Ikesworld Challenge - Awareness

Hello, blog friends, thank you for visiting.

  The more observant among you may have noticed that this blog is sporting a rather natty new DT badge, for the Ikesworld Chalenge Blog.  Ike, who designs excellent digital stamps has recruited two teams for a three-month tour of duty and I am honoured to be a member.

The theme for this month is "Awareness".  October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, and many of us will know someone who has suffered from this awful disease.  Through continuing research, the outlook for many sufferers these days is more hopeful provided the diagnosis is early enough, but too many women still die too young.

The digi is available for free from Ike for the duration of the challenge.  I coloured it digitally (I used Photoshop) and printed it onto inkjet acetate and backed it with Centura Pearl card.  This time I took care to keep it away from the cat, who has a thing about licking plastic - the last time I left a printed piece lying around she washed it for me...

I embossed another bit of Centura Pearl using the "Tied Together"  Couture Creations folder, cut the aperture with a Go Kreate die and painted it with acrylic paint in a pale pink.  Once it was dry I went over it with a wash of pale pink with a bit of pastel green mixed in.  While it was drying, I coloured some copy paper by spraying it with water then splatting (technical term) Distress Stains all over it, spraying mica spritzers onto it and then scrunching it up into a ball while still wet and then opening it out VERY carefully to dry.  I did one in pinks and one in greens.

By now the embossed card was dry (with a bit of help from the heat gun) so I drybrushed it in white to accentuate the highlights and gave it a couple of coats of Klear floor polish -  now known as Pledge Multi-surface wax.  This gives it a lovely satin sheen.  I threw a bit of mica powder into the top coat as while I was at it.   (One of these days some bright craft product manufacturer is going to wake up to how useful this stuff is, call it a posh name and sell it in small bottles at £5.99 a throw.  Fortunately, nobody has so far!)

Back to the coloured paper now, I finished off the drying process by ironing the paper and then die-cut multiple layers of my favourite flower and foliage Spellbinders dies (I folded the paper twice and the dies coped very well with the layers of paper).  While I was at it, I cut four ornate corner pieces (Marianne's dies) out of glitter paper.  I made the flowers by my favourite method.

After that it was just a matter of assembling the whole thing.

If you haven't already done so, why not hop over to Ike's World and see what my teamies have created - and  how about joining in? If you use the free digi or another of Ike's images you're in with a chance of winning a $15 prize certificate, which can't be  bad!  

Also entering this in 

 Designed To Color- Use a Die

Tuesday Throwdown - Awareness

Crafty hugs,

Keren

Snowdrops

Hi blog friends, welcome to my part of the blogiverse.  Did you know that the amazing Ike, who creates wonderful digis, has a new challenge blog?  The first ever Ike's World Challenge is to make something from the tic-tac-toe grid -

I  chose doily, tag and ribbon - 

The first version of this met with an unfortunate accident,which is why I am sliding in through the doors just before they shut them...I hope. (The blog is denying me permission to read it.. )  I'd printed out the snowdrops (an Ike digi) and glued micro beads onto the reverse.  I'd coloured the picture on the computer to save myself time and left it on one side for the glue to dry.  I forgot that the cat (Craft Supervisor Mysti) has a strange addiction to licking plastic. The project was not improved by the addition of cat spit, believe me!  (BTW, Mysti seems is OK - she obviously didn't like the taste of the ink as she didn't lick much - just enough to ruin it!)

So, take 2- as well as the aforementioned micro beads, I used a doily cut from a Cheery Lynne die, a teeny-tiny tag cut with a punch I've had for a long time, and a bit of velvet ric-rac ribbon (I LOVE velvet ribbon!) on some paper printed from a Sheena Douglass CD, mounted on a bit of textured silver card.  

Hope you like it! 

Crafty hugs,

Keren

Caught in Crystal

The recipe for the latest Artful Times blog challenge (sponsored by Oyster Stamps) is to make something using acetate.  I use acetate quite a bit, but usually to "float" things like butterflies over an image, so it took a fair bit of thinking before I remembered the "caught in crystal" technique.

 

I love the "caught in crystal" technique and have done ever since I saw it in Craft Stamper some years ago. (Sheena Douglass has a tutorial on YouTube here) If you haven't come across it before, a clear-drying medium is spread onto acetate and clear colour and inclusions (e.g. glitter) are added to the medium, then tissue paper is spread over the back of it and the whole shebang is left to dry.  I like to use clear floor polish (Pledge Multi-surface wax - used to be known as Klear) and I keep the pacakaging from the likes of Nestabilities as they have a nice rim which stops the fluid from going everywhere you don't want it to go.

For this piece, I used red and pink drawing inks (the gold backing card makes it look orange).  I also sprayed the acetate with some gold Spray and Sparkle. I attached the acetate to some gold card with the floor polish (it takes a while to dry, but works pretty well and is transparent once dry) and then decorated it with one of my favourite paper flowers and wings moulded from friendly plastic. 

I added the heart, cut out of velvet paper which I'd coloured with my Spectrum Noir pens, and some gold glitter peel-offs to just finish off the topper.  The card was originally white - some Tea Dye DI sorted that out as it was just too stark.

And there you have it.  Hope you enjoyed your visit- you'll be welcome back anytime!