thistle butterfly

As soon as I saw the new stamp from Chocolate Baroque I ordered it with the last of my birthday voucher, then waited impatiently for it to arrive.....which it duly did yesterday.
My excuse for playing this afternoon was that it was too hot and sticky to do any more baking - and I wanted to try out more of my new brusho inks as well.I don't have any watercolour paper, and just spraying water on card wasn't working too well as it dried too quickly, so I went for drastic and just held a sheet of card under the cold tap for a few seconds .Adding a very small amount of back ink and blotting with scrunched up kitchen roll produced this background - admittedly it took ages to dry, but I liked the effect.
I stamped the largest image with versafine and clear embossed it once everything was dry, then painted it with very dilute brusho in leaf green and purple. Butterflies were stamped and embossed onto a spare bit of card coloured with scarlet and yellow brusho, then cut out and glued on with gluegel.
Base card was stamped ramdomly round the edges with the large thistle head stamp using milled lavender and dusty concord distress inks, and more dusty concord sponged round the edges. mat is a dark purple card.
Another one for Make my Monday!

CB colour challenge

Chocolate Baroque now have a challenge blog of their own, and the first challenge is a colour one - turquoise, green, yellow and red.
I started out with backgrounds using distress inks on a craft mat, spraying with water and mopping up with card - well, after I had got a yellow ink pad first. I used peeled paint, mustard seed, peacock feathers and fired brick - admittedly not much fired brick!
The briar rose stamp was stamped with versafine across a paler patch of card, then the flowers,leaves and butterflies bleached out - I should really have embossed the stamp first, as the outline suffered a bit from the bleach...............leaves and rose centres coloured with green  promarker and a lot of blender pen, though maybe that should be the other way round as I used the blender first!

Butterflies were stamped and embossed (I do learn!) on a bit of card from a brusho experiment using red and yellow, cut out and decoupaged on top. Mounts are black and turquoise card and the base card is a 7" white square.
I tried a much brighter version using brusho inks in blue and green sprinkled round the edges of another piece of distress inked card - it was originally very similar to the first one. I discovered that brusho is very potent, and that if you add more water to tone down the colour it spreads very quickly.........also had a surprise when I opened the green tub and found it contained orange powder! (but it did come out green when I plucked up the nerve to try it).
The main image after again bleaching was coloured with inktense pencils, butterflies with promarkers and a touch of wink of stella to sparkle them.
By a strange coincidence, butterflies are the theme of Make my Monday this week, so I can enter these for that as well.

Clarity East again

 A day playing with Clarity stamps was a good way to spend a very hot day, especially as there was a nice breeze through the open doors.
We used 3 stamps, crackle, urn and rose. The first card involved cutting a rectangle mask and stamping round it with the crackle stamp and black archival ink. We then stamped the urn, masked it off, stamped the rose spray so that it was coming out of the vase, then masked around the vase and overstamped it with the crackle stamp. Trimmed down to give 2cm borders from the masked area, coloured with promarkers and the vase clear embossed. Then matting l;ayers of black and green and some black card candi to finish.
This is straight on the card, just gave up trying to get it straight on the scanner!
I tried a variation using the swirls to overstamp the vase, coloured with watercolour pencils before clear embossing. I also stamped the swirls round the edge and sponged with distress inks before matting and layering onto a spare card blank.
The official second card involved cutting a circle mask using the new Christmas bauble stamps, then stamping the circle onto a square of white card, masking round it and stamping the roses in the centre. I coloured this with old paper and vintage photo inks, and also used these on the large background mat, which was stamped using the swirls part of the rose stamp in black and the crackle stamp in vintage photo.I did add a little glimmer spray to the centre circle.

 Our final card used gilding flakes, and this time was the only recorded time I have managed to use flitterglu without sticking myself to everything within reach!
The vase was stamped onto double sided adhesive, covered with acetate, then gilded on the back before being cut out. We stamped the roses using the flitterglu onto a strip of black card, then glued the vase into place before trimming the card down and gilding the edges - the brighter sparks among us used thin redline tape along the edges (not me!) and got a much better finish.
This was then stuck to a wider strip of black, torn at an angle along the bottom, and glued onto a tall thin base card - a very effective card.

Diva Red cards

 These are the cards I did yesterday with Moira and Janet at Gissing - far too hot to do anything but craft in a very leisurely way!
The first card was Moira's, inspired by Laura Williams (am sure Moira will correct me if I got the surname wrong) which has an acetate overlay - on mine it is far flatter than the original, which is how I managed to scan it.
The base card is 8" square, and the main panel is 7". The Sheena flower stamps were stamped with stazon and masked, then the background was done using distress inks on a mat, sprayed with water and mopped up - I used old paper, weathered wood and black soot, bit of an odd combo but I didn't have my box of ink pads with me, and that was what was available, and I really liked the result.

Once it was all dry, we used mildew cleaner (yes, I know, that was what we thought - would have been bleach but Moira had run out of it, and it does work!) to bleach out the flowers from the background. I coloured the leaves in with watercolour pencils after bleaching them.
More flowers were stamped onto the acetate with stazon again, then painted on the reverse with acrylic paints - despite the heat it took a time for the acrylics to dry, so we all ended up finishing off later at home.
The other card was based on one
  Janet
did a while ago using shaving foam  marbled card left over from a Clarity workshop, but we used alcohol inks on some new Chromo(?) card from Clarity, which is very shiny - butterflies are spellbinders dies, not sure about the seed head ones.

