Nature's Beauty - an ATC swap

One of the blogs that I really enjoy following is that of Diana over at The Velvet Moth. Diana makes the most exquisite pieces of art, often incorporating textiles and beads and of course often velvet!!! A while back Diana put out a call for anyone interested in doing an ATC swap. I was rather behind everyone else by the time I replied, but Diana and I did make contact and agreed we would do a one to one swap.

I have had a very busy time over the last few months with family commitments taking up a lot of time and although I have been doing various knitting and crochet projects, plus had a much needed and special holiday, apart from some essential card making, I have not been keeping up with my papercrafting and mixed media projects. So making contact with Diana and agreeing to do this swap, gave me a much needed incentive to get myself organised and plan something a bit more creative and demanding on my creativity.

Diana was ahead of me and her beautiful Moonlit Garden ATC, decorated box and tag arrived while my project was still pretty much in the planning stages!  Diana's project incorporates die cuts, lace, velvet, beads, gold embossing and script. For more information about Diana's design pop over to her blog where she has also posted about our swap.

Not surprisingly, I had also planned a nature themed project as the natural world provides a great deal of inspiration to both of us. The title for my project - Nature's Beauty only came when I was nearing completion of the project.

My first step was to take a sheet of A4 white card and cover it with my leafy background technique (see my labels on the right for other posts about how I do this), using Distress Inks. I cut out the ATC panel and I then added stamping with the little ferns with first and second generation stamping and a little stencilling, before adding the heat embossed tree die cuts and the little ferny butterfly which must be one of my most used stamps. I shaded the edge of the panel to give a glowing light to the centre, as I wanted it to look like a woodland glade. The final touch was the word "Beauty".

Diana had made a lovely little box to hold her ATC so I thought about what I could do as an alternative.

I used the beautiful Crealie labels dies that I had a feeling Diana would like and cut two out of the leafy backgrounds and two out of toning green card for the insides. I stuck them together back to back and joined them at the bottom.

These are decorated again with die cuts decorated with Treasure Gold gilding wax, some tiny micro beads on the hollyhock flowers and butterflies stamped with the script stamp in the beautiful Delicata Gold ink which I had never heard of until another of my special crafty friends gifted it to me. The insides are stamped with dye inks. I made a matching small tag and finished that off with some leafy ribbon that has been in my stash almost since I started crafting, so it was nice to find a use for it.

To hold the ATC, I wanted something to hold it in place vertically so had a play with some scrap card and managed a little paper engineering to invent what I needed!

I absolutely loved doing this swap with someone so talented who likes the same sorts of motifs and themes as I do. I have been struggling to get inspired and motivated and working on this little miniature gift has got me kickstarted again I think, so thank you Diana and for the beautiful Moonlit Garden ATC, box and tag you sent to me!

My project used the following supplies:
Dies - Impression Obsession - Hollyhock; Craft Emotions Hogweed; Tim Holtz - Wildflowers; Memory Box - Darla Butterfly; Sizzix Framelits Tags Rounded; Taylored Expressions - Birch Trees; Crealies Extreme Labels; Stampin Up butterfly punches; Tim Holtz Bigz tag die

Stamps - Inkadinkado - Meadow; Darkroom Door - Artist; Crafty Individuals - CI207/231/021; Woodware script; Chocolate Baroque - Poppy Meadow

Inks and sundries - Distress Inks - Vintage Photo, Peeled Paint, Squeezed Lemonade & Twisted Citron; Stampin Up dye inks - Crumb Cake & Chocolate Chip; Ranger Archival Olive; Delicata Gold & Versamark. Treasure Gold in Florentine Gold, Oxynite and Green Amber. Embossing Powder in Copper and Gold. Dark Green micro beads.

A brush with Brusho!

I have seen quite a few crafty blog posts and Pinterest projects recently featuring Bister and Brusho. It seems that Bister is soot based which is interesting but I have not been able to track that down in the UK, whereas Brusho is easily available.

I made this card by sprinkling some of the Brusho powder crystals in red, turquoise, yellow and green across some Fabriano Ecological paper. Then, I sprayed quite liberally to get the colours to spread. This process takes quite a while to finish and I found that my experiments passed some of the best effects as the spreading continued, so I would recommend drying gently with a heat gun to preserve a stage you really like. I am still learning!

I finished my card by matting onto black and adding Hollyhock die cuts from an Impression Obsession die, a black gem swirls and words stamped using a Stampavie Suzi Blu set I treated myself to this week.

