Another Fish Card

Here's another fish card using a lovely Lil' Florida Jack image from Fred B Mullet's line of Nature Print stamps.  I used Fred's spritzing technique to get the field of diffuse images and my stamp positioner to add detail and intensity to one of the fish.  A few finishing touches with some white paint on the eye, some pencil crayon, and an ink frame and I had my focal image.  I used Tombow markers (027 and 528) and spritzed water for the fish.  The focal image is mounted on some khaki linen cardstock, and the card base is Not Quite Navy (Stampin' Up), stamped with a coral image from Fred B Mullet.  The lace paper is from my package of Japanese paper scraps and is so gorgeous I can't believe I used it.

I don't have time for chit chat today - must dash off to DD2's dance recital.  Have a great weekend!

Birthday Card

Hello!  It's a gorgeous morning here, all sunny and fresh.  I needed a quick card for a birthday party this morning for a birthday party for my daughter's friend.

I surveyed the options, spent a lot of time dithering and mining out various things for various projects, then decided I didn't have time anymore to do any of those. (The master plan for the morning was to go to the Wallack's Art Store Warehouse sale at 9:00 and hope they had some great deals, and get a birthday present for the friend too, who likes to draw.  And the reason I ran out of time was I had to experiment with an artist's panel and Tombows/Copics in case they had them at a good price and I wanted more. So I had to do a quick bit of stamping and colouring and experimentation before breakfast, and ran out of time for an extensive card before it was time to leave.)

I stamped the tree image (Stampotique) in Memento on Heather's ivory 130 lb cardstock and coloured it in with Copics.  Can't remember the exact colours, but it was B0000, B00, B12 for the sky, and YG11, YG93, G95 and G99 for the leaves and grass and a few browns for the trunk.  I accented the grass with some pencil crayons for texture.  The smudges you may see are not on the card (for once) but on the scanner, which I keep forgetting to clean.  (If you saw my house, you would realize just how far down the list the scanner is in terms of cleaning priority.)  I accented the image with some Avocado Liquid Pearls and Crystal Stickles, and set it aside to dry while I took my daughter to the warehouse sale.

Now that was a hoot and a half.  It was in a part of town I haven't been to, so that was a bit of a fun exploration.  We discovered it's in the same place as the Art-is-In Bakery, and noted for future reference.  We headed in to the sale, found some great deals, but were dismayed by the 400 people (rough estimate) in line ahead of us to pay.  We didn't have time to wait in line in a warehouse, so abandoned the effort and went in search of Suzy Q doughnuts, which came highly recommended.  It's a new little place on Wellington with homemade gourmet doughnuts.  We bought one of each plus a few to make a dozen and brought them home, after a quick stop at the local Wallack's for a sketch book and pencil crayons for the birthday present. The doughnuts were delicious (sampled the dirty chocolate, raspberry-cassis with white chocolate drizzle, maple bacon and sugar-cardamom), the card is made and the presents are wrapped and it's not even noon!  Still lots of time for the party, laundry, groceries, stamping, etc. that fill a Saturday.  And a quick jaunt out to the Sportsplex for soccer team pictures.

Must dash off to a birthday party!  Have a lovely Saturday!

Sympathy Card

Hello!

Here's a card I made for someone at work who has recently been bereaved.  I wanted to use a technique that I learned at the classes I took a couple of weeks ago from Fred B Mullett.  This was a spritzing technique using Tombow markers and a botanical leaf image from Fred's nature print line of stamps.  The sentiment is from Quietfire Designs, as is the waxed twine around the edge.  The sentiment is embossed with Rust Antiquities embossing powder, so it's multi-toned and matches nicely with the varied shadings of the rest of the card.  The panels are all edged in Memories Art Print Brown, and the card base is a lovely vanilla bean Memory Box note card.  I like the Memory Box note cards because they are white on the inside - saves having to make a liner.  

