Butterfly Tag

Will the current crafting trend for butterflies ever end? I hope not, cos I love it. I have so many butterfly stamps and just about any project looks good with a butterfly or two added! :lol:

I played on a recent card with cutting out some butterflies from a sheet of patterned paper from my Tim Holtz kraft stack and I liked the look so much I decided to make a tag using more butterflies cut from this paper:

I also got chance on this project to have a play with the distress stain background technique from this month's Craft Stamper magazine - I've been dying to have a go since the mag came out but I had to get my mitts on some Picket Fence Distress Stain first! :)

So the background was made as per in the mag, using Picket Fence, Dusty Conchord and Walnut Stain distress stains and then edged the tag with Walnut Stain distress ink and stamped ferns and the wording with Walnut Stain distress ink, adding clear embossing powder to the wording. I curled the wings of my cut-out butterflies and stuck them on using Glossy Accents on the body only. And I added brown lace and lilac seam binding ribbon to finish.

I'm entering this tag into the "Anything Goes" challenge at the Simon Says Stamp and Show blog. :)

40% off Sweet Pea stamps!

Regular readers of my blog will know that I have a bit of a love affair with the gorgeous images of Sweet Pea Stamps... well, if you want to get your eager little mitts on some Sweet Pea stamps of your own, now's the time to do it! Cos until 12 midday EST tomorrow (that's about 5pm UK time) there's 40% off your entire order!!

See details (and links to the Sweet Pea store) over at the Sweet Pea Stamps Blog. :)

Distressed Kraft Card

Here's a pretty card I made last night. I'm entering this into two blog challenges - the theme this week at Passion for Promarkers is "distressing" and the theme at One Sweet Challenge is "kraft":

I started with this gorgeous stamp from Sweet Pea Stamps - it's called Keep My Secret Well and it's by Anna Marine. I've had this one for a while but not used it before so it's been lovely to finally have a play with it. I coloured the image with my Promarkers and then distressed and curled the edges. I then cut pieces of plain and patterned pink paper to size, used an Edgabilities die on the patterned paper, inked all the edges and attached them to a kraft card blank. I added a piece of pink lacy ribbon and then cut a piece of Tim Holtz patterned kraft paper to slightly larger than the coloured image, distressed and curled the edges, and attached this and the image to the card.

To finish I cut Tattered Florals from pink patterned paper and patterned kraft paper, curled the petals and fixed them together with a jewelled brad. I attached the flower using a hot glue gun and then cut butterflies from the patterned kraft paper, folded the edges up and attached using Glossy Accents.

I rather like how this has turned out. It's got a lovely shabby, vintagey feel to it with muted colours. And, of course, the image is just gorgeous! :)

WOYWW - 15 February 2012

I am very late to the WOYWW party this week... but with good reason. Cos DD1 and I have been out for most of the day, doing this:

Yup, we went to Hobbycraft to meet Mister Maker! :) It involved a lot of faffing about (appalling organisation on the part of Hobbycraft!) and waiting around but it was worth it in the end - DD1 was super excited to see Mister Maker! :)

But back to business - here's what's on my desk today:

After the pristineness (is that even a word?) of last week, the mess is beginning to encroach a little again. I need to take 10 minutes to do some tidying away. However, there's lots of creativity going on... there's some ATC backgrounds I've prepped and there's an in-progress experiment involving a stencil (on which, incidentally, I managed to slice my thumb open whilst cleaning it yesterday!!), some embossing paste and some foiling flakes:

I'm testing out the technique on a piece of scrap card before committing to doing it on the ATC backgrounds. Tune in again to see how it turns out! :lol:

Thanks for stopping by my desk on your whistlestop WOYWW tour of the world's craft desks. :)

UKS Art Journey - Week 4

I'm a bit behind on the prompts on the UKS Art Journey project but am determinedly working to catch-up.

This was my page for the week 4 prompt which was all about journalling, with researching involving clipping interesting words from magazines/printed material etc.

I kept this one fairly simple. I wiped Dylusions paints onto the page with a baby wipe and splatted with Dylusions inks to form the background and then doodled a border. I added wording clipped from magazines etc and a figure from a Tumblefish Studios download and then added journalling and doodling to finish. 

Love... in shades of purple

Here's a little card I made for entry into a couple of blog challenges. This week's theme at Passion for Promarkers is "Grey and Purple" and the theme at Sweet Pea Stampers is "Love". This is my interpretation of these two themes in one card:

The stamp is a scrummy Ching Chou Kuik design and she's coloured in with my Promarkers, of course, and, for a bit of added shimmer, I used Icicle Stickles over the moon shape in the image. The background is Distress Stain swiped across glossy card and then water spritzed through a stencil over one section. I cut paisley shapes from shimmery grey and purple card with my Nesties and layered those onto the background and double-matted my image onto shimmery purple and then black card. To finish I made some little hat pins with heart-shaped beads and hot glued them and some layered fabric flowers into place and stamped Amour (a Stampin' Up! stamp) in black ink in the bottom corner.

UKS Art Journey - Week 3

I'm a bit behind on the Art Journey journey because this page has taken me a while. I've been working on it for well over a week now. And, tbh, I'm still not entirely happy with it. But... oddly... I'm happy that I'm not happy with it, if that makes any sense? It's not an attractive page... but I rather feel it shouldn't be attractive because it deals with a part of my personality that is not attractive.

The prompt for week 3 was all about consumerism and this page is about the ugliness of my own personal consumerism gone mad:

Although you can't really see it beneath all the subsequent additions, this page began with a collaged layer of pictures of craft stash clipped from craft magazines. I scraped a thin layer of gesso over this collage and, using Kaisercraft alpha stamps, stamped the word "want" over and over in a border around the page using different colours of Distress Ink. I sketched a basic self-portrait of myself with my arms full of acquisitions and coloured it with watercolour pencils before cutting it out and gluing onto the page. I then added the journalling in layers radiating out from the figure and finished it off with a fringe of avaricious, grabby hands!