Crafty As L

Whilst I was making a card (you’ll see this in a couple of weeks!) using the main cat face stamp from Curious Cats by Visible Image, I was thinking about what I could do with the two small silhouette cat stamps.   Another Facebook group theme was “Stencils” so, putting the two together, this is what I made. So that I knew where to stamp the cats, I first stencilled the wall using Visible Image Distress Brick stencil. Next, I stamped the cats, masking where necessary with sticky notes. The stencil was replaced and I used Ranger Distress Grit Paste through the stencil and left to dry for a few hours.   I really like the Grit Paste as it doesn’t seep under the stencil so gives a really crisp finish. To add some colour, I replaced the stencil again and used a rainbow selection of Distress Oxides and blending brushes. Finally the sentiment from That Lovin’ Feline was white heat-embossed on black card, trimmed and attached using thin foam tape.   Purr-fect! ...

It’s my turn on the Visible Image blog this week and I’m sharing a couple of cards I made for a friend and my Dad.   They both enjoy the 6-Nations rugby so the Try-mendous Day stamps and coordinating dies was a perfect choice for their cards.   I was inspired by a page I made in my art journal for a Facebook challenge with the theme “Ireland”, which I made back in March when Ireland had just won the 2024 6-Nations Championship. My Dad is English so I used sticky notes to mask the Grungy Union Jack stencil to create the St. George’s cross and blended Lumberjack Plaid Distress Oxide ink through.   I concentrated the ink in the central area and faded out as I didn’t want square edges. I blended Mowed Lawn and Salty Ocean for the sky and the grass. My friend is also English but now lives in Scotland so for the St. Andrew’s cross, I used masking tape for the cross.   It was too perfect though so I used the dots from the Union Jack stencil to add a little grunge....

This week’s post stars some Altenew goodies that I bought a while ago but hadn’t got around to playing with.   I’ve got the die version, called Rolled Roses, but I really liked the look of these Charles Rennie-Mackintosh style roses and I loved the fact that they also came with stencils for easy colouring and coordinating dies. As I planned on batch making a few of these cards, I set up the stamps in my Misti and stamped each image twice, rotating 180˚.   The stencils come with both the positives and negatives so I used these as masks when stamping the overlapping roses. I stamped and clear heat-embossed 6 panels plus some of the smaller roses that I could die-cut later. The stencils made the colouring super-easy! After stamping the sentiment, I used the Wavy Grid stencil and a very light blending of black ink to lightly stencil the pattern.   The tiny roses were die-cut and fixed in place with foam tape. To add a more organic feel to the panels, I put them in...