This technique is from the Spritz me baby ... mo' betta class.  There are some basic instructions on Fred's website, but if you can take the class in person, it's waaay better.  I got to learn all kinds of things, like how to use TP (technical paper, on the same sort of perforated roll around a central cardboard cylinder as regular old tp) to blot up excess water, and how to avoid the Zone of Preciousness around the main image.  (I struggle with this.  The Zone refers to the urge to stamp your main image and then leave a nice perimeter around it, carefully avoiding stamping over this lovely image, so carefully positioned.  Someone who has fabric scissors and paper scissors, a cutting board just for fruit, and an extra pot of her favourite twinkling h20 is destined to have entire shrines set up to preserve zones of preciousness on cards.  Many thanks to Fred for urging me to overcome this tendency and stamp right on over that zone, and he is sooo right to do so.  But, as is the case with all good advice, it's nearly impossible to follow.  I am proud to say that in this card, I was successful in my struggle to overcome the urge to leave a Z of P, and there is only the slightest Nook of Preciousness under the main leaf.)

In other stamping news, I was out all day today, and last night, and will be out tomorrow at the wonderful classes run by Krista Schneider.  We are making wonderful things and it is just such a pleasure to be doing all that creative activity in the company of such delightful people.

Classes with Fred B Mullett

Hello!  I'm back from the most amazing three days in Massachusetts.  My friend and I took a couple of days off work to drive down there to attend some classes with Fred B Mullett.  He has a wonderful line of nature print stamps, botanical and sea life, and some fruits and vegetables, and lots of others besides.  And, he has some wonderful classes that he teaches, some using these stamps, some using colour and figure/ground principles to make a little magic happen.  If he is ever in your area, try a class or two or all with him and you won't be sorry.

A quick aside - we didn't want to get stuck in line at the border on Thursday morning and race to beat the clock to class, so we went down on Wednesday night.  We stayed just across the border in Derby Line at the gorgeous Birchwood B&B.  If you are ever in that part of Vermont, I would recommend staying there.  The hosts, Dick and Betty were gracious and welcoming and their home is lovely.  Betty had an antique store at one time and their home has some lovely antiques.  The building itself is from the early 1920s, but modelled on an earlier home on the property.  The gardens are lovely and the setting peaceful and quiet.  It was a lovely way to start our trip.

Back to the classes.  If you'd like to see a few of the things we made, check out Fred's class descriptions at this link here.  In every class, we walked through the steps together, made something with some fairly specific instructions, then were let loose to try it on our own.  Fred's a great teacher and it was wonderful to be able to try the techniques I've read about on his website.  Taking the classes in person really  made a bit difference.  He has great instructions and samples on his website, but to be able to hear the tips and tricks and context and all the rest of it really made the difference.

The pictures above are the two samples I did using the Dancing Rubber Fish technique.  The purple one is the one we walked through together, and the green one is the one I did on my own.  We also did classes called The Elegant Mess, The Rest of the Mess, and Spritz Me Baby....mo' betta.  Each class was wonderful and I learned so much.  My friend and I had the best time and are just on such a creative high it's incredible.  I came home and tried another fish, then realized I really did have to take Fred's advice and make an embossing powder chart, so I spent last night doing that to find out which of my powders are transparent and which are opaque, and which are somewhere in between.  I was certainly surprised by some of them!  Today I hope to get back in the craft room and really try some more stuff.   I have everything I need and I have a delicious number of beautiful Fred B Mullett stamps to play with.  These nature prints really showcase the techniques and add such lovely elements to the "nonrepresentational art" we made.  (See, I learned lots of new words, some of them artsy, some of them unique to the Fishboy Thesaurus, things like "tactilely interactive vulcanized tools for the replication of graphic imagery" (rubber stamps) and precision thermography powder application devices (cocktail straws).   I tell you, I really was in seventh heaven taking a class from a wonderful artist with a great sense of humour who likes to play with words.  Seventh Heaven!   It was pure, pure happiness, right from start to finish.




The classes were at Ink About It in Westford, Massachusetts.  It's a beautiful stamp and scrapbooking store.  They have a great selection of products and many, many wonderful samples.  Their classroom space is bright and spacious and the ladies at the store are darlings one and all.

To put the icing on the cake, it was so special to spend those three and a half days with my dear friend, just talking and laughing and really soaking up the whole experience.  It was a magical time and the memories will stay with me for a very long time.  They will have to.  I brought the wrong camera battery charger, so all the photo ops have, by necessity, been imprinted on my memory instead of a flash card.  Oh yeah, and I forgot my twinklings and last class projects there when we left so the kind ladies are going to mail them back to me.  (This had to turn into a true story about me at some point, didn't it!)

