penguins

The challenge for bah humbug 25  is to use penguins - as I live in a penguin-free zone, my friend Moira lent me her Wendie Rhodes stamps, and the lovely swirly  penguins come from the winter wonderland collection. As soon as I saw them I thought they would fit with the Less is more challenge sketch, so long as I used squares for circles. The backing paper is from the Echoes of Italy set by Glenda Waterworth - it just looked iceberg-y to me- and the penguins were stamped with black memento ink. Base card is white pearlescent 8x8, and got the sides trimmed slightly on the scan.
Am also entering this for the MAWTT challenge 104, clean and simple - you could hardly have anything simpler!- and for Crafty Hazelnut's challenge 26, anything goes.

kraft glassine

I have been playing with some of the Tim Holltz kraft glassine papers this weekend - ever since I saw this stuff on Tim's blog I  wanted to try it for making flowers. It does make lovely flowers - the photos on the left are my first attempts. The one on the left in the first pic was the first, which was a disaster area in many respects - all was fine until i tried adding Pearlex powders and heating it - I had totally forgotten that PearlEx doesn't have a binder in it like Tim's recommended  Perfect

Pearls, so a fine cloud of white powder rose in the air the moment I turned the heat gun on, followed by a distinct smell of melting wax as I overheated the paper trying to get the pearls to stick. Fortunately a spray of glimmer mist in dewberry sort of rescued that flower - the next one was just sprayed with the glimmer mist to be on the safe side! For the 3rd one I printed a blue flower download from Glenda Waterworth on both sides of the glassine - i had to tape it onto a sheet of A4 to put it through the printer, and it worked fine - could have been a coincidence that i had to run the headclean routine twice afterwards.... It came out greens rather than blues, but made a nice flower all the same, with a quick spray of silver glimmer to finish.

I printed a different download onto another sheet, which came out very faintly, and I was stuck what to do witrh it at first, then i spotted a corner had creased and the wax showed whiter there - so I got my stampbord tools out and started scratching away. I needed to be careful, as the wax coating isn't very thick, but it certainly improved the look of the images, and I turned  them into these two cards. The first one, the glassine panel is cut from a nestie, with a sheet of white card behind to try to show up the colours better. This is on a gold mat cut after drawing round the nestie die used to cut out the image, then on to a cream base card stamped with an Artemio script stamp in SU creamy caramel ink.- the flowers and leaves are cut from old envelopes. The image on the second card was a scalloped circle originally, and I used the only scalloped circle I die I have to cut it out before adding it to the base card. the flowers this time are from cream card also overstamped with a script stamp - this one was borrowed, and I don't know who it was by.

catching up

Am trying to catch up on craft time, without a great deal of success! June has been a very busy time with markets and WI and I have not even been able to keep up with my favourite challenges - hopefully after next week things will be back to normal! Just to prove I am still here, these are some cards I made while back using the flowers I am currently addicted to making - I even made a pile during  quiet times when at the Easton College open day with Country Markets.

The cards all use sentiments from the loving sentiments plate from Chocolate Baroque, and a cuttlebug folder as background. As I am too heavy-handed with an ink pad to get a good finish if I ink an embossed card afterwards, I used the cheat way of inking the embossing folder using a brayer and a big'n'juicy pad before embossing the card. I inked the background, but you can also ink so that the embossing bit is coloured, depending on the effect you want - I found that you can get 2 images from one inking, the second will be pale and delicate.

At the WI meeting this month, we had a fascinating speaker on straw craft, with some beautiful creations to show us. We all had to make a countryman's favour - sounded simple, kept us all very quiet for a surprisingly long time, and we did all manage to produce something resembling the original! Considering that these little favours only used 4 straws, they felt surprisingly heavy after a few minutes working at arms length, and no way would I ever consider trying something as complicated as a bell!

If you are coming to the Norfolk Show next week, please visit the WI marquee and have a look at the cushions - there are some fantastic cushions (around 100!) going to be on display there. We sorted through bags of them on Monday - ranging from knitted, embroidered, ragged to patchwork, and probably some others I didn't see while I was fixing the lunch for the rest of the Home Economics committee - after lunch it still took almost 2 hours to sort out the winners from the shortlisted ones!

bah humbug22

this challenge theme was 'surprise' - and I have to admit that I surprised myself by actually doing it! My mojo had totally gone, and my first thought of a shaker card was that it was hardly a surprise, and the next ideas were dismissed as too complicated for the time available. My clearout produced remnants of an ancient Christmas-themed goody bag - complete with unused paper and reindeer stamp - and with time running out I decided to go dead simple and wrap a chocolate bar. Having forgotten then to buy a decent choc bar to wrap, I had to use a cheapo supermarket bar from the baking stock, so hope it fits a better bar later on. Just a  piece of paper wrapped round the bar, with the reindeer stamped onto a nestie shape and coloured with promarkers and stuck on top - sorry the scan is a bit squiffy, and cropped a bit tight as well.............. must do better next time!

bah humbug bells

Challenge 21 from bah humbug is to include bells - I was getting worried ,then I unearthed this stained glass image from Funstamps when doing some much-needed clearing up (I am one of those people who would never dare to put a pic of my desk on the blog, 'cos I can very rarely actually see the desk!), partly driven by having to find the bed for my daughter's threatened visit and also by a clearance sale at the local Focus store.
Anyhow, I stamped the bells with black memento ink, coloured them in with promarkers, cut them out and glued them onto a kraft card also found during the mammoth event. The wallstones were hand-drawn with sandstone promarker, deliberately squiffy to look ancient, and heavily smudged with blender pen.