Creative Chemistry Tags (Day 2-6)



Day 2 (l-r): Blended Distress/Spritz & Flick,
Brushless Watercolour,
Wrinkle-Free Distress



Day 3 (l-r):  Alcohol Ink Agates,
Archival Resist,
Stamping on Embossing Folder

 Hello!  Here's what I've been doing this afternoon.  I've been taking Tim Holtz' Creative Chemistry on-line card class (link here).  It's been wonderful and I have really learned a lot. He goes into a lot of detail and the techniques are a lot of fun.  Here are my efforts so far - definitely still in the learning phase.  I did go so far as to clear off a big space on my stamping desk so I could get all Tim Holtzy and lay out my craft sheet and have my heat tool right to hand.  I don't think I need it there all the time, but it was handy for drying between applications, etc.  I won't go into detail about the techniques, but I sure did have fun! 

Day 4 (l-r):  Watercolourng with Re-inkers;
Layered Misting,
Custom Stamp Pad

Day 5 (l-r): Stained Kraft Resist,
Stamping with Stains,
Marbled Stains

Day 6 (l-r): Watercolour with Markers,
Blending with Markers,
Stamping with Markers

Floral card

Hello!  Can't believe it's been more than a month since my last post.  It's because of a few things like I haven't been stamping as much since I've rediscovered the joys of knitting (currently doing a scarf from some gorgeous Noro Furin).  Also, I have been teaching two classes per month in March and April, and coming up with twice as many samples takes a bit of time.  And work has been quite demanding, so in the evenings I tend to just collapse.  So that's why you haven't seen too many posts from me. 

Here are some cards I did, inspired by a sample Heather made at Heather's Stamping Haven.  She had embossed the floral background (Hero Arts) in white and coloured with Distress Inks. That's what I did here too, swiping my inks on a craft sheet and lifting the colours with a wet paintbrush.  The birthday sentiment is from Impress Rubber Stamps.  The image is mounted on a piece of citron cardstock and the card base is white shimmer.  This kind of makes me think of a china pattern or something.  I did a whole bunch of these in different colourways, and mostly thank yous and happy birthdays.  Once I came up with the layout I liked, it was easy.  Now I wish I'd matted the sentiment panel, but it's too late now!  I tried adding some stitching with a white pen, but it doesn't look great.  I think I will just live with them like they are. 

Hope all is well with you where ever you are!  Happy stamping :-)

Almond Blossom Fairy and Weekly Menu Link

Hello!  Here's what I've been busy at in my stamp room for the past few days.  Not that this particular card took days, but arriving at this card did.  Heather got in some more flower fairy stamp sets. These are the famous Cicely Mary Barker flower fairies that I have always loved, and I have several now in my collection.  Heather asked me to do a class with them in March, so this will be one of the class projects for my class on Saturday, March 24th, in the afternoon (time to be confirmed).   The scanner hasn't quite done justice to the colours, unfortunately.  But then Sauron the Scanner and I have never been on particularly good terms. 

Thanks for stopping by!  I'm back to tidying up my stamp room and trying to figure out what to make for dinner.  Last night's effort was suffered in polite silence by my crew.  I found a recipe on line for salmon casserole with canned salmon, peas, peppers and eggs, sort of a crustless quiche idea.  This recipe was ideal because I had all the ingredients on hand and the exact amount of preparation time before dinner.  With this auspicious start, I knew that I had used up all my luck before dinner even started.  It was ok, they ate it (heavily bribed with the other half of their piece of cheese toast), remarking only that it was a dinner that didn't require chewing, only squishing through their teeth.  I don't have an exact quote as the daughter in question's memory is failing now that this is Going On The Blog.  Tonight I have less in the pantry than yesterday, and even less inspiration. Maybe we will have Pancake Day early!  Speaking of dinner, I did find a great website that does menu planning.  It's free, it includes recipes and it's nutritious, and the whole works.  It's put on by the government of Ontario and I would highly recommend it.  Had I been out shopping today, I would have the ingredients for numerous tasty meals.  Here's the link: Eat Right Ontario.  It's a bit wordy with a lot of links to get to a 40 page download (did I mention this was a government site? she said snidely), but it's top quality, full of great resources, and worth it in the end (did I mention I am a public servant? she said smugly). 

Thanks again for stopping by!

Bellarific Friday

Here's my card for Bellarific Friday this week at Stamping Bella.  This week's theme is "Anything Goes", so I turned to one of my favourite Bella images, this dandelion silhouette and my favourite Bella sentiment stamp "life is too short for beige".  Now I know this card contains no beige whatsoever, but in the name of design, I am using gray instead of beige.  Indeed I recently read the word "greige" in a design magazine.  (Even typing that word makes me cringe!  Ick. Beige meets grey meets terrible mash-up word of even yuckier colour.)    I have been starved for colour lately.  We are knee-deep in February in Ontario, which means the landscape is various shades of grey, sleet, sludge and slush.  the trees are grey, the sky is grey, the roads are grey, everything is grey, bleak and grey.  So grey that I had to put hyacinths on the grocery list, not to eat, but to bring some colour into the house.  My DH, God bless him, brought home gorgeous fuchsia ones.  Lovely!

