January Challenge #11

Hello!  Here's today's challenge card for my self-imposed January challenge.  The focal panel was in my scrap treasure box, and I think it was originally made of watercolour paper that had mopped up some diluted Adirondack colour wash sprays (lettuce and pesto, by the looks of it, though this is pure speculation).  At some interim scrap-rescue phase, I stamped this image (Magenta) on the paper and embossed it in black.  Back it went.  Fast forward to today, when it got plucked again from the scrap pile and enhanced slightly with some Tombow markers.  I added some shading to the skies and foliage with three shades (451, 533 or maybe 553, and 528), blending with a wet-then-blotted paintbrush.  I added the words from an A Muse sentiment stamp to the lines in the corner.  I trimmed out the image, matted on black, then put it on a card base, turning to my wonderful (but sadly neglected) collection of BasicGrey 6x6 packs.  I believe this is the Wanderer collection, and it's a lovely map in shades of blue and green.  I liked the echoing of the modular segments, the similar colour scheme and the way the birds seem to be flying above the streets.  It all seemed to work together.  You know when you leaf through your papers, looking for The One.  Well, this one winked at me and the twinkle in its eye said "Mr Right."  A few Ice Stickles embellishments (lemon and blueberry, I believe) and I was all done.  Thanks for stopping by!  I hope you are getting some time to stamp too.

January Challenge #6

Hello!  Here's today's card, well, technically it's after midnight so it is yesterday's card, but it still feels like today if you know what I mean.

I had this focal panel in my "too nice to throw away" scrap box and kept struggling with what to mount it on.  I pulled out some Lovely Lilac Stampin' Up cardstock and I felt it sort of worked.  I tried a few other things but blue drained the rich blues and greens drained the greens.  This seemed to be it.  I found a scrap of textured soft green paper and that was good as an accent and for the sentiment.

The panel is kind of fun - I had been playing with Adirondack color wash sprays and soaked up some of the overspray with watercolour paper.  I used this to stamp a nice modular Magenta stamp and embossed in some different powders.  I don't know what I used - I think there is a bit of Moonstone and one is the last of a custom mix to use up the dregs so I could have the container back. It's a bit of blue and eggplant and moonstone and I don't know what else.  I just know that I am reminded how much I like to mix my own embossing powders.  That makes me think of my dear stamping friend, Fran, who was a so good at artful combinations of embossing powders and accents in her own cards.  I miss her!  I'm glad of these memories of her, that come to me when I am stamping and think of how creative and how inspiring she was, and how inspiring her memory continues to be.

Thanks for stopping by my little blog.

Crafty Individuals Challenge May 2011

Here's my entry for the Crafty Individuals May challenge, "Free as a Bird". I used this wonderful bird stamp from Crafty Individuals. It's so striking! I stamped it twice on two sheets of sprayed watercolour paper from my stash and embossed in black. I cut out some of the pieces from the blue version and adhered them to the orange piece. It's not technically orange, since I used terracotta and butterscotch to make it, with a bit of spiced marmalade/copper concoction. So while it turned out orange, it's really shades of rust and honey gold that combine to look orange. I prefer to think of it as sunset glow. And just like a sunset, this card requires heavy-duty sunglasses to gaze at it. Ha ha ha. I used my bleach brush to highlight the birds, and coloured back in using the opposite crayon (blue on gold, marmalade on blue). Ok, so this isn't the most stylish of all colour combinations, but sometimes you just need to go where the design takes you, and this is one of those times. I had a scrap of embossed paper handy, so that became the accent strip, and the background got stamped with a Crafty Individuals script stamp. The card base is a mustard fleck, which is in keeping with the colour scheme, but not an exact match. (An exact match would require a warning and a welder's mask for viewing.) The last few highlights were in the way of white and black enamel accents (Ranger). And with that, the challenge is finished, with moments to spare. The design team will pick their favourite, and the winner gets a CI stamp of their choice. In the likely event that this isn't chosen, I may award myself an equivalent consolation prize.

Thanks for stopping by!

Challenge Tag

Hello! Wow - two posts in one day. It's been a good day for stamping, other than refereeing two girls who are somewhat overwrought with an excess of excitement and sugar.

