31 Days of Halloween - Day 9

Hello folks, and it’s Day 9 day of the Smeared and Smudged 31 days of Halloween Blog Hop.  All you have to do to take part is to hop through each of the Wicked Blogs that are participating and leave a comment on each project.  All Horrifying Hoppers will receive a Survival Button at the end of the month to proudly post on their blog.

If you’re following the blog hop in order, you’ve arrived here from Teresa’s blog.    If you’ve arrived from elsewhere and you’d like to work your way through all the participating blogs, the blog roll is in the sidebar – just start at the beginning or wherever suits you best.

Well, there was no way I was going to get through October without a haunted wood, was there?  This tag is my entry for the Quoth The Raven challenge .  It's a big tag that I've decorated up with die cuts from a number of sources - I'm particularly in love with the Xcut scene builders for the spooky wood.  The Master's face is a digital stamp from Smeared Ink (no longer available as a digi, sorry) and I've transplanted it onto the body of a raven (Bwa-ha-haa!) (Crash of thunder, flash of lightning etc).  

Hope you are enjoying the hop.  Don't forget that Scavenger Items will be hidden randomly on the Wicked Blogs, and are not guaranteed to be available every day. You will have to visit blogs to find them. If you find one, you will email and let us know exactly where it was and your name will go into that scavenger item's drawing. Each person who finds the "hidden" picture will get one entry. The drawing for each scavenger prize will be the day after it was posted and winners will be chosen by random number based on who emailed. Thank you for visiting.  Now, if you’re working your way through the roll, it’s on to Renee.  Bye now!

Curiously Challenged...with added Poe

This time Linda Ledbetter and her talented DT have challenged us to create something using the tea roses as demonstrated in Tim Holtz's Compendium of Curiosities Volume III.  Now, I enjoy making little flowers to add to my projects and I've loved this technique ever since Tim first showed it to us, so I went a bit tea-rose mad.  I made them out of burlap, coloured with all sorts of inks and sprays (mostly Dylusions).  (If you want to know how they're made, you really should get the book!)

As luck would have it, the Minions of the Master at Quoth The Raven have decreed that this month's offering to the mighty Poe shall include flowers, so the tea roses came in very handy.   I also used a little frame, a peacock feather and a couple of Rick St Denis digi stamps.  You can't really see the underlying tag in the picture - it's basically foil which has been coloured with alcohol inks and embossed and is really rather gorgeous.  Here's a picture -

Hope you like it.  And thank you for visiting - please do come back!  

Crafty Hugs,

Keren

You blood-red roses

Our boots and clothes are all in pawn,

Go down, you blood red roses, go down!

It's mighty drafty round Cape Horn.

Go down, you blood red roses, go down!

All you pinks and posies,

Go down, you blood red roses, go down!

I've had this sea shanty in my head ever since starting work on my projects for Ikesworld Challenge Blog's DT entry in the Smeared and Smudged  My Bloody Valentine blog hop.  I admit to being an old folkie from way back, and loved the rousing harmonies.  So it's the inspiration for my third blog hop piece - red roses signifying love and all that smooshy stuff!

I've used two of Ike's digis on this - Candle Poe and Gothic Window.  Well, seeing that Poe-sies are mentioned in the shanty (sorry!)  Master Poe had to get in there somewhere!  The Rose stamp was a free covermount from Craft Stamper magazine - it's a small version of one made by Visible Image.  The card is a pocket sleeve pop-up - it folds flat to fit in an envelope but stands up nicely when the tab is pulled.

PS - I'm entering this in the Quoth the Raven challenge - How doth I loveth thee?

Crafty hugs,

Keren

Words of wisdom

Hello blog friends.  At Quoth the Raven they're asking for projects that reference quotations this month, which, as I have a - quirky- sense of humour, could be dangerous. I'm still on the old kinetic card kick, so it's another twofer...

So here we have a Rick St Denis digi of the Master, printed out and mounted onto some Halloweeny-orange card...

Pull a tab and...

The message reads " It's being so cheerful as keeps me going", which is a quote from a character called Mona Lott in a radio programme called ITMA.  I am not old enough to remember it, despite my ex's insistence that when I went to school the lessons were in Latin (and he wonders why he's my ex!)
but my mother was fond of quoting it when she came across a particularly miserable person.
Here's a closeup of the sentiment -

 

The instructions for this one came from a book called Interactive Cards and I'd recommend trying to get hold of the book as it was a bit tricky to get my head around this one.

I'm also entering this into the
Artful Times Blog challenge - Spooktacular

Anyway, I hope you like it!  Thanks for stopping by!

Crafty hugs,

Keren

Crow and Poe

Hello blog friends!  Well, after weeks of next to nothing, this week it's all happening.  I blame Mr Holtz - I was having so much fun with Creative Chemistry 102 that the ol' blog got a bit neglected.  But I have not been idle, oh no no no!  And it's my turn to run the Left of Center challenge, which this time is sponsored by Rick St Denis and has a Creepy/Spooky theme.

