See The Sea

 

Aside from my Visible Image Design Team posts, this is my first post not scheduled back in July.  We are having building work done, part of which is an extension to my craft room, which will make it twice the size it was.  It’s so exciting climbing up onto the scaffolding at the end of each day to see what’s changed.  Here’s my craft room so far…

As it transpired, it was fortunate that I had all these blog posts scheduled as just over 2 weeks ago, my Dad had a heart attack, so I’ve had little time for crafting anyway.  This came out of the blue but fortunately the doctors found the problem and remedied it doing an angioplasty and fitting a stent. Mum has dementia and cannot be left alone and Dad is her carer so my sister and I were taking shifts around our work, to look after Mum.  It’s been full-on!  When I have had a couple of hours to myself, I’ve taken advantage of the glorious weather and living on the coast, and taken myself off to the beach for a couple of hours to watch the sea.  It has restored my soul and given me some peace away from the worry of my parents and the noise of the building work.  Watching the sea reminded me that I’d bought some sea stamps from Inkylicious back in June and hadn’t used them.  (Inkylicious have a great YouTube video on how to use the stamps.)  Having a few spare hours to have a play, here’s what I made with the By The Sea - Waves and Shoreline stamp sets.

To make the background, I blended sand and sea (and sky for one) onto three panels.  For the fourth one, I wanted to try out a monochrome night time scene so just used black ink on that one.

The next job was to stamp each image using Versamark and white heat-emboss.  Already they look great!

To add more definition, I added some shadows under the edges of the waves and on the sand.  All my sentiments are Visible Image’s Ride The Waves and At The Beach.  This one was my favourite and that sentiment is spot-on!

For the square card, my sticky note had lifted during ink blending the sea so I had a splodge on the horizon.  I contemplated trimming the panel down but decided to try adding a headland in the distance instead.  The yacht and birds were also to cover up some little splats.

Unfortunately, our local beach is all pebbles, not lovely sand like this but I guess it would be loads busier if it were sandy.

Lastly, Mr L’s favourite, the moonlit scene.  The sentiment on this is Visible Image Affirmations.

As I write this, the sun is shining and the weather is set to change in a couple of days so I might just head off down to the beach again today for some restorative sea-gazing.