The current challenge at Stampotique is to use newsprint/old books on the project. It's an any-stamp-goes challenge, so I went with this nice quote from a Darkroom Door floral set. I had the tag on hand, used to mop up extra ink off the craft sheet from another project. I can't say what the colours are, probably denim and eggplant color wash spray, with some Memories silver in there too. Just guessing though! I stamped the twiggy branch (Sunshine Designs) using chipped sapphire and broken china, then the sentiment embossed in metallic purple. I did a bit of a frame in black pen, and brought in the old paper by die cutting some butterflies with a page from an old book of French poetry. Which I then coloured with Tombows and covered in stickles. But the old book paper is there, I promise. You can kind of make out the print on the two larger butterflies. I decided it was too hard to see the embossing, so I took a waterbrush filled with bleach and went over the words to highlight them.

Thanks for stopping by!

Scrap Sunday 11

I noticed on the Darkroom Door blog that they had a challenge on their Flickr group was getting close to 1000 entries. I uploaded this one and depending on how I access it (through my Flickr login or via the Darkroom Door link), I'm either the 1039th post or the 983rd. Either way, it was fun to pull together a quick card with some of my new Darkroom Door stamps that arrived recently in a grab-box of wonderful goodies. I also used a scrap of blue paper I'd made at Christmas time (I think this was one of the sprayed jobbies with Adirondack colour wash spray and Memories silver mist). I started by stamping the text with chipped sapphire distress ink, and then adding the floral silhouette in white pigment ink, embossing it with a mixture of white embossing powder and warm highlights glitter ritz. Then I felt it needed something else, so I stamped the scroll down the side in black India ink. The clipped words are also from my grab box, from the baby word strip. I mounted it on a navy card base and the final card is 3x6". Thin and flat for mailing, though I may break down and add a button. I'll see. I kind of like it flat and I think non-stampers don't really understand why a button would be on a card. (I even know some stampers who feel that way, though I won't mention names in case they're mobbed by an angry bunch of paper-piercer wielding, button hurling embellishers.)

I'm having a lovely Sunday afternoon of stamping. (Hubby's out, kiddies are at their cousins', house to myself - bliss!) It's cold and windy outside, so I am tucked away in my stamp room, having a lovely colourful time. I've been doing chalk ink and resist for a class project, then took a break to do this one. Now I'm heading back to work up a "masculine" card for the class. I thought I would do his/hers monograms for birthdays or other occasions. My other line of class samples was only filling up my recycle bin and undermining my confidence. But I'm back in my element now, with my Colorbox stylus and chalk inks, iron at the ready and white paper waiting to be altered. Definitely my just reward for being up 'n at 'em bright and early this morning with a really big Sunday school lesson to teach (Palm Sunday).

Hope you're getting some stamping in this weekend too. Thanks for stopping by!

PS All stamps are by Darkroom Door.

Hero Arts 50 Grand

Hi! Can you believe the weekend is over? I can't. Where did it go??? Yes, we moved our clocks ahead today, but it feels like I lost more than an hour. I'm not ready for Monday morning at all. Anyway, enough whinging about that!

Here's a card I made for the Hero Arts 50 Grand celebration. Their flickr group had close to 50,000 posts, so they are doing a giveaway and here is my entry. I stamped that lovely butterfly collage (Hero Arts) on a piece of paper I'd made a while ago using Adirondack colour wash sprays and pickling salt on watercolour paper. The salt is what gives those neat knobbly effects. I don't remember what colours I used, but pesto, lettuce and a watered-down denim spring to mind. There may have been mushroom and butterscotch too, but I can't really remember. It's going to be different every time anyway.

