Enough with the teasing …

Here you go, enough teasing a proper card.

This first one is from the Bah Humbug plate, I have shown it below photographed flat and on an easel. The easel picks up the background a bit better, but over emphasises the glittery sky….. I might have gone a bit ott with the glitter here, but I think I was doing it in artificial light and didn’t spot how much was on there until the next day when it was well dry.

I coloured the buildings with promarkers and the sky is inked with tumbled glass and stormy sky Distress Inks. The background was made using a mylar template which I first sprayed over with some Touch of Mica mists in silver and then ran through my BS and embossed the snowflakes.

The snowflakes are from the same sheet and the sentiment is from another Bah Humbug sheet  - yes ladies you will want them both!!

 

The next card is from the Wouldn’t It Be Lovely sheet. This I stamped onto plain white card and then coloured in the heads with Big N Juicy Hydrangea inkpad.

The horses are from the same sheet and were coloured with ink from the Spice Big N Juicy pad, and the lovely tendrils of flowers are from the second Wouldn’t It sheet, as is the background mat, which I stamped randomly with some small flowers from the second sheet to make a background image.

I will post a couple more tomorrow

Pinch Me .. It can’t be real

So there I was sitting minding my own business, loading up the Craft Telly forum and I notice I have a private message. I opened it up for a read and not quite believing my eyes I read it again and again, and finally when I came down off the ceiling I screeched!

Blow me down with a feather. It was from the lovely Sheena Douglass telling me there were huge changes afoot in her career. She had been looking through a few blogs and wondered if I would be interested in being on her brand spanking new Design Team! And if not, did I know anyone else who might be! Yeah like I am gonna say no thanks Sheena! I could not believe I had been head hunted by the amazing Sheena Douglass!

So long story short. After we have had a conversation on the phone I get a fantastic parcel in the post with 4 brand new stamp plates and lots of other goodies and the remit……. just get crafting Linda!

I have been sitting on this news for the best part of three weeks now and it’s been killing me keeping quiet. After all as my teamies over at Crafty Cardmakers and my friends on Craft Telly know, I am Little Miss Chatterbox! But hey I can keep a secret, but I have so been bursting at the seams to let it out.

Anyhow the Boss – get that, Sheena the boss – told me last night that I can start posting my favourite samples I made for her from today. So here I am, giddy as a kitten trying to pick out the one I like the best. After all this is just a sneaky peek as to what will be coming up when Sheena hits our screens again on Saturday 1st October at 8am and 10am on Create and Craft TV.  Make sure you are all tuned in because I am sure Sheena has some crafting tips and techniques in line for us all and of course, her brand new stamp sheets.

I don’t think I am stepping out of line to tell you that they are called ‘Bah Humbug’ and ‘Wouldn’t it Be Lovely’. Ladies, and indeed Gents, you need to get these gorgeous new stamps and get them home. The packaging will blow you away, very interesting!

Sheena is having her new stamps manufactured for her by Crafters Companion and they will all fit beautifully on the Rock a Blocks, or indeed Umount or whatever takes your fancy.

So without further ado, here is my first effort, which I sincerely hope has done Sheena’s design justice!

 

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Ah ha, got ya!

Seriously I am waiting on something for a watermark so will be posting later today, but here is a sneaky, if somewhat distored peek at what I sent to Sheena earlier this week.

The teddy in the background didn’t go. My Mum made him when she was poorly bless her. One side of his body is definitely larger than the other but I wouldn’t swap him for a thousand Charlie Bears and we all know how I love Charlie Bears.

I should be back later today with a proper pic. So keep ‘em peeled folks.

CCM Challenge – Around the World

This is my current project for the Crafty Cardmakers Challenge blog.

Our mission this week was to take our crafting ‘around the world’. My head buzzed with all sorts of ideas for this one. I even considered making a spinner card with a world as the centre and dangling things around it, but my asperations were bigger than my practical application!

Anyhow I settled for Africa as my destination. I have a nice set of wild animal stamps that I bought a long, long time ago from Frantic Stamper in the US and knew these would be perfect for what I had in mind.

This week I got my first Big N Juicy Inkpads, yes I know a day and a dollar late. Anyhow I coloured my background with the Spice pad, choosing colours mainly from the orange section, which I dabbed randomly over the card. I then blended them in (by the way Sheena Douglass never seems to whinge that blending makes her arm ache but it did mine – I must be a right weakling). Before the ink dried I spritzed over the top with Touch Of Mica mist in Gold, which had the effect of lifting the ink in a few places.

