1 dress, 2 dress, red dress, green dress!

I'm sure that Dr. Seuss isn't losing any sleep over my non-rhyming title! lol  If I'd have thought about it earlier I SOOO would have made her dress blue and not green!  :)  Ah well, you live and learn! :)

This is the last of the painty cards I made last week, this time mounted on kraft cardstock for a bit of a change from my usual white.

Misfit Card

A bit of hybrid messing about for this card today!  The background and stamped image were created separately by hand and then brought together in the computer.  The "misfit" text was also stamped and then scanned into the computer, manipulated and then placed on the composition.  Not something I'm going to do every day, but a bit of fun to try something different for a change! :)

Oh, and thanks to everyone who let me know yesterday that the stamp I wanted was from Lost Coast Designs - much appreciated! :)

Annie Get Your Gun!

More messing about with paint and stamps today.  By the way, if anyone knows where I can get the stamp of the girl with the rifle, I'd love to know!  I used it during a class a while back but no one knew who made it, so I stamped some extras to save for a rainy day.  I'd love to buy the stamp if I can!

Painty Stampotique Card

I was in a painty mood again today and this card is the result!  I must say, I'm having great fun scraping paint around with an old credit card, I can't get enough of it! :)  The richness of Claudine Hellmuth's paints is a big help too, it has to be said :)

I used an old favourite technique of mine, that I call the painted mask technique.  I stamped the figure furst, then painted it with white paint, then stamped over it, off-setting the stamp a little to get that cool "printing error" look!

While I'm here, don't forget, there's still time to enter this weeks Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge, and be in for a chance of a $50 spending spree!

Just a bit of cardy messing about (again!)

No plan, no aim to this piece, just goofing around with stuff :)  Rather than discard it I stuck it on a 5x5 card, you never know when you might need one! :)

A Painted Card

More patterned paper today, though I've almost obliterated it with paint! Costco cardstock, Lost and Found stack, brown and white acrylic paint, Stampotique stamps and a white paint pen.

A simple enough list of ingredients, and one of my favourites of the cards I've been making lately! :)

A Kinda-sorta Self-portrait (ish)

I had so much fun making the tag for yesterdays Simon Says Stamp and Show challenge, that I decided to revisit and rework it as a sort of self portrait.

I started out my taking a photo of my hand holding an ink blending tool, and converting it to a black and white pencil sketch in my graphics software. I then printed it out on white card, which I cut down to make a white tag with my hand in one corner. I printed again onto thin paper, and cut the hand out to use as a mask.

I masked off the hand and stamped "Head" by Stampotique (their name for this boy stamp). I also stamped the filmstrip down the side in two sections, first masking off the area where the trail from the ink blending tool was to go.

Next, I masked off the hand, boy and filmstrip and stamped the backgrounds. A bit of Promarkery magic, and bob's yer uncle :) Finally I applied some walnut stain around the edges and put some acetate filmstrip ribbon over the stamped filmstrip sections.

I had a lot of fun doing this :) If you're wondering which is the self-portrait part, the hand or the chubby boy with the enormous head, keep your wonderings to yourself! LOL As ever, click on the image to see a larger view :)

Snow, Pine & Mahogany...

... is the theme over on the Gingersnap Creations blog this week. I used white acrylic paint and aged mahogany & pine needles distress inks to get me in the right colour zone on this tag.

I had just gotten these new stamps from Stampotique a day or so earlier and was keen to try them out! Add to that a bit of experimentation with a range of white pens to see which I liked best (not tried the Sakura Souffle yet, so the jury is still out!) and lots of doodling, scratching, scuffing and messing about, and this is what you get! :)

I discovered during the course of making this tag that if you use a heat gun to speed up the drying of a Sakura white glaze pen you only have a second or so to turn off the heat before the glaze turns transparent! I used that effect to write a lot of text on this tag which I then made transparent, so it can only be read by moving the tag around until that the clear glaze catches the light. (Interesting for those who actually have the tag in their hands, but perhaps not so much for you, dear reader!)

Pop over to the GC blog to see how the other DT members have interpreted the challenge - go on, you know you want to! :)

Autumn Toned Thank You Cards

Usually when I take photos of a project for my blog, they're either taken with my phone or scanned on my scanner. This is the first time I think I've mixed a photo from each, and what a difference! The 4 cards were scanned and the white cardstock is gleaming. Compare the stack of cards which I photographed with my phone, the cardstock is almost orange! LOL I know now not to do that again!

