Crafty As L

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.

Apologies for my late blog post.   It’s been a frantic few days for our family as my sister had to rush Dad to the hospital late on Thursday night, calling me to the hospital in the early hours of Friday as he was really not in a good way.   It transpired that he had a huge gallstone and inflamed gallbladder but they were reluctant to operate.   Medical management was chosen but today it became apparent that this was not working so he had to have surgery.   He is almost 87 so this was not done lightly but the operation was successful so hopefully he’ll make a full recovery.   I needed something relaxing to do whilst he was in surgery so made today’s card. This stamp set from Colorado Craft Company’s Anita Jeram collection features a snoozing cat, which very much reminds me of Scooby, one of our tribe.   He loves a bit of “paws up” napping! As usual when I’m planning on using alcohol markers for colouring, I stamped and clear heat-embossed to start. I ...

My friend and I were going to visit Dougie, one of the veterans from Project 71, and he kindly lets us stay in his static caravan, which is in a glorious position mere metres from the coast just outside Cardiff.   We like to make his something as a thank you and this time we decided to make a cushion.   Each of us would make a side, not disclosing what we’d made until it was finished. Dougie sometimes stays with us when he comes back for events so I decided my side would reflect what he gets at our house, namely cats and music.      He used to have cats and enjoys playing with ours and he also likes to listen to me playing the organ.   I bought the Four Cats Quilt Block pattern from Etsy but each of the finished blocks were too big so I had to redraw them to get the block to be 15” finished size.   I added the seam allowance and cut out each template. The first step was to make the intertwined tails by starting with the small squares. Next, t...

For my last post this month, I wanted to have another go at the spooky moon I made for my DT post using this tutorial .   I really liked the effect and wanted to try it out using different colours. For the first layer, I placed a plastic circle mask over the panel and sprayed using Distress Spray Stains in Black Soot, Crushed Olive, Dusty Concord, Mustard Seed and Barn Door together with Black Soot Distress Oxide spray, spraying with water to get the colours to mix.   The panels were then dried with my heat tool. Using my sprayer, I spritzed water around the edge of the moons to reactivate the inks and tipped and tilted the panel to get the inks to streak across the moon then left them to dry.   After they were dry, each panel was lightly sprayed with a matching Distress Spritz Spray. I decorated the panels using Stamper’s Anonymous Snarky Cats and the Halloween version and the tree branch is from Mr Frostie .   These were stamped and clear heat-embossed to ...

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...