I am delighted to say my Blog Candy surprise also arrived from Australia from Darkroom Door following their brilliant joint blog hop with Art Journey stamps. I really enjoyed the samples I saw on the blog hop using stamps from two of my favourite companies, so this parcel was a real bonus!

Thank you Rachel for such a generous prize, I can't wait to get inky with these lovely stamps. In the meantime though, I have something else taking my attention! My new tiny art studio, all 1m x 2m is nearing completion and is currently this blank canvas!

 

Getting to this stage has required lots of emptying, cleaning, stripping old wall paper and stuck down hideous carpet and paint and repainting and wallpapering. It has been hot work in there in these last few tropically hot days! We are now at the exciting stage of adding colour and equipment. It may only be a tiny space, but I have big ideas for it and will report on progress very soon!

 

I am off to pick the first blackberries for a blackberry and apple crumble tonight. There is something special about the first blackberries of the season! Whatever you are doing I hope you are having a lovely weekend and keeping as cool as you can.

 

Elaine   

A quirky birthday card!

Well in the midst of my cute card making I needed to make a card for one of my blog sisters Lesley. I wanted to do something a little different and here is the result which I thoroughly enjoyed making. I was a little self indulgent because I made this card in my favourite colours.

This is another 8 x 8 card. I started with a frame that I covered with aluminium tape that I had coloured with Stream, Demin and Eggplant alcohol ink,  don't look too closely at that!  It was the first time I had ever used alcohol inks on a project. The background was decorated with glimmer mists through a swirly mask, but not much of that shows. I used a variety of stamps, from Darkroom Door, Beeswax stanps and Invoke Arts to make different elements. All were coloured with the same blue and turquoise Adirondack inks. The main panel was an altered beer mat - courtesy of Linda Elbourne. The large flower was stamped onto Grungepaper with a stamp from the Elusive Images Big Flowers plate, coloured with dye inks again and with a decorative brad and little turquoise jewel stickers. I added a triple embossed chipboard butterfly, a chipboard dragonfly decorated with some jewels and opal dust glittery finish and a selection of flowers including some made from inked book pages. The little metal heart was painted with precious metal paint and glimmer mist and a Tim Holtz wish adage ticket was added using a TH memo pin. The happy birthday sentiment was stamped onto seprate tiny tags using a Darkroom Door alphabet set and decorated with little star brads.

Thanks for visiting!

Elaine xx 

Just tinkering!

I have been tinkering with a few different cards and styles over the last couple of weeks. I do like to mix and match the styles I try out.

Firstly, this one uses a stamp from the Brocade Backgrounds plate from Elusive Images which has some gorgeous images. I stamped the image onto green vellum in black Perfect Medium and heat embossed in Angel Wings Gold Moonshadow powder. I then cut out all the leaves and stuck them onto a background of Artylicious paper from my Graphicus Guild pack. I actually cut all these out while I was on the coach on the way to meet up with my Crafty Friends at Alexandra Palace with my trusty little decoupage scissors from Tesco! A nestie sentiment panel, ribbon and green dewdrops completed this design.

This next card uses several Adirondack dye inks in Cool Peri, Stonewashed, Sailboat Blue, Demin and Eggplant. Starting with the lightest colours, applying with Cut 'N Dry foam and working outworks to add the darker colours closer to the edge. The stamp is Vine leaf from Lavinia Stamps, stamped in blue Versafine ink. The sentiment is from a Darkroom Door set Art de Fleur, volume 2. The butterflies are from a Crafty Individuals stamp (CI 231) that I find really useful.

This card uses another Crafty Individuals stamp (CI259) stamped in grey Versafine ink, I cut out the panels separately and shaded them with Adirondacks again. I backed the stamped images onto a Crafty Individuals backing paper from their Background Papers collection 4 - Trees. I added some punched and shaded paper leaves from a book page.

Lastly this is a bit of a cheating card, for a housewarming. I rarely use ready made embellishments these days, but I thought this little shaker style house was rather nice. I also used a little heart decoration I found in a lovely local shop at the weekend. I mounted the heart and house onto panels of Basic Grey paper from their Wisteria collection - this is one of my all time favourite paper collections. These are mounted on dark green Re-Make card, with a punched edging using the Martha Stewart Garden Trellis punch.

So I have been quite busy one way and another!