July technique tags

 The theme for the Chocolate Baroque technique tag challenge for July was to use triple (tiered )stamping - pile up 3 or more pieces of card of decreasing sizes and stamp over the whole lot at one go (it does help to use repositionable glue to hold the layers together before stamping): once these are layered onto matching mats and stuck together, you get a decoupage effect, and the mats hide any missed bits of stamping. It's a simple and effective technique that I have used for cards in the past, so I rashly thought this month's tags would be a doddle.........................

it wasn't, so I will  show some of the discarded efforts as well as the final tags!
 I started by using spellbinder dies to cut out the label shape, and stamped the cottage from patchwork landscapes - so far, ok. You need to colour the layers separately, which was when I coloured some sky as trees having assumed it was a wonky bit of stamping, then I found that the next size up of the dies was way too large, and drawing round the edges of the dies I first used and cutting out the shape was way too fiddly.
Next idea was to use some Sizzix circle dies - and yes, I did check the sizes first this time! I used a stamp from the poppy meadow set of stamps, which was both large enough and easier to colour - snag this time was trying to get a poppy head in the centre of the smallest circle - these were the nearest I got, so a different die shape for the next version. This was a square label by x-cut, which also has to be handcut for the layers, but was a simpler shape to cut, it was also far easier to get the poppy in the centre of the smallest shape.
Snag this time was trying to line up the layers with the base image on the tag - after several botched versions, I had the bright idea of  stamping the base image onto a larger piece of card and cutting it to match the layers - as you can see, it didn't work very well either!
This was when I gave up on the arty versions and went for bog standard simple! Just cut 3 sizes of rectangle in white using a guillotine and 3 matching in blue slightly larger - even with measuring it was far quicker than using dies!
 I layered up one set centrally and the other to one side, stamped in chipped sapphire distress ink and coloured in with a water brush. Layered everything up onto a matching dark blue tag - just need to find a bit of ribbon now before they go in the post.
Was really glad I made an early start this time  - am usually fairly late starting - have even started on the August tags too!

Clarity East today

 Had a lovely messy inky day at Bawburgh with Janet Pring today (we all admired Janet's smart new apron) - still getting ink off my fingers!
We used Janet's set of distress re-inkers, filigraphy stamps and a couple of stencils throughout the day.
The first 7" sq cards involved putting drops of reinker onto a blending mat, spritzing with water then sponging through the block stencil - once that was dry, we sponged a palish ink through the flower stencil to give an indication of where to put the cut-out stamped petals and leaves. Yes, I believe the designer's  original  idea was to stamp over the stencilled image - you need very good eyesight and co-ordination to do this, way beyond us, so we trimmed the background card down to size then stamped, cut out and glued!
We used our own version of multicolour inkpads, mostly using the same reinkers we used in the background - I  did add stickles glitter glue over the flower petals (thanks Jeannette)- matt is a mid blue grey colour, not as dark as seems in the scan.
We had a set of stencils each, so I tried a different colour combination while waiting for the first one to dry, but used the distress ink pads and brushes - background was scattered straw and wild honey, and I stamped the flower with rusty hinge, and used spare leaves from the first card.

 The second card again used our DIY inkpads and some of the smaller stamps stamped randomly to create the background. We cut this up into 5cm wide strips, and I darkened the edges with stormy sky and dusty concord before matting them onto the purple card and adding flowers from Janet's collection. Sentiment stamped in dusty concord onto a strip of paper sponged with ink picked up from the DIY pads.
Our afternoon session was even messier - we had great fun with shaving foam marbling! Fortunately there was lots of spare card, as we all ended up with piles of backgrounds - all went swimmingly until we came to the stencil bit............. This involved putting the flower stencil over a sheet of card, the using a spreader to splodge the inked shaving foam through the stencil, scraping it off and leaving to dry before adding more foam to tint the background - well, that was the idea, and Janet had 2 lovely samples to prove it could be done........
The foam had other ideas, got under the stencil, splodged everywhere when we scraped it off - you name it, it did it!
we did eventually end up with sort-of ok in many cases, with a few people managing lovely clean prints to the great envy of the rest of us.
We edged the image with pens before trimming down and matting onto a marbled background and onto a white card blank.

June tags

 These are my tags for this month's  Chocolate Baroque technique challenge - Margaret asked us to use a masterboard this month.
I used two different ones for these, the toppers are the same though.
For the first one I dug out my long disused glimmermist sprays, and sprayed an A4 sheet with 2 different blues and a silver before stamping using various CB butterfly stamps from the 'orphan' box in night of navy SU ink - I also used a Crafty Individuals dragonfly stamp in silver. It was quite difficult to get a photo due to the shine of the glimmermists, and I have replaced the photos with scans.
The second base I used distress inks, mostly broken china and chipped sapphire, before stamping with a Crafty Individuals dragonfly background stamp in chipped sapphire. A small CI butterfly stamp and an old Elusive Images oriental butterfly in a purple ink, with a script stamp and an alphabet stamp from the mini scripts set filled in the gaps with forest moss ink.
The poppy image on both tags is from poppy meadow, stamped in black versafine , coloured with promarkers and cut out. The butterflies were part of the main image from butterfly flourish, also in versafine but clear embossed before colouring with promarkers again, but adding a spray of silver sparkle.
I used pinflair glue gel to stick them onto the tags to give a bit of dimension.