and the finishing touch were some Petaloo velvet flowers and leaves in shades of purple and mauve.

Thanks for popping by.

Elaine x

A sympathy card

Sympathy cards are always so hard to make. I always feel they should be quite simple, but they also need to be special.

This one took me a while to get just right. It is a masked sun with clouds sponged over the edge of a nestie scalloped shape in Cherry Blossom and Lilac Paris Trunk inks with a hint of Dried Marigold DI. The sentiment is a simple one from Personal Impressions by Paula Pascual from a very useful set. The main image is a flying goose die cut using a lovely Memory Box die cut out of purple card. The matting is in shades of lilac and purple and I deliberately left a wide white border to balance this design.

Another murky picture I fear!

I am embroiled in frantic Christmas card making, but batch making is help a lot and I am up to about 30 now, so pleased wth my progress so far!

Hope you are having a good weekend

Elaine x

Wrinkle-free- that's the card not me!

While I was staying with my lovely crafty friend Judith recently, she helped me understand the mysteries of the wrinkle-free distress technque. Now I had tried this before and you would think it was simple, but there is nothing like being shown how to do it and given that I had often admired Judith's results from this technique who better to show me? This is the result of our playing, oops, I mean my learning.

So what did I learn to help me get a so much better result? Firstly use a good quality water colour paper and make the paper wet first as well as the ink on the craft sheet. Secondly build up the layer and dry thoroughly with my heat gun in between the layers. Thirdly, make good use of the way the ink beads in the mositure on the sheet and make a feature of that in the gaps that appear as your design builds. Lastly, to pat and press the paper onto the sheet gently, too much pressure obliterates the shape of the water drops and you lose the definition of the pattern.

I think the colours I used were Peacock Feathers and Shabby Shutters. I edged with a little sponged Chipped Sapphire, one of my favourite colours for edging panels.

I finished off by using a La La Land die from Judith's collection, diving into her offcuts box for blending colours. I love this die shape like a fern unfurling. Then I pinched some gem swirls from Judith's not insignificant gem collection! Lastly I used a sentiment from a Stampin Up set that has a lovely script font that I rather coveted in Judith's collection! I don't think this card will be sent anywhere, I am going to keep it as a reminder of a very nice crafty session during my weekend with Judith.

And not a Kaisercraft sentiment stamp in sight, although I fear there will be another post or two using them coming to a blog near you soon!

Elaine x

A leaving card

I had to make a quick card for a colleague recently and I am still enjoying using my Kaisercraft sentiment stamps, so they were lurking on my desk. This is a variation on the theme of the last card I blogged.

I apologise for a rather washed out picture, I really struggle in the limited light this time of year. Once again I inked a background through the Clarity flourish mask and then stamped the dancer image, that I think is a Lost Coast stamp if I remember rightly. I then added the Viva flourish stamp to frame the panel. The sentiment was stamped and matted on a separate panel, I used Tumbled Glass, Peacock Feather and Chipped Sapphire Distress Inks for the colouring with sponges.

I have just got back from a brilliant weekend with my lovely friend Judith in Norfolk who made me very welcome and looked after me very well. We took in a brilliant workshop with Lin Brown on Sunday and I just need to put some finishing touches to my canvas before I share the finished result. As always Lin was very inspiring.

Have a great weekend

Elaine

Go confidently

I recently purchased a couple of the new Kaisercraft words stamps and have enjoyed experimenting with ways of using them. I have already posted a couple of bookmarks  and the Smash book I made using them. This is a card using the rich warm colours I love so much. 

 

The background of the card uses a Clarity mask and I used a brush to add the ink through the stencil giving a soft, almost airbrushed effect. I overstamped with a Viva clear flourish stamp in plum archival ink and added some darker shading at the edges before mounting onto black card. I stamped and shaded the sentiment in the same inks and matted onto a couple of contrasting layers.

Even though some of the highest winds of this weeks storm were recorded locally, we are lucky to have escaped with just a few soft branches down, including one that landed on the roof of my craft shed with thankfully no damage!

Elaine x

Smash book

Now I am not really a scrapbooker, but I am a hoarder and find it so hard to throw out things like tickets and other little mementos, so I have been pondering about the whole Smash book idea as a way of being tidier which such things. While I was looking at of the shelf products I remembered an A5 book with greyboard covers and kraft pages inside I bought at The London Graphic Centre a couple of months back for the bargain price of about £3. 

