My New Favourite Ink Pad

This short post is all in aid of me discovering my new favourite ink colour! I've always loved purples and pinks but what about that lovely grey colour? This is the Tim Holtz distress ink in Pumice Stone, which I have seriously fallen in love with - just ask the girls at craft group! Sorry that I've also make others buy it... Initially it just looks like a muddy grey, or like concrete, but it goes with so many colour combinations. I also used Milled Lavender Distress, and Wild Plum Memento inks on the above image, and I love the colour combination. It'll be appearing many more times on projects methinks.

Jenny Wren

You will probably start to see from my blog that I love all things nature and marvelling in the wonder of creation! Birds, trees, wildflowers, animals etc. you'll find them cropping up time and time again in my creations. When I saw this little Wren stamp on special offer on the Joanna Sheen website it just hopped into my basket all on its own, rather like a cheeky little wren itself! My family are all nature-nuts too so it was the perfect little image for my big sister Rochelle's birthday card. And thankfully she loved it and has just sent me the picture as I was, shall we say, time challenged to get it to her on time so there was no time to take a photo.

If you want to know the 'recipe' the wren has been coloured in with water-colour pencils. I have used nesties labels 1 to mat and layer onto the craftworks cards base. The green card has been run through the cuttlebug in the swiss dots emobssing folder. A simple card but it actually took ages to get the colours and layout just right (and two rejected wrens that have gone on cards for other people!). Oh no I feel bad about rejecting the wrens now... they were reassigned to other more suitable projects. That's better! Can you tell I work in HR?!

It's your birdy...

OK so I've got 3 apologies to make:
1. Sorry for the terrible pun in the blog title - it could have been worse, believe me!
2. Sorry it's taken so long since the last post. It is related to...
3. Sorry the picture is such poor quality. It's taken with my naff mobile phone as I've managed to forget to buy batteries for my camera 3 times already. So apologies but thought it better to post with a bad picture than none at all and I can always replace the pic once my memory improves...

Anyway, about the card. The birdy is die cut with a Marianne die bought for my birthday by the lovely Karen. Isn't it beautiful. The stripy background was created with promarkers, as demoed by Amy Shaw here. I am loving this technique as I love being able to create my own coordinating backgrounds. I used Neenah card as it gives such a lovely finish with the promarkers and is easy to punch. The fancy borders are made using my favourite Martha Stewart punches. Cardstock and sentiment are Craftwork Cards (who else!). I think this little die will be used a lot as I just love anything to do with birds. In fact my next post might be featuring a little Wren if Rochelle can help me out with some photography!

More Grungepaper - this time a Hair Slide

This was made last Saturday when I was thinking of what coordinated with my favourite skirt (see below) and I was lamenting that I have broken so many hair slides recently. I guess the advantage of crafting is that you can create bespoke pieces of jewellery relatively quickly and cheaply (especially when you have a room full of stash to use up!).

What got me started was that I still had the large Tattered Floral left from the bracelet from the last post, and I had covered it in the Antique Bronze Crackle Paint and it seemed to go. I then selected flowers that picked out the colours in the skirt and layered them up (about 5 layers this time). I covered the silver hair slide with more petals to cover the metal sticking out at either side of the flower, and then scrunched everything up so it is really 3 dimensional. Nothing like getting inky fingers on a lazy Saturday afternoon (when I should really be doing the hoovering!). Oh well, that's crafting for you... and I did need a break.

Here's how it looks with the skirt:



Let me know what you think by leaving a comment if you have time.

Grungepaper Bracelet

This is a bracelet I made using Grungepaper and some paper flowers and embellishments. For the band, the grunge paper has been inked with Milled Lavender and Dusty Concord Distress Inks, and stamped over using a Clarity stamp in the Dusty Concord. The fastening is a Tim Holtz ideology hitch fastener, and the holes were made using the Cropodile (small hole punch for the fitting, and the large hole punch for the end you push over the fastening).

The flower is made using two of the smallest 'Tattered Florals' Tim Holtz dies, cut out in Grungepaper on the Cuttlebug. These have again been inked with the two purple shades to achieve a more 3 dimensional look, and then coated in Crackle Accents and left to dry. I then layered them up with a Prima paper flower and a fancy brad and finally attached the completed flower to the bracelet using Pinflair glue gel (what else - it is brilliant stuff!).

Here's how it looks fastened:


Hope you like it!

More Friendly Plastic

As promised, here are a few of the other things I made with Friendly Plastic. The gold/red and green/gold hearts are made by pushing the friendly plastic through punchinella (or sequin waste), and molding into a heart cookie cutter. However, I think my favourites are the ones that have been stamped into. Now I need to use them...

Simple Birthday Card

Well I'm another year older since the last post! I'd love to put up some pics of the cards that my crafty friends made me as they are all stunning, but I'd best ask their permission first. So this is a simple card that I've made for someone else's birthday, primarily using stock from Craftwork Cards. I love the simplicity of their designs, especially the die cut flowers and card candy. My advice for the 'off the edge' flowers is to use a tiny bit of PVA wet glue rather than tape runners. It holds them in place very securely and they don't drop off after a while, which happened with some tape runners I had. The card base is one of the large elegant squares, scored down the middle on my Eazi-Score board to make a tall card.