pretty poppies

 Both cards use a stamp from the Chocolate Baroque pretty poppies set as the main image.
The first one was inspired by a card Janet demoed at Moira's the other week - this one was a lot less heavy-handed with the brown ink though! Background is distress inks in vintage photo, broken china, barn door and bundled sage brushed on, sprayed with water and blotted. I stamped a stamp from lace fragments several times on the left and one from  butterfly poppy on the right and at the bottom , all in vintage photo. Once the inks were dry, I stamped the main image using archival black and coloured it with promarkers and karisma pencils before sponging more vintage photo round the edges. The stamped images on
the base card are using tea dye ink, and the image was matted onto black and copper card.

The second card inspiration came from a post on the CB design team blog by Miranda, and is very different from her elegant monochrome card . I stamped the same stamp again with versamark and white EP before brushing distress inks in tea dye, barn door, bundled sage and broken china over it, keeping roughly to the design for the colours. A quick wipe with kitchen roll to clean off the embossed image, and matting onto red and green card. The base card was stamped with a stamp from poppy meadow using tea dye inks, and more sponged round the edges finished it off.

I am entering these  in the Make my Monday challenge, distressing

April tags

 The Chocolate Baroque technique tag challenge for April was to use stencils, and these are the two I finally decided on.
The first one was a variation of the tag I did for the Chocolate Baroque birthday colour challenge. This one had a base of distress inks  - wild honey and spiced marmalade - stamped with stamps from wild meadow in the marmalade and tea dye inks. I sponged the edges with vintage photo, then sponged versamark  through the sweet poppy stencil before embossing with a copper EP. The small flowers on the cow parsley stamp were coloured with a white gel pen.
I have loads of various masks, but none that seemed to fit a tag, so resorted to the Clarity tree stencil. The tag was coloured with distress inks again, this time using the ink stamped onto a craft mat, spraying with water and mopping up the ink with the tag - this particular one was done some time ago, and I can't remember which inks I used now. The stencil was the wrong way round for the effect I wanted, and I didn't fancy sponging versamark through the stencil, so decided to try a technique I saw Sheena Douglas using on tv recently.
I brushed the glycerine over the stencil, then added clear embossing powder, heated it while keeping two fingers firmly crossed -and it worked, although the glycerine did creep until the stencil round the edges. I sponged chipped sapphire over the tag to darken the trees then wiped it off the embossing, so I got my darker trees against a sky. The wise  owl was stamped over another inked tag with versamark and embossing with lava black EP , cut out and sat onto punched branches.

catching up

There was a very select group at Moira's  last Sunday - even so, we didn't get very much done! Moira had had a bright idea while stripping wallpaper (possibly pain-killer inspired) - what if there was another world under the paper? The top card is based on the ones she showed us, using some of her Hobby Art stamps and an embossing folder (Sheena?). Basically, the scene was stamped, then partially covered by the torn embossed paper and matted onto a card blank. I'm not really into fairies, so went for scenery instead - it was Moira's idea to ink the torn paper to look like wood, which really improved the effect.
The little scene with the poppies was what I did while waiting for  the others to catch up- there would have been far more poppies if I had had any post-its with me to make masks! I just had to stamp a couple of extra poppies and decoupage them in the gaps instead. I also found out that I don't like prismacolour pencils, much prefer watercolour ones, and switched to promarkers for the poppies after trying the pencils in the background.
Janet had brought along a card she had done as a DT card for Clarity Stamps using journalling and cherry blossom stamps and distress inks - definitely my favourite of the the day. I plan to filch this idea using some Chocolate Baroque stamps over the weekend, without the rather heavy-hand with the brown inks though, which made it very hard to see the cherry blossom.

 The tags were done earlier in the month - Glenda set 3 colour challenges as part of the Chocolate Baroque birthday, and these were my efforts. First uses stamps from poppy meadow and a stencil from Sweet poppy -I didn't have any yellow inks, but did have yellow card I could use as a background.
Both the  next tags stretch the colors a bit, and use a stamp from patchwork landscapes. the first was coloured with distress inks, second just stamped faintly in the background. The girl was from a grab bag of odd stamps, and is from an old discontinued Elusive Images set,words are a partly-inked stamp from artistic affirmations.
There was  fourth challenge that I didn't get around to doing, but I enjoyed doing these