I stamped the image using the Fiskars board with sponge feet and it did a great job! I needed to spray the cling part of my stamp with window cleaner and wipe it off, since that is the only way I've found (thanks to Kim for the tip) to get Hero Arts stamps to stick to the blocks. They have the stickers on the backs that interfere with the cling. So I stamped it with black pigment ink and heat embossed in black and then stamped the big butterfly the same way on plain watercolour paper. That one got cut out and painted with (8!)Distress Inks and a coating of light blue Twinkling H20 for some shimmery sheen. (Distress inks used: Stormy Sky, Faded Jeans, Forest Moss, Pine Needles, Chipped Sapphire, Dusty Concord, Walnut Stain, Rusty Hinge - I am a hopeless case!) Then trimmed the image, mounted it on black, mounted to a piece of Spring Moss (? the light green PTI paper) card, trimmed to a 5x7 folded card base. The thank you is also Hero Arts, stamped a little too high, so the black dots were dotted in to "bring it down" visually. Then everything was happening at the bottom of the card so I fooled around for a long time with fibres and bows, etc. I settled on these two fibres from my stash knotted and glued down. I think they do a reasonable job of balancing all the action in the bottom part of the card, but still linking them visually. Doubtless there is an artsy term for this, but I just call it gut-feel.

Well, I am back to the stamp table. I want to do the Darkroom Door ATC swap this month since the next few coming up I don't have the stamps for. This month is Filmstrip theme and there were lots of lovely filmstrips in my box. I am doing an alcohol ink background since I took a class at Heather's Stamping Haven on Saturday and got all re-inspired to use those with a new (to me) technique. (Thanks Fran!)

Thanks for stopping by!

Birthday card

Hello! How are you? I'm great - it's been a really good day. Great day at work, lunch with a friend, met a friend after work, nice time with the kidlets in the evening and my mother came over and we had a great time stamping together. It's my brother's birthday soon, so we were making cards for him. Here's my effort - with Marci and Mort has a Pin Curl from Stampotique. I started by making the background, which is a piece of smooth white cardstock that I used to blot a colourwashed & misted piece of watercolour paper. I ironed it and then stamped and embossed this pair in black and coloured with Distress Ink (accented with Distress stickles). The "to brother sister" are Stampin' Up! stamps and the "from" is Karen Foster snap stamps. The grass is Stampotique and the rest of the stamps are Stampers Anonymous (Tim Holtz collection). I did some sponging of Black Soot around the edge, created a frame with markers and then added a grey mat and some black enamel accents. I really love this card. This pair really cracks me up and it's a bit unexpected. I like that Marci even looks like a big sister. She looks after her little brother and makes sure he brushes his fangs - I even whitened them with pigment ink to show what a great big sister he has.

Thanks for stopping by! I hope you had a great day too.

PS I discovered that mixing Dusty Concord and Aged Mahogany gives the most wonderful plummy reddish purple. Gorgeous! I will be using that colour combination again. Dusty Concord also combines beautifully with Chipped Sapphire. I love that about Distress Inks - if there isn't quite the right colour, you can mix them together for beautiful results, and because they don't break down when wet, the colours really go well together.

Bling it on!

The challenge this week at Stampotique is Bling, and all stamps are Stampotique. This is an easy one for me, since I have a drawer full of stickles, another one with Twinklings and lots of sparkly embossing powder. I also needed a birthday card for a 4-year-old girl and that task just begs for sparkle! I happened to have a piece of colourwashed and splattered paper big enough for a card leftover from a gothic arch. It's in gorgeous shades of pink and purple and yellow. Perfect for a little girl! I dithered for a bit how to stamp the fairy, and I settled on using Dusty Concord and embossing with iridescent ice embossing powder. She's stamped on watercolour paper, so I could paint her and so it would match with the base, which is watercolour too. I painted her with distress inks, shading a bit since things always look better painted with at least two colours. See that little heart on her chest? Painted with worn lipstick and spiced marmalade. Her face has tattered rose, worn lipstick and pumice stone. Honest! The wings have shabby shutters, tumbled glass, broken china, and pumice stone and the crown is wild honey + pumice stone. I also painted the mushroom with pumice stone and accented with enamel accents in white. When I had it all put together and mounted on the card (marigold morning - Stampin' Up), I felt that it needed something, so I drew in some swirls with diamond stickles, which I had also used to accent her wings. This was a gamble, and I'm 70% glad I did it. It really needed some words or other stamps, but I wanted to use this for the challenge, and I didn't really have any other stamps that would suit and the card has to be all Stampotique. Still and all, I like the swirls and really, this is for a 4-year-old girl who will likely not even notice in her haste to open the present. So really, it's for me and I like it. So there. I love the richness of the colours in the colour wash. I spend a lot of time with stained fingers thanks to my love of that technique. I might try that craft scrubby to see if I can clean them off. It doesn't really bother me, but I do work in an office, so I'd rather not have hands that look like I've recently been fingerprinted....