 

To decorate the cover I used a Marianne A5 paper from the Country Home collection. This is like a small version of the Kaisercraft Basecoat collection but does have some words as part of the designs. I overstamped with a Kaisercraft butterfly vintagey collage stamp, I added a couple of strips of fabric tape, a stamped library card using a Memory Box stamp with a Prima sentiment and the pen nib is a Jenny Bowlin clear stamp. I added a sentiment with some self adhesive letters, some words from a pack of pre-printed sentiments and finished off with some black gem swirls.
 

For the inside cover I used an old ledger paper, I can't remember what make this is as I collect these kind of papers like a magpie whenever I see them. I added a simple sentiment that I love and seemed so appropriate for a book of lovely memories using a stamp from the recent Kaisercraft launch and a simple strip of washi tape.

You may notice I have taken the paper right up to the spine of the book. I hate to see a gap, so I carefully tore out a page from inside the book to use as a template, marked where each hole needed to be on the back of the paper and then used a small hole punch to make the holes, carefully snipped each one through, added some glue to the receiving surface and gently pushed each hole in place, closing the snipped gap with a pokey tool, ending up with a virtually invisible join.

Last weekend I found a date stamp for £1 on a visit to The Range so I am now all set to go with my Smash Book at a snip of the off the shelf price.

It seems like we are in for some stormy weather over the weekend and the lovely gentle autumn days we have had may be coming to an end. It's hard to believe only a couple of weekends ago we were picking fruit like this. Now safely stashed in the freezer or chutney jars.

As the colder weather has started, I have now made a little temporary craft area indoors as my winter craft shed evacuation is needed. My desk is made from a piece of recycled chipboard covered in green vinyl leatherette which cost me the princely sum of £3.50. I feel I have managed to be at least a little frugal recently (maybe making up for the new dies and a gorgeous set of Quietfire stamps that arrived in the post this week!). Next week we have a new woodburner being fitted so I will probably find this area a little too cosy given the current unreliability of my own thermostat!
 

I hope whatever you are doing this weekend, you keep cosy and safe in whatever the weather chucks at us!

Elaine x

Ally Pally

In September I made my regular pilgrimage to Alexandra Palace for the Big Stamping and Scrapbooking Show. I love this show, it is always a special time as I get the chance to catch up with special crafty friends from around the country, to do some fabulous shopping and enjoy the setting in a really special building. This year I had to dash off to the show the day after I got back from holiday and the strain showed when I got up late and had a massive dash! This pic shows the stash I managed to amass at the show, but also during holiday shopping at The Glitterpot and The Craft Barn. I was a very lucky girl!

 

I bought some bookmark tags from Inkylicious and here are my first two efforts. The main stamp image on the orange tag is an Inkylicious stamp called Tree of Life. The sentiment is from Stamp Camp, which I really love, what great rules to live by! I added shading with a Crafter's Workshop stencil. 

 

 

The blue bookmark uses one of the new Kaisercraft sentiment stamps with a pattern added from another Crafter's Workshop stencil. These words mean a lot to a friend of mine and me and I couldn't miss this stamp. I plan to make some more of these to add into Christmas pressies.

 

Elaine x

The end of an era

After a lot of soul searching I have decided the time has come to resign from the Chocolate Baroque Design Team. I have been producing samples to show case the lovely stamps produced by Glenda and Adrian Waterworth for three and a half years. I am allowing myself a little self indulgence with a little retrospective review here of some of my favourites among the samples I have produced during this time.

I recently decided that I want to allow myself more time to experiment with my crafting and learn some new techniques and this has led me to decide it is time to move on from the DT work. My last samples have now been posted for the team.
 

I want to thank Glenda for giving me the chance to be part of a fantastic team of crafters, artisitic spirits who have been a real pleasure to work with and who have taught me so much. Being part of the team has been such a positive reinforcement of my crafting abilities and I can feel the positive impact this has had on my output over this time.

Without wishing to make this sound like an Oscars speech, I want to thank Glenda and Adrian, Lesley, Sue Page - stamp designer extraordinaire and Val who works behind the scenes to make stamps for making this journey possible for me. To the other girls in the team Judith, Miranda, Debbie, Shirley, Claire and Clare - it has been such a pleasure to work with you all and to share life in all its infinite shades within our special little group. You are amazing, generous spirited women and it has been a privilege to share the experience with you all. Also not forgetting past members of the team Lesley, Eileen and Phree,  I really enjoyed working with you all too.

Thanks for all your comments here and on the DT blog on my samples , they have meant so much.

Elaine x

Finnibair Workshop

At the end of August I was lucky enough to be one of a group of people taking workshops with Anna Dabrowska aka Finnibair at Snazzy's in Swindon. The big bonus of the weekend was that I got to spend some precious time with my special crafty friend Lesley. It had been a year since we had been together, so we had loads of catching up to do.

