Home Sweet Home

I wanted to make a quick new home card for a friend recently. I bought this stamp at Ally Pally and thought it would be great for quick cards. I was wrong though, it was one of those stamps that just did not want to stamp properly!!!

After about 10 attempts I got a mostly decent image, which I set about ink shading with Distress Inks. Once I had done it, it looked a bit dull, so I cut out some elements, including the door and shaded them separately and in some different colours.and stuck them in place and was pleased with the result. I fussy cut the edges and then mounted on a panel I had stamped with the Stampin' Up Hardwood stamp and then rubbed over with white pigment ink to give a softer impression.

Hopefully next time I try with the stamp it won't be such a battle to get a good image.

Hope you have a good weekend.

Elaine x

A secret place

It was a special birthday for my OH earlier this year and this photograph of our garden taken early one March morning inspired the card I made for him.

Our garden and its wildlife is very special to us. We have an acre of wildness where we do our best to let nature stay in charge as much as possible without everything becoming completely overgrown!

I started by making one of my leafy backgrounds in yellows and greens, and added a Memory Box die cut branch. The leaves were all punched out of a sheet I had coloured with Brusho in shades of brown, orange and green, and I inked the edges of each one. The birds, squirrel and rabbit are DoCrafts, Technique Tuesday and Deep Red stamps respectively. I finished my design with some finds from the garden, a bit of bark, some lichen and a mossy twig and some paper daisies. The sentiment is a Jo Capper Sandon Stampotique stamp.

The card went down a treat and still has pride of place on the mantelpiece nearly three months on! That must be a first!

I have been getting back into crochet and have been making a rainbow ripple blanket using yarn that was in my stash. Inspired by Lucy at Attic 24 I ordered the kit for her Coastal ripple blanket. I realised I was struggling a bit to get the ripple right despite numerous efforts, so this was a trial run.

There are a few weird bits where my pattern has gone a little astray, but generally I am quite pleased with what I have managed. I have a sequence of 28 colours repeated twice. I am at the stage of sewing in all the ends now ready to start the edging. It will be just right to keep my cosy on the sofa during winter evenings.

It has been lovely getting into crochet again and I think I should be able to cope with the larger ripple blanket now.

Hope you have some nice plans for a crafty weekend.

Elaine x

Diamond Wedding Anniversary

My MIL went to a diamond wedding anniversary party at the weekend. I offered to make her a card as I don't think I will get many opportunities to make one! Needless to say there is a bling alert with this design!!!

I am sorry the pic is rather dark, it was really hard to get a picture that wasn't all reflections!!!

There were two elements that popped into my mind immediately as my design came together. I knew I wanted to use a quilted embossing folder with diamonds at the intersections and I wanted to use one of the Sue Wilson French dies. These were both on my wish list, so it was a good excuse to bring forward buying them!!! Choosing the size of the gems for the background was a surprising challenge. I had teeny weeny ones, square ones, larger self adhesive ones, various coloured ones - clear, greyish and aurora borealis tinted versions and all sorts out. I had stuck the "normal" size self adhesive ones all over and then when I stepped back the effect was just far too heavy. So those all had to be very carefully removed to ensure no tearing happened. My heart was in my mouth at that point I can tell you. In the end a DoCrafts gem wheel with different sized diamond and gold gems came to the rescue as I could work my way through the various sizes until I found the one that felt like it worked the best. The only problem was that they were not self adhesive and I couldn't risk escaping glue showing so I had to apply glue very carefully with a fine embossing ball tool, pick up the gems with a gem picker and press them down with the pokey tool. Thankfully I love that sort of painstaking work, it is sort of soothing somehow and in the end it was worth the effort as I got the effect I was looking for.

The sentiment was a challenge though because I really wanted it to be embossed rather than computer generated and I knew I wanted to add the little gem over the "I" in diamond. So I started to hunt for an affordable stamp ( I doubt I will use it again) and thanks to the wonders of Google I found exactly what I was looking for at Stamping All Day here. This couldn't have been better for me as I love stamps that mix script and plain fonts so it was just the ticket. In fact I loved them so much I ordered the silver and golden wedding anniversary versions too. I embossed in Stampendous detail silver powder which is my all time favourite silver EP and added a tiny Mei Flower gem.

The card is 8 x 8. I struggled to decide whether to use plain, linen of pearlescent white card and which kind of silver to use too. In the end pearlescent won the day as it looked best embossed and I used quite a dull silver pearl card behind the die cuts.

I added lots of additional die cut embellishments using two colours of silver - pearl and mirri, iridescent pearl vellum for the flowers. The leaf dies are from Dees Distinctively, the swirls and mirri flower heads are Memory Box, the flowers are two sets of Doo Hickey dies. I added some little diamond heart buckles on some white velvet ribbon and various gem centres for the flowers.

Once again the brilliant Cosmic Shimmer Specialist Acrylic Glue came into its own with this card, I cannot sing its praises highly enough, it sets off so quickly and makes this sort of fine positioning so easy. It has now almost completely displaced red line tape in my card making. I buy the bigger bottles now and decided it would be better to keep the bottle upside down. I asked my OH for some help in designing a solution and five minutes later this was the result!

