Feeling All White

Geddit? ;)

 

All White (or no patterned paper) is the theme of the new challenge starting at the One Stitch At A Time blog today.

 

It was different - and really interesting - to work without any colour on my card and I'm really pleased with the results:

 

 

I used a lovely digi stamp by Stitchy Stamps called Lite My Fire. Another thing I've done differently this week is that I've not used my Promarkers for colouring the digi stamp - due to the death of my Putty Promarker, which I use for skintones, I've been using my Prismacolor pencils instead lately and I actually think the softer colouring medium works really well on this image:

 

 

To make up for the lack of colour/patterned paper, I used lots of embossing and detailed die-cuts to add texture and interest. I cut a shaped card blank on my Cameo and also cut smaller circles which I embossed with a Stampin' Up! embossing folder. I also cut a delicate border and a sentiment label using the Cameo:

 

 

I finished things off with a leafy flourish (again cut with my Cameo) and some flowers and some Perlen Pen dots around the edges.

 

 

It's easy to enter the OSAAT challenge - you don't need to use a Stitchy Bear Stamps image to enter but if you do you'll be entered into the draw to win a $9 gift voucher for the Stitchy Bear store. Entries not using a Stitchy Bear image will be entered into a draw to win a $3 gift voucher.

 

And don't forget, now's a brilliant time to pick up some Stitchy Bear Stamps products at bargain prices as the birthday celebration is on at the Stitchy Bear store until Friday with a whopping 33% off everything!

 

 

I'm also entering this card into the following challenges:
Little Claire's - Cards with Folds
One Stop Craft - Anything Goes
Lady Anne's Challenges : Friday Sentiment - Anything Goes
Clearly Inspired - Die Cuts
Totally Papercrafts - Easel Cards
CCEE Stampers - Pencils, please
My Heart Pieces Digital Stamps Challenge - Not To Be Square

Alipeeps' Art Digi Stamps!

Readers of my WOYWW post this week will have seen me mention some exciting news that I was impatient to share... I had to wait for a few details to be finalised but am pleased to say it's now all up and running so I can tell you all my giddy news!

 

The more eagle-eyed of you may have spotted that my blog now sports some page headings because I've added a new page...

 

Yup. That's right. My exciting news is...

 

As of today you can now buy Alipeeps' Art digi stamps from the Stitchy Bear Stamps store! :)

 

I am sooooo excited about this! I used to draw all the time when I was younger but kind of got out of the habit over the years, but in recent months, through my crafting (and particularly art journalling and making ATCs), I've gotten back into it and I've been thinking for some time about maybe turning some of my drawings into digi stamps.

 

I've been honoured to be a member of the Design Team for One Stitch At A Time, the Stitchy Bear Stamps challenge blog, for a while now and love Stitchy Bear's stamps and their store so I naturally turned to them to ask if they'd be interested in selling my stamps, and they only went and said yes! :D

 

So the first 4 Alipeeps' Art digi stamps are available to buy right now at Stitchy Bear Stamps, with lots more to come. And just to maybe tempt you to take a peek, here's a fairly quick, clean and simple card that I made using one of my new digi stamps - Starry Dreamer:

 

 

I honestly cannot *wait* to see what other people make using my images! :D

 

In fact, I'm so excited that I think I'll offer a bit of a giveaway. Let's have a linky party eh? (My first ever on this blog - woot!). Make a project using one of my digi stamps and link it below and one month from now, on 16 April,  I will pick a winner to receive two free Alipeeps' Art digi stamps. :)

 

Enjoy creating! :)

 

 

 

My latest creation...

I've been hard at work crafting for the last couple of nights but, unusually, it had nothing to do with papercrafting!

 

Instead I've been messing about with fabric paints and - *gasp* - sewing! This may come as a surprise to those of you who know me and have heard my oft-repeated claim that I suck at fabric crafts (it's true - I do! :D).

 

However, it was all in a good cause... after two evenings of painting with fabric paints and sewing by hand, this was the result:

 

 

And, with the addition of some face paint, this was the finished ensemble this morning!

 

 

 

Doesn't she just look *too* cute? :D

 

All this was in aid of DD1's pre-school's decision to combine today's Comic Relief Day with last week's World Book Day - so the kids were asked to donate £1 each and come to school in fancy dress as a character from a book.

 

I decided to take inspiration from one of DD1 and I's favourite books - The Tiger Who Came To Tea - and send her as a tiger. So I bought face paint and fabric paint and some tiger-patterned felt and managed to scour the supermarkets to find a plain orange t-shirt (harder to find than you'd think!!) and plain orange leggings and also managed to find a fluffy ears headband, although it was in leopard-print, not tiger-print.

 

And so I spent the last two evenings painting black stripes onto the clothes with the fabric paint and then sewing the tiger-print felt into a tail (and sewing that onto the leggings) and into ear shapes which I sewed over the ears on the leopard headband.

 

And this morning I put the whole ensemble on her and had my first ever go at face-painting (and I do have to say, I rather impressed myself with the results! :D).

 

And she looked just awesome. :)

 

It was lots of fun at pre-school with all the kiddies running around in their costumes... and, at the risk of sounding smug, I think DD1's was the only one that was home-made rather than store-bought (most of the girls were wearing some variation of a Disney princess costume - Snow White or Rapunzel or Sleeping Beauty etc) and in fact I had several people ask me where I'd got her costume (or where I'd had her face painted!) and were surprised and impressed to find that I'd done it myself! :)

 

And amazingly, my sewing seems to be sturdy enough for the costume to have survived the entire afternoon (and is still going strong now, with her charging around the house and rolling about on the living room floor!). I guess it can be added to the dressing up box for future fun and games. :)

 

Sweet Pea Blog Hop!

