in the night garden

The challenge this month at craft-a-scene is to make your own garden - I decided in a rash moment to try a night-time scene.
The cottage and trees stamps came from Chocolate Baroque - I stamped the cottage first in black memento ink, masked it off and added the band of trees to the right. While the masks were in place,I added the moon mask and brushed distress inks in broken china, stormy sky and chipped sapphire over the sky, with a few touches of milled lavender. After removing the masks I added clouds using chipped sapphire and a piece of cut'n'dry foam.
Cottage and trees were coloured with watercolour pencils, then I used torn paper and cut'n'dry foam to make the lawns, using a ix of peeled paint, forest moss and bundled sage distress inks.
The flowers at the front are from Crafty Individuals - many thanks for the Facebook freebies! - I only used the top part of the stamp, stamping twice at different heights to create the flower border over the green inked lawn. For some of the flowers I used a waterbrush to remove some of the green ink, others I just coloured with pencils, and some I left green. Enough colour didn't come off as i wanted, so I added some dots of white gel pen, and then some clear wink of stella .
Edges were sponged with black soot before matting onto first matt silver then dark blue card before mounting onto a 7" square white card blank.

birds

 Sunday was craft club at Moira's again - a nice way to spend a rainy afternoon.
We started (reluctantly in most cases)  by making an exploding box card - I did finish it, but it still needs something else  added, so will photo it once I've decided what that something is!
After the hassle of trimming, scoring, cutting and glueing that, we were all rather relieved to get to play with Moira's new stamps from Hobby Art and do some peaceful colouring in.
These were my two creations - the birds were supposed to be bluetits or great tits, but I haven't got the colours quite right - they were coloured using my favourite watercolour pencils and a water brush, and the edges of the card brushed with distress ink.

The slightly larger card was white originally, so the edges were also brushed with green to tone down the white against the cream card we used for stamping.

may tags

 The tag challenge for May was to use embossing folders- my main challenge was finding the darn things, which involved a fair amount of rummaging around! Needless to say, the one I was specifically looking for still hasn't surfaced..............I really do need to have a major sort out, although a pile of stamps that surfaced during the hunt are now on ebay,  one empty drawer now, so I suppose that is a  start.
The owl tag uses a Sizzix woodgrain folder - I embossed 2 tags, and inked them with tea dye and vintage photo distress inks. I had a spare owl after making my April tags, so cut down one of the embossed tags to make branches for him to sit on and hide behind. The cut outs were layered onto the base tag with glue dots
For my second tag I used a Tim Holtz die, and this was inked with a mix of broken china, shabby shutters and vintage photo inks and left to dry completely. Once it was dry the next day, I dabbed a versamark pad over the raided areas and embossed with a copper EP. The small tag was stamped using images from the mini  curiosities plate using tea dye and vintage photo - this was the one time I wished that I had a steampunk stamp! I also inked the tag with tumbled glass and shabby shutters before edging it with vintage photo and tying it to the large tag with a dull gold ribbon.

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

owls....

 Spent nice afternoon with Moira yesterday, playing with her new owl stamps from Hobby Art - have to admit I drew the line at the fairies! Most cute stamps leave me cold, but these owls have great expressions - think exasperated depairing mum  for the big one - and I didn't really mind cutting them out.
The first one is my version of Moira's sample card - she kindly diecut the frame for us first. I used distress inks for the background, braqch stamped onto the background and coloured with promarkers, owls cut out and glued on top. I slit each side of the branch and slid - eventually- the wing through for the dangling owl.  I brushed more distress ink round the edges of the frame before adding mum on foam pads and a gold matt.

I had a Clarity Stamp stencil in my bag which I had been using when playing with tags for the latest Chocolate Baroque tags challenge, so used that for a background for the second card. Blue and green distress inks brushed over fairly lightly through the stencil, then again after removing the stencil to tone down the white of the tree trunks.
Branches and small owls stamped directly onto the background, coloured with promarkers. The  branch and large owl stamped on spare card, coloured and cut out - I used the branch upside down - and stuck on with pinflair gel. Matt is a dull silver this time.
Both cards are white 6x6 blanks.