brusho heart

This flowering baroque heart is the new clear stamp from Chocolate Baroque, and is the latest in a series of heart stamps - all on special offer at the moment!
I had a leftover piece of watercolour card already brusho'ed (if that is a word), so I stamped the image with black versafine and clear embossed it.
The large flowers were bleached out, and I was pleased that all the colour did come out. I added some extra colour to the leaves and the smaller flowers using spectrum noir pencils and a promarker blender pen. The stamens were highlighted with a gold pen.
The base white card blank is a 6"x6", and the dark purple mat matches one of the brusho shades in the bakground piece.



Lesley Wharton has a show on The Craft Channel today at 11.00am, called 'Brusho art with Chocolate Baroque' - should be a fabulous show! The Craft Channel is on Sky 679, or you can watch on your computer, there is supposed to be a catch-up facility if you miss the show........

decadent brocade

 Sorting out my craft stash is a slow work in progress, not helped by stopping to try out the finds that I had forgotten I had!
I have been sorting out my Chocolate Baroque stamps, and trying to rehome all the orphan ones back to their sets - in the process, I have been sorting them onto the tabbed stamp file sheets and then into plastic folders - they now take up less room than in the plastic file boxes they were in before, and hopefully I will be more likely to replace stamps on the sheets than into a box!
One of the sets I 'found' was the decadent brocade, which has been around for some years now, and I just had to stop and play.
I used this panel from the set, and experimented with some marker pens I also unearthed, but that was after the brushos! The brushos were already out. so I stamped the panel onto watercolour card with versamark and embossed with white before shaking purple, turquoise and cobalt brushos over the paper. Once it was dry, I trimmed it to 3.25" x 5.5" and mounted it onto a 6"x6" white card blank.
                                                  While waiting for the brushos to dry, I tried colouring straight onto the stamp with various  marker pens, and then huffing on the stamp to reactivate the ink.
The first sample used very old whispers pens and two new distress pens, and they both bubbled on the rubber - the blue distress pen was more successful than the green whispers, ok if you like the very distressed look!




Second try used stampin up markers, which were a lot better, although thegreens still bubbled a bit, and I didn't get very even coverage on the flowers, more likely my fault than the pens!

I cheated a bit with the third try, as I didn't bother cleaning the stamp first - to be honest, I didn't expect anything remotely useful this time!
 I had a collection of mini ink pads, mostly stampin up, and all elderly, and I tried inking using two of these.The purple still shows through on the flowers, where I was trying to avoid adding blue to the leaves.
Good news is the ink pads still work, and I have 4 notecards that will come in handy some time (also a few more stamp sets sorted)

CB challenge 22

 For my DT sample for the Chocolate Baroque colour challenge, I used 2 stamps from the butterfly poppy A4 sheet of stamps - another older set which was a firm favourite a while ago, (I really loved the combination of poppies and script) and which fitted the colours.
For the first card, the main image was stamped in black versafine onto white card and clear embossed before colouring with promarkers. The white 15x15cm base card was stamped in opposite coners with the small script stamp using whild honey distress ink before adding the butterfly image on an orange mat.

The second card was stamped with black versafine again, and coloured with pencils, giving a much paler image. The script stamp was stamped all over the 5"x7" white  base card in wild honey ink before matting the butterfly onto a paler orange card.

rose and poppy

 I have made a couple of fairly quick cards using two of my favourite flower stamps from Chocolate Baroque.
The first also uses another favourite, brusho powders.

The image from harlequin rose was stamped with black versafine and clear embossed onto 300gsm white card.
A quick spray with water, then I added yellow, orange and green powders using the dinky plastic spoons that were on the Chocolate Baroque website last year - I hope they will be back at some point, as I would like another set!
Another spritz with water, this time very generously so that the colours spread out around the stamp.
Once it was thoroughly dry, I trimmed the image down, matted it onto black card and then onto a white 5"x7" card blank. It took far longer to dry the image than anything else, Ididn't want to use a heat gun as I liked the spread of colour as it was.

The second card uses a stamp from pretty poppies and a sentiment from mackintosh sentiments.
The poppy was stamped with black versafine and clear embossed, then sponged with distress inks - even quicker!
I love the clear sentiment stamps, it is so much easier to get the sentiment stamped where you want it!

mini cards

 These are some mini notecards, using 4"x4" white card blanks, just the right size for quick notes.

They are very quick to make as well, I don't think the three of them took longer than 15 minutes at most to make (admittedly, I have friends who swear that I work so quickly that I can do 3 cards in the time it takes them to make 1 - I think they couldn't go more slowly if they tried!)

I cut a mask using a circular die and copy paper, making sure that the hole was towards the centre of the paper. Position this mask over the front of the card blank, and create a mini landscape using distress inks, brushes and the traditional torn copy paper to create the hills. I used peeled paint and broken china inks, as I didn't want too strong an image.
I removed the mask, then stamped the solid  thistle stamp from the wild meadow stamp sheet in black memento ink across the card for the first two cards.

The third card I inked the trees from landscape edges in peeled paint and stamped them befored removing the mask - I also stamped the two birds from the same set  in broken china.

here be dragons

Whilst blog-hopping, I noticed that the
Male Room challenge was fantasy, which fitted in  nicely with my find among my older stamps.
Can't remember how old this set is, but it had a lot of use when I first got it, I loved the crunchy sentiment!
It did need some attention - I had obviously last used it with a glittery 3D medium, and not cleaned it thoroughly, so the dragons got scrubbed with a nail brush and stamp cleaner (yes, I found some of this too!), which eventually removed most of the residue. I also had to replace the cling backing, which was very much the worse for wear ( microwave works well).
The stamps came out none the worse for the rough treatment, a testament to the quality of CB rubber!
I used a 6" square white card blank, stamped the dragons using black versafine ink, then masked them using masking tissue - a bit fiddly to cut out, and if I had thought I could have just stamped the dragons after doing the background..............
Background was distress inks in tumbled glass, broken china and faded jeans brushed on fairly randomly to create a cloudy effect.
Dragons were coloured with marker pens of various makes

butterfly notecards

 Whilst sorting out stamps, I came across these DL stamps - cut out, mounted but never used............I vaguely remember seeing Glenda demonstrating the kiss technique with them on Create & Craft many years ago, and at the time they were a must have! Much to my surprise, they are still in the Chocolate Baroque listing, butterfly blush for the solid images and just butterflies for the matching linear images.
The challenge this week on Make my monday is watercolour, so I decided to christen these stamps by trying the kiss technique with water-based marker pens.
I chose the largest image from each set, and randomly coloured the base stamp with 3 or 4 different marker pens. The matching stamp was then sprayed with water and placed over the solid image and pressed firmly.
This image was then stamped onto small 4" square card blanks - being cautious, I wsn't too sure it would work, and didn't want to ruin a larger card!
The result was a watery mix of colours, and I was quite happy with the result even though the linear image didn't always show up too well.

 The cards on the right show both images stamped onto white card - and also where I haven't lined the two stamps up perfectly!

I now have a set of small note cards which will be very useful for those quick thank-you notes