Clarity on Saturday

 These are the cards I made on Saturday at the Clarity East workshop with Janet - of course, after 3 days of lousy weather, Saturday was lovely and sunny, and even quite warm.............
Still, we had a good time getting inky!
For the first card we used distress inks and glimmer spray mixed on a craft mat and dabbed on with a sponge to create the background - I actually used blue inks, but they turned green as the glimmer spray was a gold one.
The reindeer was stamped on a separate piece of card and glued behind the aperture, mounted onto a green mat and then onto a card blank which had the treestamp stamped randomly round the edges.  Fir trees in front were stamped and cut out, and a bit of glitter added.

The second card used the same stamps - the sky was dabbed with white acrylic paint using the sponge again before brushing with stormy sky distress ink. reindeer and trees were stamped with chipped sapphire, mats are blue card.
This one was my favourite, and I have several spare bits to make more cards.

The final card was based on a design by Lynne Hammond, and used the sweater set of stamps - it was actually easier to do than it looked, but it did take all the afternoon...............and no-one needed the valium!
We cut masks to help with stamping the designs onto the sweater, which were stamped in versamark and white embossed, and used masking tape to help line up the stamps for the background (would have been a lot easier with a stamp positioner..............)

zentangle tags

The challenge for October for the Chocolate Baroque technique tags was to use zentangling - this was definitely not one I looked forward to!
 I can admire the work that many people do - indeed I own a beautiful tangled birthday card, and am totally awed by the skill of Paula - but it is not something that I would in any way describe as relaxing.
I dug out an ancient Elusive Images mandala stamp, (sadly no longer available, they were great fun to do), stamped it in black versafine onto white card and added stripes and dots in black marker pen, and some solid black areas too.
Once all filled in, I cut it out and glued it onto a red tag - first one done!
I did think about just repeating it for the second tag, but decided to try using a newer stamp, the clear peony, which hadn't seen a great deal of use.
Again black versafine on white card, and more marker pen, this time mostly just stripes, with circles where the stamens were in the centre. A quick whip through the big shot with a spellbinders die, glued onto another red tag, and that was it.
The tags went into the post very quickly before I had any second thoughts, working on the principle that almost any swap tag was better than none...............

woodland glade

 Had a lovely peaceful afternoon yesterday at Gissing with Moira, who showed us her makes from the Hobby Art workshop the day before, and let us loose on her collection of stamps - and yes, she did make sure she got them all back!
One of her cards with the robin on wellies had a new fold, which I have to admit drove me mad as I couldn't get it to stand up, so I added another card blank behind and left off the tag at the top of the original.
I chose to use the new woodland glade set, which I love - am sure it could be made to work with any season.........but my version is winter.
The background was using distress inks in broken china and peeled paint and crumpled cling film, dabbing the ink randomly over the card.
 The images for the front panel were stamped with black versafine, and coloured using marker pens scribbled onto an acrylic block and a water brush.
The greeting came from a different set, and the small pine trees were hastily added to cover up a smudge of ink from the edge of the rockablock the stamp was mounted on - benefit of clear stamps is that I could make sure the darkest tree was over the line!

The second card used the same stamps and the rest of the background piece of card, but I used distress inks and a water brush to colour in this time.
Both cards are on  6"x6" blanks, and the smudge on the second one is from the scanner - it is definitely not on the card! But I do admit to needing a new blade in my trimmer...................think I may have had better photos on my phone from yesterday, as the light was so much better  but not worked out how to get them on the computer yet!