I have some other colourwash projects to post when I get a chance. Right now they're trapped inside my camera and I haven't had a moment to extract them since I have been off sick with a bad cold. It hit me like a ton of bricks on Saturday afternoon and it was only yesterday morning that I turned the corner and felt halfway human. Nothing serious, and I do get sick leave off work (just not off being a mommy).

On an unrelated topic, we watched the new Sherlock Holmes, the modern day one, with Tim from The Office as Dr Watson. It was fantastic! I was hooked right away. I thought they did a marvellous job. We've been enjoying Wallander too. And when I was off sick, I got caught up on my Midsomer Murder episodes. I sometimes wonder why English villagers don't move to the inner city to get away from all the crime. I mean they are bumped off left and right out there. Which reminds me of another show we enjoyed but haven't seen on lately was about the housewife mafia of Little Stempington and we can't remember what it was called. It had its funny moments for sure. I just liked the premise - too funny. All ladies-who-lunch on the outside and cold-blooded villains on the inside, cornering the local drug market on high-test hormone replacement therapy pills. Who knew rural England was this seething hotbed of crime??? (Other than Miss Marple, I mean, who was certainly well aware.)

On another unrelated topic, this weekend we are hosting our second annual gingerbread house building afternoon with the cousins. We have a cast iron mold (from Lee Valley Tools) that you bake the pieces in - one side is a log cabin and the other is a brick house. It's fun, but largely because DH does most of the baking and building. When I was a teenager I used to enjoy designing and making gingerbread houses at Christmas time. I remember making a few. I can hear rasping sounds from upstairs, which means DH is filing down more walls and roof panels so they make a better join. That is where we differ. He likes them to fit neatly together, straight line to straight line. I realize it is a cookie house, shortly to be encased in candy, so I just stick them together with gobs of icing to fill the major gaps. Actually, to be fair, it is nice to have someone like that in the house because it means that pictures get hung straight and the Christmas tree doesn't lean to one side.

Well, I should get back to it and not sit around blogging all night. I have things to do to get ready for Christmas, as well as Gothic arches to get caught up on, and the 12 Tags of Christmas have started already. Yikes! So much stamping to do, competing with other necessary tasks. How to choose??? People at work keep asking me if I'm ready for Christmas (and I do have to say that I resent bitterly this particular conversational gambit). I always respond with a chipper, "Another six weeks should do it!" and wish they would stick to the more traditional Canadian opening line, "Can you believe the weather we've been having, eh?" I guess I should be grateful that people still openly talk about Christmas, but I do dislike having to constantly defend my state of planning. My normal life gets planned on an as-needed basis, which is to say, whatever is happening in the next two hours. Long range planning gets done as-needed as well, which takes care of tomorrow, and possibly the next day if DH and I have had time to work in a strategic planning meeting. Any extras, like birthdays, holidays, church bazaar, throw a spanner in the works and seriously jeopardize things like laundry and groceries. I suppose if I gave up stamping, I could become some manically organized dervish, whirling the laundry from dryer to drawer on my way to menu planning and dropping the kids at gymnastics. In my new spare time I could host delightful candlelight suppers and stylish cocktail parties, but I would be so stressed from lack of stamping that I would likely become as murderous as a villager. Also, it would be a shame to lose the value of the investment on my stamps. By my calculations, if I stamp for seven hours a day for the next three hundred years, I will see a 10% return on investment. 10% is excellent, since our savings account only gets less than 1%. Now that I see the numbers in black and white, and realize what a great investment stamps are, I should get some more, and increase my returns by 9%, which translates (rounding up, carry the one) to investing in 9 times the stamps as I had been getting. I love it when the math checks out. I guess having an engineer husband is rubbing off on me.