It's a twofer this time.  I'm on a kinetic card kick right now and this is a "Dissolving image" card -

First a crow (all right, it's a raven!)

 And then it's Poe!

This is a tricky one to make.  It's important to get the pieces in the right orientation or it will almost work but not quite!  (Guess how I know?  I'd practice a bit first if I were you!)   I've done aYouTube video of how to make this (which I could do with updating) and if you would like templates they can be found here.

The frame is covered with spiderweb netting, painted black and drybrushed white (I've done this before but I am very proud of myself for thinking of it - someone else may have done it first but if so I didn't know about it so I'm giving myself the credit!).  To tone down the bright white card I put a piece of acetate into the aperture and dabbed on some Lake Mist alcohol ink just to give it an aged look (sorry about the flash flare on Mr Poe)

Anyway, please hop over to LOC and see what the DT have been up to...and how about joining in?  If you don't like the theme you can still enter the challenge as long as your project is "Left of Centre" - creepy, horror, anime, steampunk, goth and so on.  We would LOVE to see your work!

Crafty Hugs,

Keren

Tic-Tac-POE!

I admit, I do have a "thing" for Edgar Allen Poe, the master of Mystery and Imagination.  So when I came across the Quoth the Raven blog, I did a happy dance and signed up immediately.  This month the Minions of the Master have challenged us to create an offering by playing tic-tac-poe - here's the grid;

I missed last month's challenge so I have to get back in the Master's good books this time!  I chose the middle column.  Now, regular readers of this blog (thank you! Thank you!) will know that I do love my Alterations dies and I love paint effects.  A while ago I was having a play with Ferro paints and embossing folders.  I made a very heavily textured Alterations cabinet card for a project and then didn't use it (and again, regular readers will know that this happens quite frequently!) .  But, being a crafter, I didn't throw it away.  No indeedy.  It lay at the bottom of one of my bits boxes (we all have bits boxes, don't we?) until I remembered it and decided that Its Time Had Come!!!

 I found the Buckmann portrait of Poe on the internet and set to work to make a digi -

which I tinted sepia and printed out.  I die-cut an oval out of the centre of the cabinet card and rubbed a touch of silver gilding wax over the top to highlight the texture.  A black feather or two (to suggest a quill pen) and rose out of the bits box (moulded out of paper clay when I was playing and coloured with black and red Dylusions sprays) and....

(As so much of this was made with things I'd forgotten about, I will enter it in the Our Creative Corner Challenge - Forgotten Things so that others may hear news of the Master)

Crafty hugs,

Keren

A Poe-triotic blog post

July already, and of course, for our friends in the USA, Independence Day has come and gone.  If you celebrated the 4th of July, I hope you had a great time!

The Minions of the Master over at Quoth the Raven have decreed that this month we shall submit Poe-triotic items for the delectation of the faithful, and here is my humble offering -

The image is made up of digital stamps of Poe and the raven from Smeared Ink (no longer available as a digi, but there are many other similar images out there) combined with a picture of Uncle Sam and manipulated in my graphic software, with a background and lettering added.

It's printed onto Safmat and then applied to a faux weathered wood background (one of Andy Skinner's Timeworn Techniques) with the headers cut from the same material with the "Pediments" Alterations die. 

And there it is.  I hope you like it - and that the Master approves!

See you next time!

Crafty Hugs,

Keren

Poe-try

Hello, blog friends and thank you for visiting.

I've been a bit quiet lately.  There have been a couple of reasons, one being that my husband has been in the hospital (he had a nasty infection in a gland in his neck and spent five days on intravenous antibiotics).  Running to and fro to visit him, plus the demands of getting  to grips with a new job and recovering from the old one (seriously stressful!) left me little time or inclination to craft. Then I got a bit carried away with my entry for the Quoth the Raven challenge...it turned into a real project.  So this post is going to have quite a few photos.

The theme is "Anything Poes" - and I've taken my inspiration from "The Raven". 

It was originally going to be a notebook cover.  I began by embossing black cardstock and painting it to get the look of leather - one of Andy Skinner's Timeworn Techniques.  The frame was made using a mould bought from a well-known internet auction site and is moulded out of paper clay, painted silver (Eco Green Antique Silver, as it happens.) The plaque I made out of Pearl white Fimo. When it was cooked I stamped the raven stamp (from the Tim Holtz Hallowe'en set) in black archival ink and covered it in Glossy Accents.  I made the book cover out of chipboard (yes, the pieces that come to act as dividers in the boxes of envelopes we have in the office.)  And I could have stopped there...but I didn't.

