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...

For my blog post this week, I’m adding to this year's Christmas card collection.  I can’t even remember when I purchased this set called Sing It's Christmas by Clearly Besotted.  I'm happy I've finally gotten around to using it.   Using Versafine Onyx Black, I stamped the cats and lampposts onto two panels and also onto some masking paper, which I fussy cut. After placing the masking paper on one panel and adding a sticky note mask for the snowy ground, I then coloured the sky by blending Distress Inks in Chipped Sapphire and Tumbled Glass with some Mustard Seed for the lamp light. The masks were removed and I sprayed a little water over each panel to add bleached speckles to the sky. To colour the cats and lampposts, I used various alcohol markers, adding highlights at the end using a white Posca pen. Lastly, I stamped the musical notes around the cats and the sentiment.   To make the scene more wintery, I watered down some Dr Ph Martin’s Bleed Proof w...

Welcome to my second Visible Image blog post, this time featuring patriotic cats.   The idea for this card came to me whilst I was driving home and saw some red, white & blue bunting with a cat sat underneath.   Instead of bunting, I subbed the Grungy Union Jack stencil instead, which I love. I have a quickie YouTube video of the making of this card here . To begin, I stamped multiples of the cats from That Lovin' Feline onto masking paper and fussy cut them. On a 5¼” square piece of card, I stamped the cats along the bottom, masking the foreground cats then stamping others in the background until about a third of the panel was covered. I replaced the masks on the cats and then positioned the Grungy Union Jack stencil and taped it in place.   Using sticky notes to cover adjacent areas so as not to mix the colours, I used small blending brushes to add traditional colours to the flag.   Once complete, the cat masks were removed. The cats were coloured ...

Just a quick post today to share with you one of my cards that I made for Creative Stamping issue 122.   My brief was to show the masking technique and different ways to colour stamps.  This one was coloured with Copic markers but I also used ink blending, coloured pencils, watercolour and ink ‘smooshing’ to create the others. I had a lot of fun creating these biscuit and cake themed cards. The afternoon tea stamp set that comes with the magazine comprises a huge array of biscuits and cakes plus some crockery. If you don’t have one, get your magazine here . The biggest honour though was getting the cover photo for one of my cards! This is the highlight of my crafting journey so far.  

Our lovely Godson, Rowan, turned 2 a couple of weeks ago.   He’s into diggers at the mo so when I saw this set, it was a no brainer for a card for him. To begin, I used Pink Frog masking paper to create a large no.2 mask and used the negative part first.   I was aiming to get it to look like the diggers had excavated the ground to make the number 2. After blending various shades of brown and splattering some brown, white and black inks to the number for texture, I then masked the ‘2’ and preserved some of the space for other elements before blending the grass. After removing the masks, I stamped the cones and piles of dirt.   In hindsight, it would have been easier to stamp these first, then mask them!   It was at this point that I realised that the stencils were not designed to colour the stamps.  The stencils worked OK with the piles of dirt but the lorry and diggers didn’t line up at all so I used Sharpie markers to do some basic colouring.   I t...

  Christmas stamps aren’t just for Christmas! Obviously, you probably don't want to be sending cards with Santa on for someone’s birthday but some stamps are versatile and can be used all year round.   The focal image for this week’s card is from Colorado Craft Company’s Christmas Presents by Anita Jeram set.   The sentiment is from Clearly Besotted called Laugh Out Loud Again.   I used MFT hybrid ink for the dog and Versafine Clair heat set with clear embossing powder for the sentiment.   The card was for my friend who has a dog called Tilly.   Using Copic markers, I tried to colour the dog to look like her.   To create a mask, I stamped the scene onto a sticky note and fussy cut around the bottom.   After adding a length of stencil tape across the panel for the horizon, I used MFT Ray of Light stencil and a blending brush and some green ink to create the lawn stripes, removing the stencil and blending more green ink to complete the lawn. ...