This is a couple of pictures of my 12 x 12 layout made in the Tea for  Two workshop. This is based on scrapbook paper, but thanks to all the layers and embellishments it ended up quite dimensional and much more rigid that I expected. Being so large it was quite tricky to get a decent pic to be honest and I have now put it in a frame so I have a little reflection too.

I used a copy of a vintage photo of my Nanna, that I have always loved. The sepia picture fitted well with the warm tones of the backing papers, brass metal embellishments, gold and terracotta flowers and the tea colouring that was a major feature in the finishing process. I found a great 12 x 12 glass fronted deep frame in Wilkinsons that seemed made for my project.

The workshops were absolutely brilliant and Anna is such a great teacher. The workshops were fast and furious, but we all finished some quite complicated projects thanks to her guidance and encouragement. Everyone's projects reflected their own styles as well as Anna's ways of working. One of the key messages I took away from her teaching is not to overthink things. I always plan things to the nth degree, but I think I may have been slightly cured of the habit and I am starting to trust myself to just dive in a little more!

Since then we have been away for a holiday in this interesting conversion of a water tower in rural Sussex.

 

We didn't have brilliant weather with rain, by most afternoons, but we found some lovely places to visit each morning like Scotney Castle

 

Wakehurst Place which is an outpost of Kew Gardens and has some amazing trees

 

 

Nymans has charming gardens with wonderful plants and the main house ruined by fire was thought to be the inspiration for E.H. Shepherd's illlustrations of Toad Hall in Wind in the Willow, one of my favourite children's books.

 

 

 



 

 

Standen is a lovely Arts and Crafts house in wonderful grounds, and well worth a visit, even though the day we chose was not the best! 



There were some beautiful crisp early autumny mornings though which are so lovely this time of year.

 
We were also in the right area for visits to the Craft Barn and the Glitter Pot, so I took advantage of some great crafty shopping opportunities and on some of the wet afternoons I did a little crafting and made some collaged postcards of the places we had visited. I used watercolour card as the background, added pictures from the leaflets I had collected, together with leaves mod podged onto the layouts and a few nice images I found in a Waitrose newspaper!
 

 

We have been at home for the second week of our holiday so there has been plenty of opportunity to use some of the new crafty treats I purchased while we were away and from the Ally Pally show that I dashed up to the day after we got home.

 

If you made it to the end of this post, thanks for your indulgence of my holiday memories! Back with more crafty stuff very soon!

 

Elaine x

Leafy Butterflies

I love foliage stamps and there are some super images as part of the new Autumn fairy plates. I love any nature themed images and have really enjoyed playing with these.

 

I started by cutting a strip of white card to fit on the left hand side of the card. I chose Two shades of lilac and mauve inks stamping randomly to cover the panel with the umbel image from the September Fairies, firstly in the lighter ink and then overstamping with the darker ink. I then shaded the whole panel with more lilac and pinky inks to build up a depth of colour. The panel was then stuck to the base card and trimmed to size. I added a thin sparkly strip either side of the stamped strip.

I finished by stamping the image directly on to the base card on the right hand side and a sentiment from the Pretty Poppies plate. I love these sentiments and find myself using them often. The finishing touch was to die cut two butterflies from two shades of mauve card with a Memory Box die and position them on the stamped strip.

Thank you for taking the time to leave comments, they are always appreciated.

Elaine x

 

Autumn Leaves

I love working with silhouettes and the new autumn fairies offer plenty of scope for that.

For this card I started ink shading with yellow ink across white card. I then used the Solace stencil and shaded with Spiced Marmalade Distress Distress Ink. At this point it is essential to make sure your background ink is really dry before embossing the fairy image in a plum metallic EP. I then added some darker ink shading at the very edge and to ground the mushrooms! I used pencils to add a little more shading on the fairy wings and stamped the sentiment in Plum Archival ink. To finish I punched little leaves from copper metallic self adhesive paper and mounted the panel on to black card to add a little contrast.

Hope you are enjoying the inspiration the DT have worked on for these lovely new stamps.

Elaine

Autumn Fairy Collection

Today sees the release of the Autumn Fairy Collection from Chocolate Baroque, a real feast of designs on three DL plates.

There is a special offer on these lovely stamps here.

As well as the gorgeous fairies that I will feature later in the month, there are some great foliage stamps in these sets too. I used the rather ferny leaf from the September Fairy plate for this quick card.