The panels were cut on the cricut and then stamped/masked/stamped again/coloured. Thanks for taking a look! :)

Love Me, Do

Stampotique have launched the Stampotique Originals Challenge Blog, and the first challenge is to make a love themed card.

I stamped the edges of the card with a Wendy Vecchi text background stamp and then applied Shabby Shutters distress ink to colour the card. The flourishes were from one of Tim Holtz's new stamp sets that were launched at CHA recently, and were highlighted with a Ranger white pen.

The large heart was cut roughly by hand and splodged with white and red acrylic paint which acted as a resisit for the Brushed Corduroy ink I applied once the paint was dry. It was matted onto a heart cut from brown card and then matted again onto a white card heart that was stamped with parts of a Wendy Vecchi gingham stamp, masking each part before stamping the next. The small gingham hearts were punched out of white cardstock and stamped with the same gingham stamp.

The little man was stamped on white cardstock and then coloured with Promarkers. He was cut out and mounted on the card using 3d foam. His heart was punched and mounted with foam too. And that's about it! I hope you like it, click on the image if you'd like to see a larger view! :)

Moo Frame Gift

Not the greatest of photos, but hopefully clear enough for you to see what's going on here. I really must do something to try and improve my cameraphone skills!! LOL

I made this aaaaaaaaages ago as a Christmas present for a friend, but couldn't blog it in case they saw it, and then life got in the way and the photos have just been languishing on my computer, staring glumly at my mouse pointer as it kept passing them by! LOL

My previous framed moo projects used deep frames that I got from Tesco, but they stopped selling them and I had to start looking around for other frames to use. It's not easy to find frames with enough space behind the glass to add dimensional elements, but eventually Ikea stepped up to the plate with this square frame.

Using a different frame meant designing a different mount to fit it, which I duly did in Inkscape and cut with SCAL. This time I also cut a 1 inch border frame to go on top of the mount, which I think makes it look a little more "finished", don't you think?
Each individual panel was stamped, inked, embossed etc and then fixed to the back of the mount. The bird with the secret compartment where you can hide little embellishments was designed in Inkscape and cut on the Cricut, and then stamped and inked. Mort with his pin curl was placed behind glass in a copper memory frame and attached to one of Tim Holtz's keys, which had been rubbed with a little white acrylic paint on my finger to make the lettering pop.

Thanks for taking a look, I hope you like it! :) Click on any picture to enlarge it.

Psychodelic Something-or-other!

Here's the last of the 3 tags I made on Tuesday. On this one, I rubbed Fired Brick, Mustard Seed and Brushed Corduroy ink pads onto a non-stick craft sheet and then spritzed it with water. I laid the tag down onto the inky mess and then picked it up and dried it. I repeated these steps twice more, to give the funky psychodelic background you see here.

I overstamped with a Wendy Vecchi background stamp in Walnut Stain (I think) and stamped the corner designs (I think the corner stamps are by Autumn Leaves but I can't be sure!). I coloured the corner designs with lime green and aqua promarkers. The "Mort had a pin curl" figures were stamped separately with a black Memento ink pad and shaded with pale grey promarkers before being cut out and adhered to the tag. They were then outlined with a mid grey promarker to give them a little more "pop".

Phew, I think that's everything! :)

A bit of messing about...

I met up with a couple of crafty chums yesterday, for lunch and a little "play" time. They both had rather large projects to continue with, while I found myself messing around with a few tags.

This is the first one I made. The bottom-left corner uses the faux batik technique (stamp/clear emboss, ink over the top, iron off the embossing powder with brown paper) and the rest of the tag is a LOT of layered stamping and inking. The 3 main figures were stamped and promarkered separately and then adhered to the tag.

Mort Journal

I picked up several of these little hard-backed kraft-covered journals last week, thinking that they'd make good stocking fillers, once suitably decorated.

I stamped the word "journal" onto the front cover, then made this sleeve to go around the book. The stamp is called "Mort had a pin curl", by Stampotique. Isn't that a great name? He was coloured in using promarkers an then masked off and the background was coloured with distress inks. Since he's sporting a great set of fangs, I'm going to enter him into my friend Hels' Sunday Stamper Challenge this week, which is "Monster Mash".