Crafty As L

  Hello and welcome to my Halloween inspiration DT post for this week.   I usually do a Monday post but Rachel and I swapped so, for this week, here I am on a Friday instead! I had a ball creating this interactive card, using lots of different sets and trying out a technique I’d seen on this blog to make a spooky Halloween moon. For the focal image, I was thinking of a scarecrow with a pumpkin head so I stamped the Christmas Jumper and small pumpkin from Happy Halloween onto scraps of Tomorrow’s Memories Paper Pad and clear heat embossed. The jumper was decorated using the Knitted stamp. These were glued onto scraps of black card, fussy cut and set aside. For the moon background, I used the large circle mask from Bubbles & Fizz on a half sheet of A4 card and sprayed over liberally with Crushed Olive, Dusty Concord & Black Soot Distress Spray Stains and Black Soot Distress Oxide Spray.   I carefully lifted off the mask (keep it inky for later!), blotted s...

  It’s time for my Visible Image Design Team post and this week’s theme is Halloween and my brief is CAS - clean and simple.   I’m using the lovely pumpkins from the  Happy Halloween stamp set as I don’t really use them at any other time.   Maybe I should try to remedy that?! I wanted to speed up the colouring of the pumpkins so decided to experiment and use black card for them. First, I used Versamark to stamp and clear heat-emboss the small pumkin. Covering the small pumpkin with a mask, I stamped and clear heat-embossed the large pumpkin. For the colouring, I used Finetec watercolour metallic paints in orange for the pumpkin and green for the stalk.   The embossing resists the paint so you don’t have to be super careful about not going over the lines.   Once the paint had dried, I quickly fussy cut the pumpkins. For me, a CAS card has to have a reasonable area of blank space, in this case white, but I didn’t care for leaving it all blank.  ...

The theme for this month’s ATC swap in the Visible Image Facebook group is Halloween Colours.     Since I’m loving the pumpkins in the Happy Halloween set, I thought I’d use this set again.   An ATC is 2½” x 3½” so the small pumpkin was a suitable size for my project.   I began by stamping the pumpkin onto the ATC and onto a piece of masking paper.   The pumpkin was coloured using alcohol markers and I fussy-cut around the masking paper on the inside edge. Next, I placed the mask onto the pumpkin and blended Villanous Potion and Twisted Citron inks all over the card. For texture, I used the Graffiti stencil and the same colours and then used The Cat’s Whiskers stencil and black ink. The ATC was finished by adding a little shading under the pumpkin with a black fineliner and gold heat-embossing the sentiment. To accompany my ATC on its journey to my swap partner in Australia, I made a shaped card/tag using the large pumpkin stamp and die.   For the...

Aside from a friendly pumpkin carving competition between the two of us, Mr L and I don’t usually go in for Halloween.   However, I’m rather taken with these Visible Image Happy Halloween pumpkin stamps so I think we’ll be having a bit of spooky décor up this year! This week, I’ve been playing with shrink plastic, a completely new product for me.   It seems most people had a play with it when they were at school but I didn’t! I used the Sizzix white shrink plastic and you can see the difference on size here between the small stamped pumpkin and the shrunken ones. As this involves stamping onto plastic, a non-porous surface, I used Stazon ink.   Some people aren’t comfortable using Stazon on photopolymer stamps but I’ve never had any bother, although I do make sure to clean the stamps immediately after stamping.   To begin with, I used Sharpie markers to colour the pumpkins but when they touched the stamping, they did drag some of the black. I had more success,...