Crafty As L

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 ...

First of all, I have good news - our missing cat from last week’s post has been found!   She was in a neighbour’s shed all along, despite them checking.   We believe she was afraid of their dog and wouldn’t come out.   I wish I’d gone around and checked myself, she might have come to me.   Anyway, she was checked out by the vet and, despite losing a third of her body weight, she is absolutely fine.   Having not eaten for 3 weeks, we’re having to feed her a small amount, slowly increasing her food allowance over a week so that she doesn’t have complications from refeeding syndrome.   She’s not very impressed with her meagre rations though! It was my brother-in-law’s birthday earlier this week and, having watched Visible Image’s Live earlier in the week, I grabbed the same sets Mark used, Grunge Birthday Words and Blow Out The Candles.   I also got out some other favourites, Stamper’s Anonymous Snarky Cats and Snarky Cats Halloween.   I white heat...

Recently, a very dear friend of mine was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer.   She is an amazingly strong and determined lady and I don’t know anyone who can better weather the treatments and surgery and emerge victorious than her.   She has a wicked sense of humour so I had to get thinking to create a card that would make her laugh. Somewhere in my mind, an idea of a cat with a bra on had taken root so that’s where I started.   Stamper’s Anonymous Snarky Cats has a fab selection of cats with great expressions so I looked through them for a suitable cat on which to sketch a bra.  This cat looked suitably alarmed at this idea! Next, I pencilled in the words and then went over them with my black fine liner pen.   Once the ink was completely dry, I erased the pencil.   I like to combine capital and lower-case letters when hand lettering. For some extra interest, I stamped another of the cats on the inside of the card and on the envelope.   I love ...

The Stampers Anonymous Snarky Halloween Cats is my most recent purchase.   Whilst I don’t send Halloween cards as such, I liked the other sentiments in the set so decided to purchase it anyway.   The thing I really like about these sets is that it’s easy to make quick cards with them as they don’t need much colouring. To make the backgrounds, I used Distress Stains in Mustard Seed, Lumberjack Plaid and Distress Spritz in Fossilized Amber and Spiced Marmalade for two.   The other two were sprayed with Villainous Potion and Twisted Citron Distress Stains and Wilted Violet and Twisted Citron Spritz.   For the latter panels, I had to wait for the different colours to dry so the colours didn’t get too muddy. I wanted to use the witches’ hat on one of the panels so I wiped the ink off the sticking up ear before stamping. The hat then sat nicely on the cat’s head. To add a little colour, I used a white pastel pencil and coloured pencils.   To make the eyes ...

Spellbinders brought out four lovely build-a-birdhouse die sets, one for each season, and this week’s card uses the Summer Birdhouse.   Since I was planning to ink blend the colour on, I cut out all the die-cuts from white card, including a bird from the Sweet Birds on a Branch set. For the background, I blended ink around my cloud stencil for the sky, then taped across the horizon and blended the sea using Distress Oxides in Salty Ocean, Chipped Sapphire and Uncharted Mariner. For some additional background interest, I added two palm trees which were cut using dies from Tonic Studios Craft Kit #61.   I lightly blended yellow ink around the bottom edge. To make the beach for the birdhouse to sit on, I blended on some light brown ink then added DOx Mustard Seed and spritzed with water to give a speckled look.   To add extra dimension and texture to the shell and starfish, I heat embossed with some coral powder.   The sentiment is from the Tweet Sentiments se...