Crafty As L

My Dad and I have been going to a beginner’s watercolour class in a local village hall for the past three weeks.   I’ve done a little watercolour using YouTube tutorials and Dad paints using acrylics so it’s a fun activity to do together.   So far, we’ve done seascape, landscape and abstract, which Dad wasn’t keen on, although I liked having a play without the expectation of having to produce something recognisable at the end!   Here are my efforts so far. It was my Dad’s birthday last week and I bought the course for him for his birthday.   It seemed appropriate to paint him a card so I used Recharge stamps by Colorado Craft Company as he also likes fishing. I painted the scene using watercolours and followed the guide colour scheme on the back of the packaging.   We’d just learnt to do a wash for the sky so I practiced that again. To frame the picture, I cut a rectangle of black card and die-cut a rectangle from the centre.   On the frame, I whi...

This week’s DT make uses my favourite stencil from the new release, Wildflowers , together with the cute mini-dragonfly from Brighter Days .   As soon as I saw that stencil, cornflowers were what sprang to mind.   I made a similar card for my sample, which you can see here. For my CAS make, I started by selecting a light and dark shade of cornflower blue and green inks and small blending brushes. The flowers on the stencil are on the right but I wanted mine central so I stencilled those in first, moving the stencil as required. Next, I used my greens to add the leaves and grasses. After cleaning the stencil, I flipped it over and stencilled more grasses. To create depth, I lightly stencilled distant flowers using just the remaining ink on the blending brush.  I tried not to go over the green so that the grasses remain in the foreground.   I also added a few more grasses in any bare patches. To ground the scene, I blended more green ink just along t...

When Spellbinders recently released the Say Cheese Classic Mouse collection and I watched Tim Holtz having a play with them, I decided I needed them in my stash.   They are so cute!   Disney are very strict about copyright so I was surprised to see these until I discovered that they are based upon the Steamboat Willie characters, which were released from copyright into the public domain  worldwide earlier this year. I was making this card for a male friend’s birthday – it’s great to have another set that I can easily use for bloke’s cards.   There are several arm variations and a couple of tail options so I selected which to use and did all my die-cutting first. The dies cut really well and have debossed areas to indicate where to line up the various parts.   The section to make the tongue is marked ‘mouth’ which is very handy too.   That would have had me scratching my head for a while! Assembly was very straightforward and within a couple of minutes...