Crafty As L

Today is my sister’s birthday and I’ve made a fun fold centre-stepper card for her.   Ange is a total inspiration, working hard in her job as an NHS perfusionist, together with being the head of the department.   Outside of work, her passions are her cats and harp playing and she’s fiercely loyal to family and friends.   She’s a great listener with a good sense of humour and is even more sarcastic than me!   Ange is the reason that I started to learn the harp at the beginning of this year.   She’s been playing for about 12 years and played at our wedding, even though she’d only been playing for about a year then.   Very brave!   My friend spotted this die when we went to the Creative Craft Show at Farnborough a couple of weeks ago so I had to have it for Ange’s card.   I opted for gold mirror card as one of Ange’s harps (she has three!) is a very grand gold one.   This die-cut was layered with a brown one.   I then decided to cut out t...

For this week’s post, I’m doing more stamping and stitching, trying out another of my stamps with free-motion embroidery.   I used the large sunflower from Visible Image Sunflower Grunge and stamped it onto a bit of old wash basket liner.   I used my large MISTI so that I could repeat stamp if needed. I put a couple of layers of gold organza over the sunflower and first stitched around the edge of the petals with a golden coloured thread.   Next, I filled in the petals with a lighter yellow. For the centre of the flower, I started with dark grey but with yellow in the bobbin.   I adjusted the tension so that some of the bobbin thread would pull up to the surface to give the effect of pollen. I continued the centre with a light brown and then a darker brown at the edge. After putting a layer of green organza over the leaves and stem, I stitched these in the same way with three shades of green.   I made some random long stitches for grasses at the bottom ...

I have a pile of Distress Spray Stained backgrounds on my desk ready for creating with.   Leafing through them, this one looked like a scrummy summer cocktail so it was the perfect base for this week’s Visible Image DT post. The Grunge Birthday Words stamp is in my Top 10 of VI stamps as it’s so versatile.   I stamped with Versamark and heat embossed in white to keep the summery feel.   I decided not to repeat the stamping across the whole panel – sometimes less is more! Next, I stamped and clear heat-embossed the cupcake from Birthday Glow and coloured with alcohol markers. After fussy cutting the focal image, I felt the cupcake needed more sparkle so added some Nuvo Drops and Stickles to the icing and flame. I always make my background bigger than the finished size so I used the offcuts to create the sentiment strip.   This and the cake were attached to the background with foam tape.   The background was mounted on black and then onto a square white ...

Continuing my recent theme using Anita Jeram’s illustrations, this week’s cards are made using Colorado Craft Company “Ice Cream Day” which feature two of my favourite things; cats and ice-cream.   To begin, I stamped and clear heat embossed the images so that I could colour with alcohol markers and not worry about the ink running. I used a selection of markers to colour the cats simply and added some Stickles to give the ice-cream some sparkle. One of the panels was quite small so I used the small ice-cream cone stamp to add some details to the card blank. Finally, I matted the card using Neapolitan ice cream colours.   I had to add a some rhinestones onto this one as I managed to get finger prints in a few places. This card is more CAS and the smaller images are perfect for making cute 5” square cards.

At my art group, we have a competition each term and this term's theme is “Fauvism”.   In its most basic form, it is art made using intense, non-naturalistic colours.   I’ve just bought some large animal stencils so thought I’d try them out with some non-standard animal colours. I used a couple of colours of turquoise and pale green acrylic paint, which I applied by dabbing with a sponge over the stencil. I’m loving my turquoise giraffes! I repeated the process with the zebra stencil too, trying out the paints on black and white card. The sentiment was from a Creative Stamping set from a few years ago.   After backing with dark green card, the panel was adhered to a 7” square card blank. The other two were trimmed down with the zebra mounted on a 5” x 7” card blank. I decided that I didn’t like the one on the black card so turned the card over and applied Distress Grit Paste through the stencil, topping with sparkle embossing powder, which was heated whilst t...

Last week, our godson, Rowan, celebrated his 5 th birthday.   I don’t have many stamps specifically for children so I had to get creative with what I had.   Rowan’s Mum keeps a flock of Icelandic sheep and I have a sheep stamp set.   Sorted! I wasn’t sure how many sheep I would need but guessed it’d be quite a few.   To get some colour on the fleeces quickly, I opted to spray a sheet of damp watercolour paper with Distress Spray Stains. This next stage is a quicker way of stamping and die-cutting if you’re going to be doing a lot of the same image.   I die-cut the shape as many times as I could from the inky panel.   To make a frame for the stamping, I die-cut the sheep from a piece of scrap card. After securing the frame in my MISTI, I positioned the sheep stamp in the aperture and picked it up with the door of the stamp positioner. One-by-one, the die-cuts were popped into the aperture and the sheep stamped. To give the sheep a bit more chara...

It’s another exciting new release day over at Visible Image, this time to celebrate Hobbymaker’s birthday.   This new collection comprises four stencils and four stamp sets to cover you for cards for all kinds of life events.  You can shop the collection  here . For my card today, I’m using the Birthday Glow stamp set and I started by stamping and gold heat-embossing the large sentiment. After trimming the sentiment, I cut a 5¼” square of black card and marked in pencil where the sentiment would go.   This gave me the frame to work around whilst stamping and gold heat-embossing the row of candles. The row was perfect for the height but a bit short for the width of the sentiment so I had to repeat stamp, masking the area I didn’t want stamped with a sticky note.   I filled in the little gaps at the corner with my Versamark pen. To get the candle glow, I blended Delicata Golden Glitz ink over each flame using a small blending brush. Metallic waterco...