Class sample - Distress Markers

Hello!  Here's a card I made for an upcoming class at Heather's Stamping Haven.  The class will be called "Fun with Textures" and will feature this card an another one, and some different techniques (creating texture with UTEE and the new Donna Salazar Mixed Media Inx).  The class is Saturday, May 5 from 2-5. 

The poppy stamp image and background stamps are all from Heather's Stamping Haven and the image is coloured with my .... (insert deep, sonorous, game show host voice here) Brand, New Markers!!!  (cue applause and raucous cheering).   That's right, I got my new Distress Markers and I was prepared to love them, and I do.  A lot.  I love my Tombows, I love my Copics, I love my pencil crayons, and now I love these markers.  The Distress colour palette will be a great complement to my Tombows from a watercolouring with markers point of view.  I'm looking forward to doing some experimenting with them and seeing what kind of things I can do with them.  Have you tried them out yet?

Happy stamping!

Mastering Twinks & Scrap Sunday on Saturday

Hi!  Here's a quick stamped project to show you.  I was cleaning off my desktop (!) to make room for my large craft sheet, and I came across this coloured image.  I think I'd done it for my calendar class and switched to a poppy image for the calendar page.  This little beauty needed its own home!  I had a few other scraps that I incorporated into the design, and presto-change-o, this card was done!  The image (Heather's Stamping Haven) is embossed in black on watercolour paper and coloured with Tombow markers.    The sentiment is a rub-on, and the light green panel is embossed with the Tim Holtz brick wall and enhanced with some iced spruce distress ink.  So, here we have a Scrap Stash Sunday card on Saturday.  I'll slide it in on a couple of technicalities:  I can't actually remember what day  I made it, so it might very well have been a Sunday.  Also, it's Saturday morning here so it must surely be Sunday by now in Australia, if not Monday or Tuesday. 

In other news, I signed up for this on-line class, Mastering Twinkling H20s, and so far it looks great.  I have read over the first lesson, but not done the exercises.  The exercises look like a lot of fun.  I have always loved my twinks, and I'm looking forward to learning more about them.  I'll try to post my exercises on the class's Flickr group, and I'll post a link here if the group is an open forum.  Now it's off to feed the kiddies and get ready for my class at Heather's this afternoon.  I might even try to get the kids' hair cut this morning, but we'll see how the time goes. 

Have a great weekend! 

Creative Chemistry Days 7-10

Day 7 (l-r): Nostalgic Batik,
Rusted Enamel, Distress Powder Resist

 Hello!  Here are the rest of the tags I made to go with the Creative Chemistry class with Tim Holtz that I took on line.  I really, really enjoyed it! 

Some of my favourites are the Rusted Enamel (can't wait to try that in different colours) and the distress powder resist - isn't that fabulous with my big Fred B Mullett fish!  I love the colours.  And I just got a wonderful bubble stamp at Heather's for the background by Ryn Designs. For that resist I used some sprays in shades of red.  Scrumptious!  I also loved the perfect pearls and am going to get them out far more often. 

Thanks for stopping by!  Now I'm off to clean up the aftermath in my stamping room.  I had hoped the elves would do it while I was out at work, but as usual, they didn't. 

Day 8 (l-r): Paint Dabber Resist, Crackle
Paint Resist, Shattered Stains

Day 9 (l-r):  Perfect Distress Mist,
Perfect Distress, Perfect Splatter Distress



Day 10: Rock Candy Distress Stickles



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.