I decided to put the poem into a mini album using Laura Denison's "Stack the Deck" method.  The great thing about this method is that it allows space for embellishments.  I love getting a 3D element into my projects and my latest toys are some Martha Stewart silicon moulds, including this frame, so while I had the paper clay out it would have been rude not to make it.  I made my own mould (with Siligum) of a rose-shaped bead and made a few paper clay roses while I was at it. 

I made the leaves for the Stack the Deck out of black cardstock, and while the paper clay was drying I went searching for some suitable papers to suit my project.  In the haunted wing of my stash I found a pad of "oriental" papers I've had for years - so long I can't remember where or when I bought them - but the rich colours were just the job.  In the pad there was some white textured paper with a gold flower design that I didn't like very much.  When the flowers were dry I put some sheets of the white paper underneath them while I sprayed them (black & red Mr Huey's and pewter and red Radiant Rains)...and they suddenly became yummy - result!  All that was needed then was a vintage picture (again, one I've had for years) to represent Leonore and to paint the frame silver.

Surpise - the page opens up. I die-cut some ravens and the candlestick using the Alterations dies and you can see some of the oriental paper behind the raven.  The silver part of the candlestick is cut from a scrap of textured card that I found at the same time as the oriental paper.

Next pages - the window is a digital stamp from Ike's, printed out twice, colored with Spectrum Noirs.  I cut the panels out of the lower print and stuck the frame onto acetate. I backed the acetate with a scrap of card - I masked the moon and blended shades of blue ink (Adirondack Cloudy Blue, Stonewashed and Denim) over the mask with a bit of Dusty Concord and Black Soot Distress Inks around the edge.  I used the Split Tree stamp from Clarity to get the branches (I used Memento ink).  I repeated the process on the tag and added the Raven  (Dah-dah-DAH!)

The raven and the background paper on the left are from Ike's. (I like Ike's.  They have some very fab digital stamps in the fantasy/gothic genre)  On the right, the raven is from Smeared Ink - added to the bust of Pallas and coloured with my Speccies (hard to see in the image but it is really a light grey).

More diecuts and Smeared Ink digi stamping

Etcetera

Etcetera

Nearly done.  You can find directions for the pushmi-pullyu card here.

The last page.  Thank you for staying with me in this marathon post!

Crafty hugs,

Keren

The Red Death

Hi everyone, and welcome to my blog.  Today's post is all about my entry for this month's quest at the Quoth the Raven, Nevermore blog, which is a celebration of all things Poe and doesn't do cute (well, neither do I).  The challenge is to choose three elements from a list, and I have chosen - lace, flowers and Edgar Allen Poe.

I've taken my inspiration from Poe's short story, "The Masque of the Red Death", which is set in against the background of a mysterious plague.  To avoid the Red Death, Prince Prospero, together with a thousand of his nobles, shut himself up in one of his abbeys.  After being isolated for some months, the prince gives a masked ball, decorating each of seven rooms in a different colour. In one room, which is decorated in black and red, is a large clock;  every time it strikes the hour, the guests stop their revels, disturbed by the sound.   At midnight, a hooded figure with a terrifying mask, that of a victim of the Red Death, is suddenly noticed by everyone...(dramatic music, flash of lightning, clap of thunder!)

 Confession time.  I wanted to use the tag background for another challenge, but didn't get it finished in time, so I put it to one side and hoped it would come in handy.  It's a fun technique, this one - but you do get covered in glitter.  I covered the tag with some double-sided adhesive sheet, then covered that with a piece of lace and sprinkled on the black glitter.  After I shook off the excess, I removed the lace, then sprinkled on the red glitter.

When I tried the effect of the clock face (from Prima) against the background it needed something to help it stand out against the bling.  I'd been playing with gel medium, mixing it with black gesso and then spreading it over stamps.  Once dry, it can be peeled off and the resulting image can be added to your project.  I'd tried it on the Angel Wings stamp (from Sheena Douglass).  Now, either the stamp was a bit too detailed or I didn't put enough gel medium on but it was very delicate and fiddly to remove, so I'm not sure if I'll try the technique again, but once I'd rubbed some gilding wax onto the finished wings they did look rather good in a "Dark Angel" kind of way and the clock face looked good against them.

I printed out a picture of Poe, sized to fit an oval pendant blank I had handy.  I covered it in Crackle Accents as I wanted an "aged and distressed" look.  While it was setting, I made three roses using my favourite method and sprayed them with some mica spray.  I had a piece of card that I'd covered with Viva Ferro paint, and I die-cut it with the Fleur-de-Lys On the Edge die in my Vagabond.

After that it was just a question of putting it all together.  I used a couple of foam dots on the back of the pendant as the bail is quite deep, and Pinflair Glue gel for the roses.  Cosmic Shimmer glue worked for everything else, even the clock face, which is made of  metal.

And there it is.  I hope the Master will be pleased with my humble offering;  and that you liked it, as well.  Thank you for visiting - see you soon!