Arch #19 All About Me

This is Arch #19 - theme "All About Me", for the Inkurable Stampers' year-long Gothic Arch challenge. This was such a tough one. I really struggled. I decided that rather than go "deep" on this one, I would just go with the flow, which I guess is really very much "me" after all. Just realizing that now! (Also very much me!) Anyway, the main image is a Stampotique one, and is me as the reluctant office worker (with bad hair and questionable sartorial instincts, if only I was that tall and thin though!). I am sleep-deprived, and in a partial zombie state most of the time (see the greenish pallor?), have to wear the 'office uniform' of blouse, etc., but usually try to have something colourful like a scarf knotted like a tie, or a shawl or something. I even have a blue blouse like this one, but no red polka dot tie, sadly. I don't wear mittens at work, but I do have some mittens that I knit for myself, and can usually only find one of any given pair, so that's about me too. I guess if I did want to go deep on this one, I would usually rather be outside admiring the sky and air than be inside at work. In fact, I would like to be a farmer (small multi-animal self-sufficient farm in remote, but idyllic location with bees and flowers and a Canadienne cow for our milk and cream), but my husband continually talks me out of it citing trivialities such as lack of money and vacation and the extreme likelihood that I would immediately lose interest in farming once I had to clean out the barn. Our plan is to take a farm vacation to 'cure' me of this dream, which could be a rather risky plan seeing as I could realize my true calling. Another thing about me - addicted to colour, colour wash, colouring, colour flinging, colour spritzing, colour sponging, colour-using of any kind. All of these are found somewhere on this arch. I also have a sense of humour and love to laugh. And I have a million stamps. Which explains the yellow joke panel (Stampin' Up stamp). Another thing about me is that I can never bear to throw away interesting scraps, so I have used some on this card to make the grass and the flowers and the yellow joke panel. Another thing about me is that I love Japanese paper, but can never bring myself to use it because it might get used up. I did get out some nice Japanese paper in shades of green to use as the grass. Do you see the watercolour paper grass that actually got used? hahaha. That is so me.

Also one last thing about me that you can't see directly on the arch - I lost her for quite some time, mid-project. I put things down on my desk and then they vanish, mid-project. I spend time hunting and cursing and vowing to improve my organizational abilities, then I find the thing and immediately abandon tedious activities such as tidying and organizing. One more last thing about this arch: the circles around my head symbolize all the balls I have in the air, but please also note all the ones that have fallen on the ground! So that's this arch. All about me.

Party invitations

Ok, I am not a very good blogger. I should figure out how to post these better, but I am in a rush. These are the three versions of the party invitations I mentioned in my last post. DD1 and I did colour washes (she picked the colours) using Adirondacks and watercolour paper. I love these! Then she picked some colours of Twinkling H20s and we flung and blobbed colour on top (our fingers are starting to get clean, but it's taken about a day and a half....v. professional look for me.... but I don't mind - it just means the outside matches the inside for a change, as in I am much happier to think about colours and ink and paint and my next design than I am to think about superpopulations and weighting data. One makes me smile and the other makes me shudder. I guess life is about balance, isn't it.) Anyway, we flung and blobbed our twinks, and then let them dry and I ironed everything and she picked out some embossing powder (Faded Jeans distress and White Gold) and I used the Tim Holtz splatter stamp for that. A quick "You're Invited" (Stampin' Up) and we were done. We picked out card bases together, she had the final say, and I added some stamping (Stamping Bella - I love that background!) and some rub-ons (BasicGrey and Stampin' Up!). And we're done!

I'm pleased with how these turned out. They're all different, all lovely, all full of texture and rich colour. Scrumptious!!! I should mention that the card bases are Memory Box (key lime, boysenberry and peony - what fabulous names!), so have white on one side. (And matching envelopes! I have those in the lime and boysenberry - double scrumptious!) I can't believe I am using my precious, hoarded Memory Box stationery on a bunch of Grade 3ers. Still, (1) it's meant to be used, not hoarded, (2) DD1 loooves this stuff and really gets it and appreciates it, and (3) who would love this better than little girls? I mean they keep everything! DD1 keeps shiny gum wrappers for pete's sake. (Does this cast aspersions on point #2?) Anyway, it's used, and I still have some in the stash. It's all good. If I ever win the lottery, I am getting one of every colour of Memory Box AND matching envelopes. My second thing to do with my winnings would be to bring Fred Mullett up here to do a class. My third thing would be to hire a personal assistant to clean and organize my stamp room. My fourth thing would be to build a stamping studio in the backyard, complete with loft and kitchenette, decorated by Ms Sarah Richardson. My fifth thing would be to do a stamping tour of UK, Netherlands, Australia, West Coast/Pacific Northwest/California, and the midwestern United States. And Japan for the paper. My stampy friends and I would hop a chartered jet and just do the rubber tour. I could blog about it, which would then turn into a movie deal, and I would get to do the casting for the role of DH (would probably offer it first to Mr Colin Firth) and I would also offer Mr Tim Holtz a cameo appearance. It's all falling into place. I can see it now..... [Note to self: start buying lottery tickets, DH's position that they are a tax on people who can't do math aside. Someone's gotta win, and who better than someone with a five-point plan!?!?!]

