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Sunset Silhouettes

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The Wildflower stencil from the brand-new Visible Image collection is now one of my absolute favourite stencils.   It’s absolutely perfect for silhouettes too.   I used it together with the Fly High stamp set, also from the new release. To begin, I made my sunset background by spraying a half sheet of A4 card with Distress Stain Sprays in Mustard Seed, Picked Raspberry, Chipped Sapphire and Dusty Concord, adding water sprays to get the inks to blend.   A few sprays of Distress Spritz Wilted Violet were added to the top portion. For the first layer of silhouettes, I blended Memento Tuxedo Black through the stencil. Next, I stamped the text and small butterflies around the panel. After letting the inks completely dry, I blended a little black ink along the bottom of the panel.   I then flipped the stencil and applied black Distress Grit Paste, washing the stencil immediately in hot, soapy water. The paste was still wet when I covered it with Black Sparkle e...
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Fly High

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It’s time for my fortnightly Design Team post and I’m using a couple of products from the fabulous new collection, which will be released tomorrow.   Woohoo!   The style of this new collection coordinates perfectly with the floral collection released back in March.   My CAS card uses the Fly High stamp set and Atmospheric stencil. I started by positioning the three butterflies and sentiments on my square white card panel, stamping with Versafine Clair Nocturne and heat-setting with clear embossing powder.   I do this for two reasons: I like the shine on the sentiments and I can colour using alcohol inks.   I cut the “Fly High” sentiment into two as I didn’t want the horizontal alignment.   I coloured the butterflies using a light and dark shade of purple alcohol marker. This card was to be a CAS design so I only added a light stencilling of the Atmospheric circles using silver ink. To give the butterflies dimension but not weight, I used the same ...
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Location: Fareham, UK
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Ahoy There!

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This week’s card was one I needed for a very dear gentleman’s 101 st birthday.   Since he is a retired Naval officer, I decided on a sea theme and dug through my stash to find some appropriate gear for the card. To make the background, I used Weathered Wood and Salty Ocean for the sky and Salty Ocean, Stormy Sky and Chipped Sapphire Distress Spray Stains for the sea.   I blended a little ink over the edge of a piece of paper to make the horizon and stamped some wave tops from Inkylicious By The Sea.   After planning to make a square card, I changed tack and decided on a DL card so had to make some beach from the overspray area by blending some Mustard Seed Distress Oxide over the area.   I also added a little Peacock Feathers at the edge of the water. Once the blended ink was dry, I used Versamark and white embossing powder to stamp the waves at the bottom of the panel.   After stamping, I used markers to add some shading to the waves. For the top of the ...
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Location: Fareham, UK
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ATC Memorabilia

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This week’s project is one that I meant to make last year when I took early retirement but never got around to.  You’d think retiring would give you more time to do stuff but that doesn’t seem to be how it works!  In my job, almost everything we used was set in place in the Ops room.  We didn’t have our own individual spaces, sharing radar screens, desks, keyboards and even pens.  We were issued with our own headsets which many controllers identified as theirs by covering the ear pieces with patterned “knickers”.  Mine were leopard print velour and were home-made, obviously!  My other homemade thing I had was a pager tag, which you put in the pager rack so the Supervisor would know which pager to ring if they wanted to call you back to the sector.  I made a few of these for other controllers to raise funds for charity.  Another of my memorabilia is my Air Traffic Controller’s Licence (the “Yellow Book”) which holds all the validations, ratings, me...
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Location: Fareham, UK
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Christmas in June

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Well, I know it’s usually Christmas in July in the crafting world, however, over at VIHQ, there’s exciting news coming next month so we’re doing the festive stuff early.   For my CAS makes this week, I’ve done a bit of batch making to get ahead.   I’m not a big fan of all my cards being exactly the same so using an inky background ensures the cards are the same but different whilst still offering the speed of production-line style stamping. For the inky backgrounds, I got busy with my Tim Holtz Distress stains and spritzes and half A4 pieces of card.   I like to use a bigger piece of card so that I can trim the part that suits my project best.   Invariably there’s a dodgy edge so it allows for trimming that off! The stains I used were: Dusty Concord, Picked Raspberry, Chipped Sapphire, Stormy Sky, Broken China and Lost Shadow (for the snowy part).   The spritzes were Picked Raspberry, Wilted Violet, Uncharted Mariner and Weathered Wood.   I tried not to m...
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Location: Fareham, UK
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Maybe Daisy

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My makes this week are the card and ATC I made for my swap partner in this month’s Visible Image ATC swap.   The theme is “Summer Love” so it can be anything you love about summer.   Being solar powered as I am, I love the sun and the warmth that the British summer sometimes brings.   What I also love is the massive array of flowers so I test drove my latest purchase, Daisy Grunge . To begin I stamped the large daisy in Versafine Clair Nocturne and heat-set with clear embossing powder.   I planned to use the metallic watercolours and the embossing resists the lines, making them remain visible.   The ATC was straight forward but I hadn’t quite decided on the size of card so I just stamped the daisy on a half A4 piece of card, to be trimmed down later. For the colour of my background, I opted for some ink smooshing using Salty Ocean Distress Ink and Weathered Wood Distress Spritz and some water on my glass mat, repeatedly pressing the card into the inks un...
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Location: Fareham, UK
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