Home Is Where The Heart Is...

I was recently lucky enough to do a Guest Designer spot for Stampotique. I love their cute and quirky stamps and as they are now having a DT Call for folks to join their Design Team for 2104, I just had to jump at the chance to work with them again. :)

 

So here's a fun little creation I made as a DT Call entry.... *

I decided to make a little wall-hanging. :)

 

I used one of my favourite Stampotique stamps - Smile - and his cute little heart made me think of the saying, "Home is where the heart is" so I made a little house from thick board.

 

I covered the roof section with a piece of gelli plate print that had a nice texture and "roof-ish" red colour....

 

 

...and I covered the main part of the house with cardstock which I'd coloured using Dylusions sprays and a stencil. I inked all the edges of both parts of the house with black ink before attaching the roof section. I sprayed more card with Dylusions inks in shades of red and doodled a door and doodled windows onto old book pages that I spritzed with more Dylusions in blue shades. I cut these out and attached them to my house and added the sentiment which I hand-wrote onto old book paper and cut out. I cut the top of a gold brad and glued it in place as a doorknob.

 

 

To finish I stamped my image onto the house (to capture the external detail of the image) and stamped him again onto white card, colouring him with my Promarkers before cutting him out and attaching him over the image on the base, using clear sticky pads to give him a bit of dimension. I also gave him a little bit of grass under his feet (doodled and cut from old book pages spritzed with green Dylusions ink) to ground him.*

Finally I attaced a rusted-effect wire hanging to the back of my piece to allow it to be hung up. :)

 

I'm rather pleased with this cheerful, brightly-coloured piece and I hope the good folks at Stampotique like it as much as I do. I love the quirkiness and unusualness of Stampotique stamps. I think my own crafting style is quite changable, depending on the products/medium I am working with, but I do find that working with Stampotique stamps pushes me to be more creative, to play with lots of inking and stamping techniques and making my own backgrounds etc, and to really go to town with colour. :) I really enjoyed doing my GD spot for Stampotique and would love to join the team for a longer period and get the chance to work again with such a lovely, talented bunch of people.

Now I just have to decide where to hang my little work of art.... :)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*I must apologise both for the lesser than usual quality of my photos (my crappy slow netbook has now died meaning that I can't download photos from the data card from my camera so I have had to resort to using my phone to take these photos - thankfully my beloved laptop is being delivered tomorrow after having been repaired so once DH reinstalls the operating system, I'll be back in business!) and for the fact that Photobucket appears to be once again playing silly buggers and randomly rotating or squidging my photos for no reason!! :/ I'll replace these with some better (hopefully, right way up!) photos over the next day or so. :/

Use a Digi

Time for a new challenge at One Stitch at a Time and this week it's Use a Digi. That could mean a digi stamp, digi papers, a computer-generated sentiment... anything you like, as long as there's some digital element on your creation. :)

 

For my card I've used Barbara Jensen's Arteest digi stamp:

 

 

I went with the whole arty/painty theme and used one of my Gelli Plate prints for the background, matting it onto black card:

 

 

I coloured the image with my Promarkers, using warm oranges and reds to tone with the painty background, and cut her out, layering her on foam pads over layered die-cut shapes:

 

 

I stamped the sentiment (a very appropriate one, I felt :D) with a Tim Holtz stamp and heat embossed it with black embossing powder, and added chiffon ribbon and some layered flowers:

 

 

To finish, I added some teeny black gems on opposing corners:

 

 

The challenge runs for a week and you don't have to use a Stitchy Bear product to enter - those please do remember that you are limited to THREE entries, if not using Stitchy Bear products. You can have unlimited entries using Stitchy Bear products and will also be in with a chance of winning our main prize. Entries without a Stitchy Bear product will be entered into the draw to win a $3 gift voucher to the Stitchy Bear Digi Outlet.

 

I'm entering this card into the following challenges:

Annabelle Stamps Challenge - Color Challenge

Brown Sugar - Anything Goes

Creative Fingers - Anything Goes

Inspire Me Fridays - Anything Goes

Sister Act Card Challenge - Anything Goes

House of Gilli - Bright Colours/Anything Goes

Delightful Challenges - Make It Pop

MilkCoffee Challenge - Show Off Your Colouring Skills

Addicted to Stamps and More - Make Your Mark

Crafting by Designs - Celebrate Women

 

Sweet Pea Stamps ATCs

A few weeks ago, one of my awesome Sweet Pea Stamps DT colleagues, Milo, posted these absolutely gorgeous ATCs on the Sweet Pea Stamps blog. Now, I love ATCs and have recently gotten hugely back into making them so my first thought on seeing these (okay, my second, cos the first was, "Wow!!" :D) was, is she gonna be trading these (and, if so, can I please have one!)?

