A quick card and a holiday!

We have been away for a few days in west Dorset and had a lovely short break. Although the weather forecast wasn't great, in fact for the most part we were blessed with hot sunshine, almost too hot at times!

 

We stayed in this lovely converted railway carriage and it was super. The inside had been restored into beautiful comfy and very well appointed accommodation.

 

 

We also had the use of another van for extra space! This was the inside! It was a super place to sit and read!

 

 

We enjoyed some peaceful places off the beaten track where possible to avoid the busier places as it was peak school holiday season.

 

 

We also enjoyed some much needed R & R!

 

 

Evenings provided the opportunity to sit out in the garden and watch the sun go down.

 



 

After a detour to a lovely relaxed family wedding on the way home,  we got home late on Saturday. I have been pottering since making the most of my last couple of days before going back to work tomorrow. Here is a quick card I made, I seem to have loads of birthdays coming up through August and September.

 

I sponged through a Crafters Workshop stencil with Spiced Marmalade DI, and shaded the edges with Adirondack dye inks in Watermelon and Cranberry.  Quite a fruity recipe now I come to think of it! The balloon girl image is Hope by Bee Crafty stamps. I have to say it is not the easiest stamp to use as it has a lot of extra background polymer that catches the ink. The sentiment is from a Woodware set. The panel is mounted on black card measuring 4 x 4 inches.

 

Hope you are all safe and dry after the wet weather of the weekend. I think despite being down here on the south coast we escaped quite lightly thankfully.

 

Elaine

My new craft room!

Hope you are all having a good weekend. I am here with an update on my little mini indoor craft room! It may seem that I am making a big deal about my new space of 1 x 2 m in what was the old larder of our house, but I had completely given up hope of any dedicated indoor craft space of my own as our house is quite small. I had carved out a corner of the living room, but it made the room seem messy and cluttered. It was only when my OH asked for help to access the window in our old larder which was used to store cleaning materials and recycling I started to cook my idea! This picture shows the "before" state, after we had stripped off the old wallpaper and carpet. Although it looks awful I suspect anyone with an older house can relate to this sort of look! Our house was build in the 1890s.

My OH has been a trooper, patiently replacing skirting board, painting and wallpapering. This is the stage I showed last time with the wallpaper giving a clean, fresh blank canvas.

The colour I chose for the walls was a chalk paint in a pea green colour. It seemed very dark at first after the bright white, but I am used to it now. This pic shows how we were designing a two layer desk top. Note the spacers which are 4 jars of chutney and jam! Very technical approach there! I had wanted a two layer desk for ages so I could stow my guillotine under my work surface. This was something I have seen on Pinterest and pinned onto my Craft Room ideas board which has grown completely out of hand with over 800 pins!

The blue drawers don't match very well, but I was trying to recycle what I had as this is a trial at this stage to see how it works. This also means that we have not put any shelving onto the walls, but we will later if it all works out in the longer term. The four drawers each side hold Kitchen roll and baby wipes, folding boards and die cutting plates, watercolours, pan pastels, Treasure Gold, colouring pencils, adhesives, embossing supplies and heat guns, brushes and sponges and gems and embellishments.

This is the desk with all the "stuff"  added. Essential tools, pens and brushes are all close to hand. The lower shelf now holds the guillotine as planned and two wooden trays of work in progress. I can tuck my cutting and glass mats down the left side of the drawers and I have added a couple of plastic boxes of stamps in my knee hole, one of which provides a comfy foot rest. A caddy to the left on top of the ink pad racks holds essential cardstock supplies. The containers with telephone boxes are waiting to be painted black, but are a very useful size for brushes, scissors etc.

Once again my lovely cassette racks are pressed into service for my ink pads. They fit nicely against the wall and this one has all my acrylic blocks stowed above in an Ikea Perspex container.

Excuse this rather blurry pic, this is the unit you can see to the right against the wall in the pic above. I had to move it in order to take a photo! This was a little Ikea wooden drawer unit, currently minus its drawers which has been pressed into service as a narrow shelf unit. My OH has fitted it with castors for me so it can be moved easily. I am using it to house 6 x 6 pads, boxes of punches and most of my Bigz dies. My Distress Ink carousel is housed on the top. You can see my die cutting machine on the floor. I miss having space for my Big Shot, but am going to try and make myself use the new one as it is so much more compact as well as being able to cut up to A4. Not far away I have access to my die collection, coloured card and card blanks.

I finished off by adding a present from a special friend, a panel by Kelly Rae Roberts as this reminds me of the special friendships that crafting has blessed me with.

Hope you enjoyed the "tour" around my new tiny space. I think I have crammed in as much as I dare without making it all feel too cramped and cluttered! Before long I hope to be sharing some lovely things I have made there!!!

Elaine

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   

Friends indeed!

I wanted to make a card for a friend to let her know I was thinking of her this week as she is going through a stressful time. I decided to use an Inkylicious sentiment I bought at Ally Pally.

I wanted to make quite a simple and unfussy card. The sentiment is the focal point here. I also bought the star embossed card at Ally Pally as I could see how well it would work with the sentiment. I added a bit of ink shading in various shades of Distress Ink - Tumbled Glass, Broken China and Chipped Sapphire. I am really loving my little round mini DI applicators, they may even tempt me away from my old favourite chunks of Cut and Dry!

 

While I was in the mood for making cards I decided to make a second to add to my box of cards for selling. This time I used a stencil to add ink to the card blank and then added some Imagination Sparkle medium using my finger.

