Crafty As L

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...

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...

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...

Today is Father’s Day in the UK and you may recall my Father’s Day inspiration for my Visible Image DT post at the end of last month.   I had my Dad in mind when I made that one.   However, I needed another card for my Father-in-Law so here’s what I created for him. My plan loosely involved beer bottles and a wall but I decided to add a cat peeking under the wall.   This is exactly what our youngest cat, Dill, would be doing.   I marked in pencil where the stencil bricks end and added a bit of sticky note to mask then stamped the cat from Curious Cats . Whilst I had that set out, it occurred to me that the whiskers would make rather good grass so I stamped that along the bottom edge. Before stencilling the brickwork, I lightly blended some brown ink so that the mortar lines wouldn’t be stark white.   Then I blended terracotta ink through Distressed Brick stencil. To give the bricks some texture and interest, I mixed a small amount (which was still way too ...

Our Design Team brief this week is Summer/Picnic and on a warm summer evening, my husband and I like to go watch the sun set over the sea with a bottle of fizz.   Our version of a picnic is that we occasionally have a bag of chips to go with it!   For my card this week, I started by stamping, clear heat-embossing and colouring the champagne bottle and cork from  Anyone For Bubbles and cut them out with the matching dies . To make the champagne flutes, I stamped and clear heat-embossed them onto vellum.   I then pressed my Versamark pad over the top of them, added clear embossing powder and heat-set.   I coloured champagne onto the back of the vellum.   The glasses were cut out with the matching dies too. To make the sea, I first sprayed a variety of blue Distress Stains onto a piece of card.   To make the waves, I die-cut the  Framed Fibres then sprayed that too.   Once it was dry, I used a Tim Holtz Embossing Dabber to add some s...