angel and madonna - Diva 2

 As promised, the final part of the Div Red day yesterday - the weather co-operated inasmuch as the sun came out, but I did not appreciate scraping the ice off the car this morning! It also took 3 different cameras to try to get a decent image...........and a great deal of muttering.................
I tend to make simple cards, and Moira loves the complicated ones, so it is a nice change to have to make them occasionally - and I have to admit I do enjoy doing them. As Moira showed us her sample card, I had a brainwave and decided to use my new Chocolate Baroque stamps instead of the diecuts Moira was using - the angel just fitted nicely, although the madonna was more awkward.
The word and the stars are all from the same set of stamps - I stamped and gold embossed these first onto the scored card, then stamped the angel and madonna onto a spare piece of matching card and cut them out. I glued the angel partly overlapping the fold at the front - and I did check before I added the glue! The madonna I had to trim right down to fit the size of the central panel, and mounted it onto gold mirri card.
I decided to make another one, this time using the full sheet of A4 card, so the card was taller - the other dimensions were the same - partial scores at 5 and 25cm, and full scores down at 10 and 20 cms along the long side of the sheet- the original bar at top and bottom was 3cms,  and I did increase this a little for the second card. You can see the difference in the height of the card by the space above the angel, who this time was embossed in silver. I also did a second angel for the back panel. I left the stars off as I thought they would be a bit too much with the two angels.
The madonna stamp still had to be cut down, but not by as much.

Here they are both together, so you can see the difference in height.

Diva Red part 1

Spent a wet day at Gissing with Moira , Janet and 5 other ladies, all happily getting inky.
This is the second of Moira's cards , and is a double-fold card - the front part was a ready-made card blank, with the back piece trimmed down and glued to another plain square card blank .
My camera is playing up , so these are scans.
I stamped the snowflakes from the Chocolate Baroque set a child is born, using Moira's multicoloured ink pad, then brushed cloud blue and juniper adirondack inks over the front.
The inner piece was a piece of water colour card coloured with  brushos (what else?)
I masked part of the card off first to give a snowy area, then used crumpled cling film and liquid pearls to dab in mountains,  sprinkled grey and turquoise brusho powders over the rest of the card, then spritzed heavily with water.

 Covered the wet card with more cling film, scrunched it up and left it to dry. Once it was dry, i used torn paper to sponge in the snow using the cloud blue and juniper inks again, then sprayed the sky with home-made glimmer spray using shimmer ink, water and isopropyl alcohol. Die cut deer added to the snowy fields, then the piece was matted onto silver card and glued to cover up the joined cards. We added acetate behind the cut out on the front, then added the diecut stag.
I will add the other card tomorrow once I get a decent photo, as no way will it scan - hopefully the weather will co-operate............

Janet's cards were much simpler -the one on the leftt was very quick, but very effective, using a Clarity stencil.
The stencil was taped down onto white card, then the blue and juniper inks were brushed through the stencil, and the darker bits sponged in. Once the ink was dry - I cheated and used the heat gun- we glittered the centre image - I used a white glitter that turned out to be mainly clear, so I went over part of the dove with a glue pen and added another glitter that claimed to be sapphire but looked more like an iridescent silver..........Matted onto grey card brushed with the blue and green inks, then onto silver before mounting onto a white card blank.

For the other card we used alcohol inks to create the background strip and the card used for the diecut poinsettia - I used latte, pest and rust, which came out rather paler than I was expecting. The strip of card across the front used 2 holly spray stamps, coloured with a mixture of inks and marker pens, trimmed down, matted onto a strip of gold card then onto the inked background strip before mounting on a white DL card. The poinsettia was held together with a brad, leaves curled slightly, then glued over the join of the two stamped images with glue gel.

Chocolate Baroque challenge 3

This is my entry for the latest Chocolate Baroque challenge - have stretched it a a bit to include the blue!
Yet another brusho background - you can definitely tell that I am seriously addicted to these little pots of powder!
The image from a child is born was stamped in black versafine and clear embossed before colouring with promarkers in shades of brown. I used bleach on the head dresses and sheep with varying degrees of success - the blue colour doesn't seem to bleach as easily as the others.
Simply matted on dull gold and black and mounted onto a white 7x7 blank card - the gold embossed star in the corner is also from the same stamp set.