Crafty As L

Last week, during one of my trips to the hospital to visit my father, I saw a bunch of sycamore “helicopter” seeds laying in the road.   They were so pretty that it seemed a shame for them to rot in the road so I scooped them up and took them home, to have a think how I could use them in a craft project.   I gathered some maple leaves from my garden to go with them. It’s been a while since I used my Gelli plate so I thought I’d try to get a print from the foliage and seeds.   I used a brayer to apply a thin layer of acrylic paint to the plate and arranged the foliage over. I used a scrap of paper to cover the foliage and pressed firmly all over the plate.   After removing the paper, I then removed the foliage and brayered a layer of pale green paint over the plate. Whilst the paint was still wet, I placed a sheet of white card onto the plate and applied pressure all over with the brayer.   When I lifted the card, I had this lovely print. I chopped the shee...

My projects this week are the card and ATC I made for the Visible Image October ATC swap which had “Autumn Vibes” for the theme.   On the day I made these, it was blowing a hoolie and multi-coloured leaves were swirling all over the place, which inspired my makes. Using the Autumn Leaves stencil, a variety of Distress Ink pads and small blending brushes, I layered the leaves to cover the ATC. To give a little shadow to create dimension, I painted on watered down Gathered Twigs Distress Ink around the edges of the leaves and also painted on some leaf veins.   For some sparkle, I spattered on gold watercolour paint and edged the ATC with it too. Whilst the ATC was drying, I turned my attention to the accompanying card.   I began by stamping the large tree from Into The Woods in Versafine Clair Pinecone ink on kraft card.   I sprinkled a little gold embossing powder on, knocked off the excess and then added clear powder and heat-set. To make the tree canop...

  There are lots of rainbows around at the moment, not the meteorological kind but ones created to celebrate the work of the NHS during the pandemic.  This made me think of doing a rainbow-themed card for my blog this week.  I used the leaf cluster from Rooted in Nature as my feature image whilst the large sentiment from the same set was the focal point. To begin, I stamped the sentiment just left of centre. Next, I stamped the leaf image seven times, changing between the rainbow colours each time. Since I had decided to use a Pacific Point card base, I decorated the liner and envelope with the leaves stamped in the same colour. To complete the card, the front panel was mounted on a black layer before being adhered to the card base.