Alice Through the Iron Gates

Another oldie today - I could have sworn that I've blogged this before, but after a thorough search, it appears not!

I used layers of chipboard to form a compartment, which I gilded with metal leaf on the inside. It contained some Alice-themed playing cards and a mini-book with part of the story and some of Tenniel's classic illustrations.

Chipboard doors were added with metal hinges and fastenings.

Click on an image if you want to see a larger version. ! :o)

[Edited to add - Google is telling me I blogged this in Oct '07, but I can't find the post! I can only think I deleted it at some point, but for what reason I can't imagine! Ah well, here it is again, lol]

"Numbers" 4x4 Challenge

Ok, ok!!! Yes, yes, I know it was a bit obvious to use this Tim Holtz numbers stamp for this challenge, but stop going on about it! :o) Seriously though, it's a perennial favourite of mine, so I make no apologies for returning to it again.

This was made for the 4x4 Friday challenge, the theme this week being "numbers". The other image I used was from Paper Bag Studios, and is another image I find myself never tiring of.

I hope you like it, click on the image to enlarge it! :o)

Bind-it-all Calendar - December

Phew! And now it's done! :o)

This is a fat page sized version of a tag I'd made a while back. Background is scattered straw distress ink applied with a baby wipe and edged with faded burlap. The holly was stamped in pine needles then painted with a water brush. The berries were painted with fired brick ink, which was also used to stamp the "noel" text. Finally a little glossy accents was applied to give the berries a bit of shine.

The quote reads "I heard a bird singing in the dark of December - Oliver Herford "I Heard a Bird Sing".

Thanks to everyone that's stuck with me and looked at each month as I've gone along. I hope you liked it. It was fun to make, though a lot of work!

Nothing (yet) to follow tomorrow :o)

Bind-it-all Calendar - September

The start of Autumn, and the start of autumnal colours in my calendar. I started with a blank fat page, and coloured the top area with faded burlap distress ink. I stamped a row of bulldog clips across the top, then stamped them 1/2 on the edge of a piece of Basic Grey patterened paper, and stuck it to the background.

The woman's face was stamped 3 times, once in faded burlap to echo the background, once in black soot and once in fired brick. Elements of the 3 images were cut out and assembled. It was fixed onto the BG paper and stamped with a paper clips stamp.

"Begin where you are" was stamped in fired brick on white card which had been distressed with faded burlap ink applied with a baby wipe, and a black thumbprint. It was fixed into place and trimmed to fit. Finally, the whole thing was edged in black soot, applied with a baby wipe.

The quote reads: "September: it was the most beautiful of words, he'd always felt - Alexander Theroux".

October to follow tomorrow! :o)

Bind-it-all Calendar - March

Time for the next installment of my 2008 Bind-it-all Calendar, and as it's Wednesday, that must mean March!

The image background was cut from a 6x6 Basic Grey paper, distressed by applying black soot Distress ink around the edges with a baby wipe. The paper has a slight sheen to it, so the paperclips and ruler images were stamped using Stazon ink to get a better impression. The words "spring awakening" were stamped in pine needles Distress ink.

The main image was created on glossy photo paper. I tried to use colours that would echo those on the backing paper I'd chosen. Bottle, Denim, Caramel and Terra Cotta alcohol inks were dropped on the paper, and lightened with a few squirts of blending solution. A 2nd sheet was then placed on top and moved around, to create two sheets of identical (or at least very similar) paper. One was filed away for future use, the other was overstamped with the spring themed image in black Stazon. Finally, it was trimmed to size and matted onto black card and stuck to the background.

The quote reads "Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour. - Ralph Waldo Emerson".

I hope you like it! :o)

Next installment tomorrow!

Blue Christmas

A christmas card based around one of my fat page designs. An acrylic message stamp and a tapestry stamp were used for the text on the card.

Click on the card for a larger view.

Oil's well that ends well

I tried to make this page look a bit like an oil painting. It's on mountboard, and I started by using a paint dabber to apply a layer of white acrylic paint. I deliberately left "brush marks" in it to give texture to it, and then let it dry. Using baby wipes/paper towel I applied distress inks to create the sky then I stamped the row of pine trees in black soot distress ink across the bottom. Finally I applied more white dabber across the bottom of the page and stamped snowflaks with white versamagic and used a white pen to apply dots for snowflakes.

A Mixed Bag

2 more Christmas fat pages today, completed in between preparing Thanksgiving dinner (which turned out lovely, thanks very much for asking!).

Enjoy! :o)

They say things come in threes....

...so here are 3 more christmas fat pages.

I've joined a christmas rubber stampting themed swap list on the Craft Swap forum (http://www.mfbb.net/craftswap for those of you interested in friendly craft-related chat and lots of fun swaps to take part in!). There are 20 people in the list, and we each make 19 pages and send one to each person on the list, at the end we will each have a unique 19 page book of eachother's work. I'm almost 1/2 way through making mine, first time I've ever been ahead of the game! LOL

Similar routine here to the other pages I've made in this set, except that I decided to try out a couple of alphabet stamp sets that I've had for a while and not tried yet!


As ever, comments welcomed! :o)

They say it comes but once a year....

... but that's clearly a lie!! It's only a couple of days later and Christmas is here again! Rich reds for these ones, always very christmassy in my book, and maybe a little bit of a retro feel too, though that could be down to the stamps I've used. No acrylic paint this time, just distress ink pads. Fired brick distress ink pad was rubbed directly onto the pages to colour them, then rubbed with a wet baby wipe to get the patchy blurry effect. Any extra blur effect is down to my phone camera!

My much loved Tsukineko/Sakura white pen has gotten very sick, it's either dry or dropping great globs of white ink all over the place I haven't been able to find a replacement locally, so I have used a Sakura glaze pen for the snow and beard highlights. Still on limited supplies/equipment and photographed with my phone.

In-flight Entertainment

This project is based around the movie descriptions in an Air Canada in-flight magazine. They were so short that taken out of context the sentences seemed a little bizarre, and many of them were not even recognisable as the movies they were supposed to be describing!




Pages 1/2 - "A commitment-phobic man keeps falling for a woman with no short term memory".



Pages 4/5 - "A professor framed for a murder in the Louvre unravels a religious mystery".



Pages 6/7 - "The son of a brilliant archaeologist receives the ancient map that his father died to protect".



Pages 8/9 - "A Manhattan orphan infiltrates a brutal gang in order to avenge his father's death".



Pages 10/11 - "After a series of unsuccesful romantic set-ups, a visually impaired man meets a woman he could fall for".



Pages 12/13 - "Stripped of her noblesse, a French woman goes to Versailles to try and win back her status". The attached mini-book contains an account of the famous case of "The Ghosts of Versailles", in which 2 women on holiday in Paris in 1901 claimed to have gone back to the time of Marie Antoinette.



Comments welcomed!