Crafty As L

Our Design Team theme this week is Father’s Day and I’ve made a clean and simple card for my Dad.   He loves a bonsai tree, as do I.    They are so majestic despite being miniature.   When seeing them at gardening shows, I’m always amazed as to how old they are.    When I was young, I grew an orange tree from a pip and Dad suggested we grow it on as a bonsai.   It lived for many years on the kitchen windowsill in its little pot. For my bonsai card, I started by stamping the tree from  Resilient Bonsai in Versafine Clair Pinecone ink and clear heat-embossing.   I heat-embossed the pot part again, this time using Versamark and gold powder. After smooshing some Distress Inks on a block, I sprayed them with water and added some colour to the tree.   I watercoloured the pot using metallic gold paint. After fussy-cutting the tree and pot, the white edges of the trunk were visible so I used a brown marker pen to darken these up. T...

  It’s *NEW RELEASE* time again and for my DT post this week, I’m delighted to be sharing my makes using the Resilient Bonsai stamp set together with 2 of the stencils, Art Spheres #2 and Painted Grid . To begin, I stamped the bonsai using brown hybrid ink so that I could colour with alcohol markers.   This bonsai was to be one full of blossom so I used a selection of pinks and just dotted them around until most of the tree was covered, although I left a few areas white.   The pot was coloured to match the background panel – more on that later! Next, I gold-heat embossed some of the small symbols onto the pot. To finish the panel, I gold heat-embossed the writing randomly and then blended some gold ink around the edge. For the background, I roughly measured where my focal panel would come to so that I could align the half-sphere pattern from Art Spheres #2, which I stencilled using black ink.   Once the ink was completely dry, I gold heat-embossed the senti...