It works perfectly - sometimes the simple solutions are the best!

Goodness it is suddenly very chilly here, We have lit the wood stove for the first time today, it is so wet and windy and generally unpleasant, the glow has made things much more cosy. My slipper boots are out and I am planning an afternoon in the craft room!!!

 

Have a great week!

 

Elaine 

A swinging birthday!

I made this card for my sister's birthday recently.

The main image is a two part Inkylicious stamp, the tree and the person on the swing can be added separately. Once inked (I think in black Versafine if I remember rightly) I die cut the circle and added yellow, orange and cranberry inks to create a nice rosy glow.

I mounted the circle onto a panel stamped with the Stampin Up Hardwood stamp in brown ink on kraft card. The sentiment on a die cut oval is from Unity. Both shaded with Vintage Photo DI. Everything was mounted on chocolate brown card.

Elaine

Steampunk beetle birthday

You may remember I was lucky enough to win a smashing prize from the Darkroom Door and Art Journey shared blog hop recently. I finally managed to get some ink onto one of the stamps for a birthday card for a 21 year old great nephew (phew does that make me feel old - in numbers if not in my head!). Anyway this is the result of my playing.

I started off ink shading with Mown Lawn, Salty Ocean and Tumbled Glass DIs. I then overstamped with the DD numbers background stamp in black archival ink. I used a sentiment from the very useful DD String Sentiments set on a panel shaded with the same inks which I mounted onto black. I also added some shading around the edge of the numbers panel with Chipped Sapphire DI. I was than a bit stumped as to what to do next.  Cards for men and boys always have me flummoxed! So I decided to go steampunk and used one of my favourite images from the Chocolate Baroque Steampunkery set. This also provided the small words I added. I fussy cut the image and then ink shaded with more DIs before adding some further shading with Prisma pencils in blue and white.  The final touch was a metal clock face from DoCrafts which fitted the design perfectly.

Even my OH liked this one which is very rare and said "oh its steampunk" - you could have knocked me down with one of the beetle's feathers because I didn't even think he knew what steampunk was!!!!

Hope you are all having a super weekend. Yesterday I made the trek up to the Big Stamping and Scrapbooking Show at Ally Pally and spent the day doing some fabulous shopping and catching up with some special friends Judith and Sue in our much needed refreshment breaks! These days always go far too quickly (despite leaving home before 8am and getting home after 8pm) and make me spend too much money, but they are always so enjoyable. I had another crafty friend to travel up with which always help the long journey go more quickly too.

I have to earn my keep today and get on with some housework! My lovely shopping will get unpacked at some point too though!

Whatever you are doing, I hope you enjoy a lovely autumn day.  I leave you with some amazing diamond raindrops on my macleaya plant in the garden that had me rushing into the garden with the camera one morning still in my pjs!

Elaine x

More Christmas In September

I am on a roll with these Christmas cards now and came up with a very quick idea I am thrilled with. A while back I bought the Dina Wakely Scribbly Birds stamps. These were a real extravagance because if I am honest it is only this image I really love! Then I got the new TH Christmas words set and in a moment of serendipity when I was tidying the sets on my desk I realised how wonderfully they match! This is the result!

As you can see I stamped the bird and sentiment on a craft card in black Versafine. Even that looked alright actually! Then I restamped the bird onto cream card and sponged ink - Vintage Photo and Barn Door DI before sticking it into place. I loved these little cards even though they are so simple and will no doubt make a few more. They are so quick. Even with the cutting out and sponging the whole design only takes a few minutes.

It is definitely the time of mists and mellow fruitfulness here. We picked our damsons this weekend, I have made elderberry syrup to ward off the coughs and colds and these hops are some of the largest I have ever seen.

 

Apparently it is another night when the Northern Lights may be visible from the north of England and Scotland, no good for us, but good luck if you are in the right areas you lucky things.

 

Have a great weekend

 

Elaine 

Christmas in September

I was determined to get ahead with my Christmas cards this year. I started off with good intentions in January to make 10 a month. It hasn't happened, but I am making reasonable progress with batches and now have 36 under my belt and more underway.

I have made a batch of these cards. Three different snowflakes (Personal Impressions - Let it Snow-flakes) stamped in three different shades of turquoise and blue. The sentiment is Inkylicious stamped in Versafine Majestic Blue and then the edge lighted shaded with Tumbled Glass DI. I finished off with some matching layers and a few gems.

I am really enjoying working in my new tiny craft area and I am amazed at how much I can squash in there. Everything is close at hand that is for sure and I find myself with lots of inspiration as I sit listening to the radio or podcasts! I have been busy indexing my ink pads. I know I have an addiction, but I am amazed at how many I have. I have been stamping each colour onto tiny tags to be kept on book rings.

It will be great to sort them into colour families so that I make much better use of them. I was very interested in how the different inks perform just how many amazing colours I have. I am especially pleased to have a reference of my much paler colours that I often forget to use. I think my final plan is to set up something like Jenifer Maguire here, a system one of my kind crafty friends pointed out to me.

Elaine