Ok, so enough about the bleak outsides.  We decided to go shopping for a new duvet cover and check out the new Ikea.  They just built one here that is the biggest in Canada and is approximately the size of  Prince Edward Island.  Before you get to where you can buy anything, you walk through approximately 53 km of showrooms, all done up in Ikea style.  Guess what the Ikea style is.  Yep.  Grey.  Grey with pops of colour.  so there will be a living room with charcoal couch, pencil lead carpet, exhaust fume drapes and a lime throw cushion.  Or a kitchen pewter cupboards, steel appliances, graphite counter top and a chartreuse tea towel.  You get the picture.  Everything was grey.  It seems this year's fashion statement is Bunker Living or Prison Cell Mod.  Even the bed linen store was no better, with 85 duvet covers all in shades of charcoal, graphite and oyster.  Ultimately, we settled on a duvet cover that is white with solid botanical silhouettes in lime green, greeny-beige and grey.  So, we did get some grey (my brush with stylishness) but the overall effect is green and white.  (That and my husband vetoed the hot pink and purple stripes AND the fuchsia paisley.) 

So, being inspired by recent forays into the world of home decor (usually we decorate in contemporary Playmobil and children's art), I translated it into a card for Bellarific Friday.  The stamp is "solid funky dandelion" and as I looked on the website to find that out, I discovered a very similar sample card there, with bright green and black.  Maybe that was deep in my subconscious, I have no idea.  They say there's nothing new under the sun (well, people other than Hamlet say that, and we never do find out what Horatio thinks of that!).    Anywho, that's my card for Bellarific Friday.  Thanks for stopping by!

Supplies:  ink: charcoal and gray whale colorbox fluid chalk, kiwi kiss stampin' up, lettuce colorbox pigment ink.  Zing lime green embossing powder.  Naturals white, kiwi kiss paper and grey paper from Heather's. 

Sending scoops of love

Hello!  Here's my entry for Bellarific Friday at Stamping Bella this week.  The theme is Valentine's or Red and Pink.  I have this cute Valentine stamp, so I used it.  Inside the card it says "sending you scoops of love".  The image is stamped in India Ink and coloured with pencil crayons (mostly Bruynzeel, some Prismacolor).  The scoop is accented with Sakura glitter pen and the hearts are accented with a couple of layers of glossy accents (let dry in between layers).  The "bottom" hearts have one layer and the "top" hearts have two layers.  The background paper is Basic Grey from the Lemonade collection.  I had some heart shaped rhinestones so I coloured those with a Copic and added them.  I didn't have enough to go all the way across, so I used some little rhinestones in there too.  Here I am, with a Valentine's card in time for Valentine's Day.  Whodathunkit?!

Thanks for stopping by.

Another Japanese paper card

As I was writing my last post, I remembered I had wanted to try this card with a black background for my vase and branch.  Ignoring my to-do list, I set to it and came up with this while all the stuff was still out.  (Blithely ignoring the fact that this state is likely to continue indefinitely....)

I used Brilliance Coffee Bean ink for the branch and Brilliance Pearlescent beige for the flowers (branch and flowers - Impress Rubber Stamps).  I tried adding in some light blue flowers in pigment ink and didn't like a blob, which I tried to scrape off, causing a smudge and necessitating some punched butterflies (a.k.a. Stampers' All-Purpose Concealer).  I may whip up a few more like this as I have enough for at least 3 more in black with blue and brown accents . 

The background stamp is a calligraphy stamp from Fred B Mullett, stamped in Bordering Blue (RIP; BTW I found a whole package, unopened!  Yippee!  I can downgrade its status from Perma-Hoard to Short Rations.) 

Playing with Japanese paper

 Hello!  For the past couple of days I've been playing with my stash of Japanese paper.  I had picked up a big bag of scraps, so I used those to make about 17 or so cards.  Here are two examples.  For all of them, I punched a vase (punch from Carla craft) and stamped the bough+flowers (Impress Rubber Stamps) on a 2x3 3/4" piece of neutral cardstock.  I used the colours in the vase to determine the colours of the flowers, and the background accents, etc.  I found some wonderful scraps and these are two of my favourite cards.  When they were bright and cheerful like this, I made them into birthday cards, Mother's Day cards, thank you cards, etc.  More muted tones and purples I turned into sympathy cards.  Almost all the card bases are the wonderful tsumugi cardstock that comes in such beautiful colours and has such wonderful texture, reminiscent of slubbed silk.  For the purple card, I only had a tiny scrap of the vase paper, but I found another tiny scrap of the red and white and black that looked nice, and a bigger piece of the crumply paper.  On the blue card, I used an Oriental calligraphy stamp (Fred B Mullett) in the background.  (It's the stamp that has the poem about the words like stones and youthful tongue growing gray.)  The green card is a Mother's Day card, with the sentiment on the front (Stampin' Up) and a lovely quote on the inside with a Quietfire Designs calligraphy stamp. 

It was a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle, finding all the bits to go together and arranging them to look nice on the card.  All the cards are finished off with some liquid pearls in the centres of the flowers, and the colours again depended on the overall colour scheme but I used mainly white opal, platinum, and used pale yellow on a couple and lettuce on one with yellow flowers and a brown base.  I now remember that I had thought of trying some on a black backdrop.  Hmmm...maybe something to try before I clean up the scraps!  Thanks for stopping by!