 



I'll leave you with a pic of the lovely sight that greeted me outside the front door yesterday. This beautiful pink lily that has that amazing nutmeggy fragrance of lillies I love so much. The scent got stronger as the day went on.

Things are rather busy here. We are working on renovating the tiny space of an old larder which is only about 1m x 2m. I am going to trial it as a tiny indoor workspace. I have seen lots of cupboard and closet craft spaces and I think it should be as workable as my current winter arrangements in the living room.  There has been lots to do stripping old layers of paint, wallpaper, stuck on carpet and all the grime that goes with it. I have chosen new paint colours and am cooking up ideas of how to make the most of the space. The transformation will be revealed in due course.

Have a good week!

Elaine

Another leafy card!

This is another of the cards I made with some of my leafy prints from the other day.

 

 

This time I printed with a smaller leaf, a hardy geranium if I remember rightly. Then I overstamped with a leaf stamp made of pinky purple rubber, I think it is a See Ds stamp that someone rehomed with me! I finished with overspraying with a vibrant Cosmic Shimmer mica spray in a lovely golden green colour.

 

The sentiment came from a bargain bin wood backed stamp at a craft show in Newbury I think. The die cut butterflies are from the Tim Holtz Butterfly Frenzy die.

 

This next  card uses the lovely Stampin Up Hardwood stamp and one of their sentiments from the Wetlands set. I added some die cut leaves using an Impression Obsession die coloured with Pan Pastels, mounted onto branches cut using a Memory Box die. 

 

 

Hope you are all having a good weekend. I am just waiting for a loaf to finish baking so I can pack a picnic as we are going out for a walk before I plan to sit down to watch the Wimbledon final.

 

 

Elaine 

Leafy prints

If you follow my work on here, you will know from time to time that I get very inspired by the lovely leaves of the macleaya cordata plants in our garden. I was sitting in the garden on Monday and the leaves in the sunshine looked like they had been dusted with fine gold mica powder, they had a gorgeous delicate sheen. I felt it was time for a creative leafy session. So on Monday I picked some leaves and inked the reverse sides with dye inks for some delicate leaf prints, using my Speedball brayer to gently press the detail into the paper. I used the plume poppy leaves, geraniums, hop leaves and ferns so ended up with some quite varied results. I sprayed some of the prints with walnut ink, my old glimmer mists and some Cosmic Shimmer sprays and I was really pleased with the way it made the ink bleed gently. I also added some leaf stamping on some of the pages. This was results of a couple of hours leaf printing.

I was really delighted with one of the prints that I will be keeping to make into a project just for me as it reminds me of that golden sheen on the leaves that inspired me in the first place.

I loved the way the gold spray collected in the veins of the leaf. If you click on the picture you can get a better look.

Here are a couple of the designs of card I made with the sheets of printing. The first uses a similar print to the one above. I lost the top of the print, so had to crop it a little. I added a DoCrafts sentiment and some Impression Obesssion die cuts in chocolate brown card.

These next two use one of the sheets like a masterboard and I used 3 x 3 inch squares to make the prints go as far as possible.

This panel used fern prints which I overstamped with the fern from the Chocolate Baroque Wild meadow set, using shades of Versafine ink. I added another DoCrafts sentiment and more of the IO leaf die cuts.

The second card uses the same sentiment and an Impression Obsession Gingko leaf die. I love Gingko leaves and I am hoping we can find space to plant a Gingko tree in our garden before too long. I added a little Vintage Photo DI to the edges of my leafy squares.

I was very pleased with how quickly these cards came together in the course of one evening once I had made the leafy prints and I still have plenty of material to make more cards and projects with.

Elaine

Scribbly birds

I have had my eye on these Dina Wakley Scribbly Birds stamps from Ranger for a while. I just think this little fella is especially delicious!

I haven't had a lot of time for crafting recently. We went away for a little break and then work and home stuff has taken over a bit. This afternoon I had a couple of hours much needed tidying in the shed and once my desk was clear I felt the need to make it messy again. The background of my card is stencilled using DIs and ink shaded using the new mini ink applicators, I really like these little round ones, you don't get the horrid straight edge marks as with the usual rectangular ones. My leaves were stamped using a Dyan Reavely set, also from Ranger and I had those already stamped and coloured left over from my book project. I stamped little bird and sentiment in brown archival ink, cut them out and added more DI and a bit of Distress Marker and stuck them on separately and then realised I could use up the little bit of spare leaf and a couple of pearls to finish things off on a black base card.

Things are blooming in the garden, even though we don't have much veg planted this year, things have a way of growing despite what we do or don't do sometimes!

Isn't it amazing that a flower can develop from this (excuse the blurry pic)

to this

to these!

I can tell you they taste amazing too! I am currently enjoying them every morning with breakfast.

These poppies seeded themselves in the garden and grow like weeds, I find it impossible to pull them all out and this is the result!

I have also been experimenting with the amazing and simple artisan bread recipe. Find the recipe here. This recipe only uses four ingredients - flour, yeast, salt and water and you don't even have to knead the dough. I have made two loaves so far, the first with just white flour and the latest with half wholemeal and half white and I also added some sesame and ground flax seeds. This made a really tasty loaf for so little effort, it works like magic!

Whatever you are doing, I hope you are enjoying the summer that finally seems to have tentatively arrived.

Elaine