 

I stamped the leafy image randomly on a strip of card in three colours of Versafine, Toffee, Spanish Moss and Olympia Green, starting with the lightest colour and finishing with the darkest. When the ink was completely dry, I added some shading in Crushed Olive Distress Ink along the edges. I matted the strip onto yellow and brown card before mounting the panel onto a cream card blank. The final touch was to add some Tim Holtz chit chat word stickers.

I'll be back next week with another design.

Elaine x

Dusky sunset

Some time back I bought the Flying Goose die from Memory Box. I felt it was about time I used it.

I made a background using my leafy background technique, although I must confess I made it rather too dark to appreciate the pattern. Never mind! I added a sun with the sentiment from Inkylicious and a couple of bird stamps, one Tim Holtz and the other I think may be Lavinia. Finally I added the goose and mounted the whole thing on a black card blank.

Just a quick post today!

Thanks for popping in!

Elaine x

Variations on a theme

I have had to make a couple of cards for relatives recently where Get Well cards didn't seem quite right and I felt the sentiment on the following cards fitted the bill.

In both I started with papers from an 8 x 8 pad which has quite a retro kitchen feel. I had always planned to make some cookery themed cards with these, but have not quite got there. I like their cheery feel.
 

The sentiment is from a second hand set of Stampin' Up stamps I bought at the craft show in Portsmouth I went to recently. In both cases I added die cut flowers, leaves and hearts, some mulberry paper daisies that I always find uplifting to look at, some buttons and a little ink shading.

These were really quick to make and I was pleased they felt quite perky and I hope upbeat.

I don't seem to have made much to share lately craftwise, life is pretty hectic one way and another right now. I am certainly enjoying being able to spend more time outside thanks to the better than avergae summer we are having.

Hope you are enjoying your summer too!

Elaine

Peerless Transparent Paints

I feel I must share an amazing discovery on the old internet, Nicholson's Peerless Transparent Watercolour Paints. If that sounds like an old fashioned patent product that is because they are!

 

Peerless paints are manufactured in the US, and have been since 1885 when they were developed to hand tint photographs. The unique thing about these paints is they are coated onto the surface of a special paper and then activated when water is added. They are dye based, really transparent colours. I saw them when I was googling storage of watercolour paper and came across this film on YouTube by Jayne Davenport. They are really thin sheets of paint which makes them incredibly portable. Now as soon as my paints arrived, inspired by Jayne,  I had to get my own portable palette oragnised. I warn you now some may find this post a bit dull, while others may get as excited as me by such a task! 

First I did some test swatches on scrap paper to work out colour groupings, that got me really excited by the colour intensity. I then designed a grid with an inch square for the paint itself and space underneath for a strip of watercolour paper for a test paint splodge and the name of the colour. This shows the format for the blank pages printed on white card with the watercolour paper strips added. The final page has an index of which paint colours come from each set of paints as various options are available.

 

I gradually painted my colours onto each strip of paper and I also cut out some inch square samples.

 



I used masking tape to organise my paint squares onto a spare grid printed onto paper. As I cut the inch squares out I wrote the colour name onto the masking tape and added a square of red line tape on the back of each ready for mounting. Now this is a little bit of a mucky job as the paint does activate on your hands if you have hot hands as most of us have recently!

When all the swatches had been painted on, the next stage was for me to trim up the grids and laminate the panels. I had left the excess edges in situ while I did the painting and that worked well as my mucky fingers were only touching something that would be waste when trimmed off. Once laminated and trimmed, I used some A3 kraft card to make a four fold palette. Between each of the sets of two I used acetate as Jayne had to separate colours if wet and also providing a mobile palette for mixing paints.

 

Once I had stuck down my four grids, two with a hinged acetate panel underneath, I was ready to stick on my paint squares.

 





The end result is my lovely palette of all the gorgeous colours. I can imagine taking this on holiday and to all sorts of places, with just a waterbrush these paints are good to go. I want to make a decorate folder to house the palette, but in the meantime, I can just delight in the result of my work of about three evenings!!! Please excuse the messy desk, but you know how it is.

I bought my paints here and I cannot recommend the customer service and speedy delivery I received highly enough.

I hope someone out there will enjoy this post!!! Thank you to Jayne for the inspiration.

The cooler air this evening is a delight, we have had no rain down here yet though, I think some other may have had our share!

Let me leave you with a pic I took outside our front door. This little plant seems to hang on by a thread, but never grows very much. I noticed this week, something had been making holes in the leaf and the little muncher seems quite artistic, because they have created a leafy butterfly with holes in each corner!

Elaine