Mother's Day Card

Hello!  Here's a card I made recently, but didn't post because it was for Mother's Day.  I guess that doesn't make a lot of sense since I stamped it with my mother while she was visiting.  Oh well, that's my trademark - not making a lot of sense!

Mum and I were playing around with Fantasy Film from the Art Institute Glitter folks.  It's wonderful, iridescent, shimmery stuff.  This is an Art Institute dragonfly stamp, and I followed the directions on the package to stamp and heat with an iron.  It doesn't show from the scanned version, but in real life, I made two layers for the dragonfly wings.  The background is distress ink and the bull rushes (Penny Black) were stamped by colouring directly on the rubber with Tombow markers and spritzing.  The sentiment is a Stampin' Up stamp and the circles are from Papertrey Ink.

My own Mother's Day has been lovely.  Hubby and the girls made me breakfast this morning: pancakes with sauteed apples (from DD2s new kids cookbook), fruit salad with lemon yogurt sauce (delicious Barefoot Contessa recipe), bacon, coffee, and juice.  The table was set beautifully, complete with a bouquet of roses, a bouquet of handmade flowers, handmade cards and a poem.  Then off to church where the junior choir sang a lovely anthem, then out shopping in the afternoon for some summer clothes with DD1, then out for dinner, and then a nice bike ride on a balmy spring evening.  Now home for the evening routine and a quick blog post while the kids do a bit of tidying.  It's also the 18th anniversary of the day hubby and I met.  Now that's a lot to be grateful for in just one day!

Another Distress Marker Project

Hello!  Here's another project I made with Distress Markers.  I used them with the LaBlanche specialty stamping paper (same was what Ranger sells).  The markers work really well with this paper and I was able to blend them very easily.  I will be doing this card as a class in June at Heather's Stamping Haven, so I won't go into too much detail here.  The image is one by Magenta.

I will say that I really liked the combination of Distress markers with that super-smooth paper.  The background patterned piece is one I made, thanks to a new technique I learned from my mother (thank you!). The card base is my favourite - tsumugi paper.  Beautiful stuff!  I love the colours and the texture.

Well, I am off to steal a few minutes in my stamp room before I get going on the weekend chores.  I might even turn on the hockey game to listen to the playoffs while I stamp.  We'll see.  Hubby's playing his guitar and I'm enjoying listening to that.

Ok - Blogger has upgraded and won't let me attach pictures without using the new version.  But I can't see where to add labels.  I hate these "improvements" that make it hard to do things that used to be easy.  ---later-- I found the labels under an icon that looks greyed out, but turns out to be active with the right incantation.  I don't understand this move to icons everywhere.  This a blog.  That implies a certain level of literacy right there.  Why use impenetrable icons when a label would work?   Speaking of literacy, or lack thereof, I was walking downtown down a road I hadn't used before on my way back from a meeting. I went past an electric company installation and they had a big sign on the fence (big, imposing, serious fence) that said, "NO PARKING.  VILATORS WILL BE TICKETED AND TOWED."  This sign was repeated again, about 10 feet away.  On one sign, someone had turned the I in vilator into a flower, and on the other sign, some punctilious vigilante had added an O.   Here's a picture of the sign - it must be at a different location since it's on a brick wall, unlike the ones I saw.  http://boerishbwoy.blogspot.ca/2010/06/title-warning-to-all-vilators-location.html#links  I wonder if one could appeal one's ticket on the grounds that they are not a vilator, and are therefore exempt from this exhortation.  I'd hope so, but I wouldn't want to be the one to try it out.

Baby card

Hello!  Here's a card I made recently, but didn't want to post it until I was sure the recipient had seen it first.  I wanted a non-traditional baby card and I had this beautiful quote (Quietfire Designs) in mind.  I used a number of soft shades of Colorbox fluid chalk to brayer on to 130 lb cardstock and heat set with an iron.  I think I used Ice Blue, Creamy Brown, and Dark Moss.  I stamped the image and used Moss embossing powder for emphasis.  Then I die cut with spellbinders to get the image and coordinating mat in ice blue linen.  With that same linen, I made a background panel with a baby theme embossing folder.  The cardstock is a lovely soft moss green, and the accent paper is an espresso brown.  A few soft blue brads thrown in for good measure and I was done! 

Thanks for stopping by.  Happy stamping!

Edited to add:  the embossing folder is from Cuttlebug, and is one of a set of four called Word Collage.