 

So I asked and she said yes. And I said, "Hurrah!" :)

 

And so I promised to make my own set of Sweet Pea Stamps ATCs so that I'd have one to trade with her. And then real life got in the way a wee bit and here we are several weeks later... and I've finally gotten around to doing just that. And this is the result:

 

 

I used Rebecca Sinz's gorgeous Sweet Demon digi stamp - digi stamps are great for projects like ATCs cos you can resize and print them to any size you need - and coloured her in with my Promarkers before carefully cutting around her. I went with a red and black colour scheme on the image and then remembered that, in my stash of Gelli plate backgrounds that I made while on holiday back in April, I had a luscious one that was all black and red and gold. So I cut my ATC backgrounds from that and added some fragments of netting, some flourishes dotted on with a gold Perlen Pen and a few little paper flowers (that I coloured black using a Promarker pen!) with more Perlen Pen dots, and a little metal flower, for the centres.

 

Here's the three cards in close-up:

 

 

 

 

I love how these turned out. They're kinda gothic and gloomy but at the same time a bit bright and glitzy with the warm red and all the shimmery gold.

 

I'm definitely going to make more ATCs with Sweet Pea Stamps images... they have such an awesome range of beautiful, gothicy, fantasy, streampunky images. And, speaking of which, I'm also going to enter this set of ATCs into the first challenge at the PunkyouGirl challenge blog. :)

 

WOYWW 211

Oooh lookit, I actually remembered what day of the week it is, for the first time in 3 weeks! :lol:

 

Yup, I've remembered that it's Wednesday *and* that that means it's time to share what's on my workdesk. Take that, baby brain! :D

 

So here's my desk in all its messy glory:

 

 

 

I've actually quite productive over the past couple of days, mostly making ATCs. I am on a *major* ATC kick at the moment and getting involved in some great swaps over at ATCsforall.com.

 

Scattered about on my desk you can see some of the goodies I've been playing with - Pan Pastels, stencils, Chocolate Baroque and Stampotique stamps, pens, Distress Stains, offcuts of Gelli plate prints, crackle paint... ooh it's been a lot of messy fun! :D

 

There's also an in-progress card sitting on the desk. I've started off with kraft card and Distress Stains but not yet decided where to take it from there...

 

But here's some of the bits and pieces I have finished recently...

 

Three cards for an art journal themed swap:

 

 

And a hand-drawn card, using just a fineliner pen on card:

 

 

I also made a few quite notecards with which to send out my cards for swapping, including this one:

 

 

I love this big butterfly stamp (Swallowtail stamp from Stampin' Up!) and been wanting to play with it and I was tempted by the Clean and Simple challenge at Flutterby Wednesdays. So am entering this card into that challenge.

 

That's it for me for this week... will try and get around and comment on a few more desks this week. The days just seem to get away from me and I never seem to get chance to do as many comments as I would like!

 

 

 

Red, White and Blue

It's Variations Week again at Sweet Pea Stamps and this time the DT are playing with Karen Middleton's sweet Red, White and Blue image. I love Variations Week... it's always amazing to see how everyone takes the same image and creates something so different with it. :)

For my card I coloured the stamp with my Promarkers in shades of red, white and blue - as seemed appropriate - and added some sparkly Stickles to the scattered stars.

 

 

I cut out the image with a Nestabilities die and embossed the edges and decorated my card with gold mirri card and one of the backgrounds I made while playing with my Gelli plate last month - I thought the red, white and blue colours, with touches of gold, in this print were just a perfect match for the theme of the stamp and the colours I'd used to colour it in.

 

 

I added a couple of lengths of ribbon in blue and gold and then cut some zooming star shapes with my Cameo and layered them under the image, which I matted onto more gold mirri card and attached with foam tape. To finish I added some teeny tiny little star-shaped gemstones here and there.

 

 

This image is available in both red rubber and digi format from the Sweet Pea Stamps store.

 

WOYWW 205

Am back in the land of WOYWW after my week's absence... but sadly don't really have anything to show on my desk this week:

 

 

I haven't had chance to do any crafting since we got back from our little holiday so the desk is still in the state of chaos in which I left it before we headed off down to sunny (and boy, it sure was!) Dorset.

 

I do however have some crafty photos to share because I actually managed to do some crafting while we were on hols. :)

 

My lovely sister-in-law has been my crafty accomplice and enabler for ooooh, nearly 9 years now! She's responsible for getting me into scrapbooking, for getting me hooked on Stampin' Up!, and for generally encouraging, aiding and abetting my crafty addictions and stash shopping! ;) But in all this time, we had never yet actually gotten to craft together.

 

Well, last week, we finally did. I left hubby with the kids for a few hours and spent a fabulous afternoon at my SIL's house playing with our Gelli plates and making lots and lots and lots of gorgeous, messy, painty backgrounds. Just look at the results!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not only that, but after dashing back to the rented holiday house to cook dinner for the gang, I abandoned hubby and kids for another couple of hours and went with SIL to her weekly cardcrafting group. It was lovely to meet her crafty friends and spend some time crafting with a group of lovely, creative ladies. And we made this gorgeous card....

 

 

...using a faux-patina technique which I'd not tried before.

 

 

All in all, I had a lovely crafty afternoon/evening, spent some great time with my SIL and came away with some gorgeous creations. What more could a girl ask for? :)

 

Thanks for stopping by. Normal crafting service will no doubt be resumed for next week's WOYWW.