Sweet Pea Stamps are having a blog hop today to showcase some of the stunning new images from Rebecca Sinz. Each of the Design Team have been given one of these gorgeous newly released stamps to create with and if you take a hop around all the DT blogs you can see what we've all created - and maybe bag yourself a prize in the process! :)

 

You should have come here from Nataliya's blog but if you've missed the start of the hop, or if you get lost along the way, you can find a full list of all the participating blogs at the Sweet Pea Stamps blog.

 

My image to create with for the hop is Rebecca Sinz's Forget-Me-Not:

 

 

This card is something a bit different for me because (as previously mentioned on this blog), I wasn't able to use my Promarkers for a few days because my Putty one, which I use for colouring skin tones, died on me! So instead, I dug out my Prismacolor pencils. I only bought these a couple of months ago and haven't actually used them a huge amount yet, but as they say, necessity is the mother of invention! ;)

 

 

And I'm SO glad I did use the Prismacolors because I think this image looks gorgeous coloured with the softer touch of pencil colours. Isn't she just beautiful? I just love how Rebecca draws faces and her latest set of images, each based around a particular flower, is just stunning.

 

I decorated my card with a sheet of Kate Knight patterned paper, which was a perfect match for both the background and flower colours I'd used on the image, and added a die-cut frame and some die-cut flourishes. I matted the coloured image onto blueish/violet cardstock and attached it to the card using foam tape and finished things off with some pretty flowers and a few gemstones.

 

 

Your next stop along the hop is Sharon's blog. Don't forget to leave a comment at every blog along the hop and on Monday a randomly-drawn winner will receive a $10 certificate for the Sweet Pea Stamps store.

 

Birthday Sale!!

Stitchy Bear Stamps are 3 years old this week and they're celebrating in style, with a great big birthday sale! :)

 

Starting today - 15 March - for one whole week there's a whopping 33% off everything in the Stitchy Bear Stamps store. That includes digi stamps and digi papers... everything!

So don't delay, grab a bargain today at the Stitchy Bear Stamps store. :)

Dreaming of Aquamarine Tides

It's Variations Week at Sweet Pea Stamps, where each of the Design Team posst a creation using the same stamp. I love seeing how everyone creates such different projects from the same starting point. :)

 

This month the stamp we've all used is Dreaming of Aquamarine Tides by Katerina Koukiotis. I've had this rubber stamp in my stash for a while and it was a nice change for me to play with rubber stamping instead of digi stamping and so I decided to do something a bit different and use a technique that's not really suited to digi stamps - painting with bleach:

 

 

I first of all used Dylusions spray inks to colour a piece of white card and then stamped the image onto it using Versafine ink and heat embossed it using a fine black embossing powder. I then used plain old household bleach and painted over the areas where I wanted to remove the colour - I bleached out her face, neck and hands, leaving colour on her lips, fingernails and around her eyes and also on the seashell.

 

 

I love this technique because the results are always different - different inks react differently to the bleach so the colour you get on the bleached areas is always random.

 

I liked the contrast of the black outline against the vibrant colours on this card so I decided to carry that through on the card itself. I swiped the edges of the image with more black ink and heat embossed it and chose a paper that seemed to fit well with both the colours and the theme of the image.

 

I inked the edges of the paper and cut decorative corners and layered flowers with my Cameo, inked them and heat embossed with black powder for a glossy finish.

 

 

You can buy this stamp from the Sweet Pea Stamps store either as a single stamp or as part of a sheet of 4 gorgeous stamps by Katerina Koukiotis. And don't forget that until Friday there is 15% off all rubber stamps (including overstock/sale items) at Sweet Pea Stamps. :)

 

I'm entering this card into a couple of challenges:

Flourishes Timeless Tuesday - Go Green

Through The Craft Room Door - Anything Goes

Tuesday Alchemy - Anything Goes

Make My Monday - Heat Embossing

Paper Playtime - Anything Goes

 

 

 

 

 

WOYWW 197

I've been working on something really quite exciting recently... *but*.... the details aren't finalised as yet so I can't share! Argh! Oooh the tension is killing me! :lol:

 

So anyway, I can't share what I've been working on but I *can* share where I've been working... and... brace yourselves.... I've tidied!!!! :)

 

 

 

Yup, I finally got fed up enough of the mess on my craft desk to start trying to do something about it. I was reaching the point where I was struggling to have space to craft in. So I had a darn good sort through and cleared all the paper scraps, random embellishments, tools, inkpads, varied bottles and jars, and accumulated rubbish (darn it but the paper backing strips of DST get everywhere!) from the main craft desk. Lookit! You can actually see desk! Acres of it! :D

 

I actually made two cards this evening too but I pretty much tidied as I went and a few strips of off-cut paper and a pad of 6x6 papers is all there is to show from my creating.

 

Just compare it to how it looked last week: :)

 

 

Admittedly, I have a lot more work to do. Because the second desk, the craft stacker unit, and even the floor, are still piled high. But it's a start right?

 

And I do still need to deal with the teetering pile that has accumulated on top of the printer:

 

 

I have however implemented one idea to try and prevent the mess from recurring (I know, I know, it's a futile effort, and yet still I try!) - a snazzy little metal "in-tray" in front of the Cameo is now housing any random bits of loose embellies etc and any bits of paper/card etc that I am currently working with/about to work with.

 

 

My idea is that by sitting it in front of the Cameo, it will prevent the build-up of paper scraps etc that usually accumulate in that area... and I can simply pick it up and move the whole thing aside when I want to use the Cameo.

 

That's the idea, anyway. Tune in in a few weeks to see how well it works! :lol:

 

That's it for me for WOYWW this week... hope to be able to share my exciting news some time very soon so keep an eye out for an announcement! :D