Thanks for stopping by! What would you do if you won the lottery?

Happy Hallowe'en

Happy Hallowe'en! We've had a great day. I was at an all-day Copic class with Krista Schneider. It was wonderful. Colouring alllll day - what could be better??? Well, going over to my brother's place for a super Hallowe'en party and then coming home to make a Gothic arch. That's a lot of goodness packed into one day. I'm so worn out from all that goodness I can hardly picture going to work tomorrow!

This arch was a fun one. I went with a pre-coloured piece of watercolour paper that I had around from a session of spray and smoosh on the freezer. I had used shades of green and blue from Adirondack colour washes and let them dry. I think Pesto, Mushroom, Stream, and Denim were implicated in this recent experiment. I stamped on the spooky branches and text (Tim Holtz - Stampers Anonymous) in distress ink, followed by the crow and pumpkin image (Inkadinkado) in Ranger Archival. To colour them, I painted on bleach over the moon, crow and pumpkins. Then, I added colour back in with a paintbrush and distress ink pads (mustard seed, spiced marmalade, rusty hinge, walnut stain). Then, swooped over the focal image with Rock Candy crackle paint, which did smear the moon somewhat (that would put the trick in trick-or-treat I guess). Waited impatiently for cracks to form then bam-whooshed it with the heat tool to finish it off. Then it needed something more, so more spooky branches stamped on and embossed with Bavarian Bronze to create some depth of field, or something anyway. So that's my Arch #21 - Spooky theme for Inkurable Stampers! Yay - in under the wire on Hallowe'en.

Glowing Colour Wash

No scrap card today. I had to work most of the day, then tried to spend some time excavating my stamp desk. I did manage to clear a path towards it, so that's a start. I'll post one I made Saturday night instead.

This card features a brand new Penny Black stamp (yum!!!!), well new to me. Also new Adirondack Color Wash sprays. Double yum!!!

I got some new sprays recently and wanted to try them out. I covered the top of my deep freeze with packing paper, but an old towel would do. Then I spritzed a bit of paper (about 1/4 sheet, just grabbed a couple of plain whatevers from beside the cutter) with water, then some Adirondack color wash (wild plum, butterscotch, cranberry) and smooshed another piece of paper over top. Peel gently apart and wait to dry. You could do that, or you could rush over to your heat tool and dry them off to see how they're going to turn out. That's what I did. They will curl up, but they flatten out again. You can always iron them to flatten them out. (Which is what irons are for, right?) Once I had my piece dried off, I stamped a new Penny Black (Carefree Smiles!) repeatedly in black pigment ink and embossed in black. Matted on some black paper and then spent ages trying to find a paper to mount it on. The washes are so vibrant that they can really suck the life out of the background cardstock. I settled on this delicious tsumugi. It's richly pigmented so can stand up to the wash. I couldn't find an accent piece, so I trimmed the butterscotch bit off the end of another washed piece. A bit hard to do, since that piece was scrumptious, but if I am going to enjoy these washes, I need to get used to using the paper. That bit of butterscotch behind really adds a nice accent. I added the message stamp at the bottom (Sunshine Designs - The Stamp Barn) and some black accents (Ranger). Then today I added some white accent lines with gel pens and realized that however much I might want to be Michelle Zindorf, Queen of White Gel Pen Accents, I am not Michelle Zindorf, QWGPA. Still, my daughter liked it better with the gel pen accents, and I think I do too. It's always hard to know when to stop, especially with irreversible things like liquid accents and gel pen.

I am in love with these washes! They just glow. I am going to experiment with some resists next. Good times!