I inked up my tree stamp in Vintage Photo, Shabby Shutters and Forest Moss DIs and stamped it three times, the last one clearly much paler and was meant to look further in the distance but I boobed and put a slightly darker one furthest back. DUH idiot, lol. The cheetahs or are they leopards? I Inked with Memento black.

I used the green area of the Spice pad to highlight under the tree and under the cats, and went around the outside with a shade from the darker end of the pad to blend it all in.

The background papers are all handmade papers from my stash and apart from the layer immediately beneath my image I gutted the others as the card was just too gorgeous to leave hidden behind it, and will give me something to play with later.

Sadly the camera has not picked up the shimmer of these papers. That copper mat is just so sparkly.

The letters I cut using a Sizzix Alpha and the same black paper that is beneath the image. I love the way it has cut the letters out of areas of gold patterning and left them looking like they have tribal markings on them. In fact that black paper has chinese patterns all over it! So my card has gone further around the world than I intended.

Do be sure and check out the Crafty Cardmakers blog and join in the fun. This week we are sponsored by who are offering a £10 voucher for the winner. Kind of wish I was not a teamie today, cos then I could enter! LOL, mind you I would still need to win it!

 

CCM Alcohol Inks Spotlight

Apologies to my teamies but I am a day late posting this. Ye gods I am having such awful puter problems I am on the verge of chucking it out the window! Grrrrrr

Anyhow in the hopes that the blinkin thing stays awake long enough I am posting my project for this week’s Crafty Cardmakers Spotlight, which is alcohol inks and I also followed last week’s challenge theme of clean and simple.

I had a couple of old tins, looking a little tired and worn that I figured would look nice with an alcohol ink makeover so had some fun altering them.

This is what one of them looked like before

And this is what it looks like now.

 

I discovered that adding the inks via the blending tool looked too muddy, and that just dripping them on, although giving a better effect, they didn’t spread out fully and then I had to finish them off with the blending tool anyway. However, if I rubbed the blending solution over the tin first and before it was fully evaporated dripped the inks on ‘voila’ a nice, complete, effect.

I decided to make a nice card to go with it, and got some old packaging that came with nesties or similar and cut out a Go kreate die shape, from the acetate packaging. I followed the same principle as with the tin and applied the blending solution to the shape and then dripped on the inks. I cut a larger shape for the background and when it was dry, eyeleted it onto the background card. A gorgeous acetate butterfly, which I added a bit of glitter too, finished it off. A nice clean and simple looking card, which hides the work that went into it, lol

I was very pleased with the outcome and think the tin would make a nice jewellery box for a gift.

I did also do one in the red colours, but with that one I used the applying the inks to the blender method. Personally I don’t like it as much as the spreading on the tin method.

I’m entering this/these into the following challenges

Creative Inspirations – Anything but Square

Everybody Art – Other cardform

Stamp, Scrap and Doodle – A gift

Charisma Cardz Challenges – Try Something new – Hmmm I have played with Alcohol inks lots of times but I don’t think I have ever put them on a card, and I have certainly never made a card and gift combination; so that is also new for me.

Do be sure and stop by the CCM blog and perhaps you might like to enter the challenge too. Whilst you are there don’t forget to check out all my teamies’ lovely projects.

Sorry for the erratic blogging at the moment but until I get this blinkin’ puter sorted it may continue.

I should shortly have some exciting news to share with you all though, so keep your eye on this spot….

WOYWW 01.09.10

I have seen these dotted about all over the place and this week I decided to show  for the first time what’s on my workdesk. As usual it’s untidy all around the area I work on. I do try to keep that glass cutting mat clear if I can, although it often doesn’t work that way.

I’ve got a couple of images in the process of being coloured and one somewhat damaged inkpad. It’s one of those sticky embossing types. But for some strange reason it’s just disintegrating. Can you see in it’s top right hand corner the foam pad is just falling to pieces. If anyone has any ideas as to what might cause that I would be fascinated to hear them as these things are not exactly cheap.

There is also a mouldy cup of coffee! Must wash that up, was wondering where that cup was, it must have appeared from inside a pile of rubbish about ten minutes before I took the picture. Note the el cheapo storage solutions. Various empty ice cream containers and one I pinched off my Sister yesterday. Made her empty it too. It had those liquitab things for the laundry in it, so now my ink dusters smell delicious.

The set of drawers contains my promarkers. Not a bad storage solution although a couple of the colours could have done with deeper drawers as they get jammed when I pull them out, but otherwise keeps them in colour families and easier to locate.

If you want to join in the fun hop on over to The Stamping Ground, where you will find many more messy craft areas. 

Oh well, I guess it’s time I messed it up again.