Cherish your Dreams

Hi folks, thanks for stopping by!  Hope you're all having a lovely crafty weekend, wherever you might be, and welcome to my blog.

 

The Stamp Man's latest blog challenge is to make something embossed, and as it's my younger son's birthday next week (he'll be 25 - how is that possible?) I thought I'd combine making something for the challenge with his birthday card. 

 

I have to confess to another happy accident here.  The coloured panel (done with an Alterations embossing folder) was orignally a practice piece for a "painted chipped metal" technique.  The technique is paint-heavy so the card used in the making needs to be a good weight - 300 gsm is recommended, and I use Centura Pearl (the plain side) for most things.  In this case, I put the card into the folder the wrong way up.  Rather than waste it, I reasoned that the piece was going to be covered in paint so Nobody Would Ever Know.  Which worked until the final aging layer was wiped off, and took some of the lower layers with it, leaving behind areas where the pearl card is peeping through. 

 

The faux leather/crocodile is made by taking brown card and brayering a layer of PVA or gloss gel medium over the top.  If you try this, work quickly, brayer in one direction and don't overwork it - and clean your brayer immediately if you're planning to use it again!  Once dry, the card can still be embossed, as you can see.

 

What else? Oh, the "stitching" on the vertical strip was done by pricking out the holes (with my Tim Holtz ruler) and then dragging the tip of the piercing tool from hole to hole.  The sentiment is from Pink Petticoat, cut with a Spellbinders die and coloured with Distress Ink in Vintage Photo.

 

Well, I've had a lovely week off work, crafting to my heart's content, but now it's back to real life.  I may be a bit quiet for a while as I'm going to be busy elsewhere - a Risk Management course in work for one thing - but don't worry, I will be back!  See you soon, I hope.

 

TTFN!



Altered Tin

Not a clever blog title but my brain has gone on holiday after an unusually stressful day in work (I won't bore you with the details - suffice it to say that, at one point,  the Police had to be called to remove a customer who was refusing to leave the premises!). I'm lucky that my hobby keeps me sane(ish)!

Here's the tin that could be spotted lurking on my desk on Wednesday.  The latest challenge for the Stamp Man Challenge Blog is to alter something and as I have a number of these tins that I use to keep by crafting bits in (they came with coffee in originally) I thought I'd give one a makeover.

To begin with, I stripped the paint from the tin.  I use a brilliant gel paint stripper (Home Strip Paint and Varnish Stripper) that's not caustic, smells pleasant and cleans up with water, and does an AMAZING job, but it struggled a bit with the paint on this one.  I was determined, however, and once it was back to the bare metal I sponged on a couple of light coats of gesso, and once that was dry, I painted the tin brown.

While that was drying, I splodged some Distress Inks in various shades of brown onto my craft mat, sprayed them with water and smooshed them (technical term) about a bit, then spread a sheet of white tissue paper over it to pick up the colours.  (This tin needed one A4 piece for the tin itself and another A5 bit for the lid)

When it was all good and dry, I spread PVA glue over the whole thing, covered it with the tissue paper, allowing it to wrinkle , and then put another coat of PVA on top so that it was well and truly stuck on, and left it to dry.  I sponged another thin layer of PVA over it to make sure it was sealed and to give it some texture, and put it to one side while I thought about what I was going to do next!


After a couple of days drying time, I inked up the Harlequin texture mat with gold Brilliance ink and rolled the tin over it and added the embellishments.   (Though tempted, I refrained from adding flowers).  I think it's going to look good on my desk, and it'll keep my odds and ends under control - I hope!

Heavy Metal

The theme for the latest blog challenge from The Stamp Man is "Metal". Hah!  This plays right into my (somewhat inky) hands, because, gentle blogger, my favourite thing of the moment is Gilder's Paste, which is just super at making all sorts of everything look lovely and metallic;  and I when I was playing with the Perfect Pearls mist technique (see Tim Holtz's Compendium of Curiosities Volume II) I made up a few tags and one of them was just right for this project!

 

The sprocket shapes are die-cut out of chipboard and I've just rubbed some of the paste over them.  They are VERY shiny under the camera's flash, as you can see - it's easier to see in this picture, taken without the flash -

The butterfly is stamped onto Fantasy Film and mounted onto some scrap acetate so that it "floats" and the letters are from the "once upon a time" Sizzlets die, cut out of silver card and mounted on foam squares.  The corner piece was meant to be the gnomon on a sundial but was too small and the arrow was also left over from another project. 

Hope you like it - and thanks for visiting!

Summertime Blues

The Stamp Man's current blog challenge theme is "The Colours of Summer".  A couple of years ago I did a few tags that were distinctly summery/seasidey, but I wanted to do something a bit different - and nothing was coming to me.  Possibly the lousy weather we've had so far this summer has something to do with it.  Then today...INSPIRATION!  YAAY! - SUMMERTIME BLUES!

I have the Aspects of Design musical instruments in my stash, so I decided I'd use the guitar as my central image.  The colours would be shades of blue (of course).  I just needed the words...and didn't have them!

Is a little thing like that going to stop our heroine (i.e. ME)?  Perish Forbid!  Not with my trusty Imagepac sachets to hand.  'Twas but the work of a moment (Oh, all right, half an hour) to run up a quick stamp.  The getting carried away and making four others, that took all afternoon.  The sachets have been discontinued so once I've run through my current supply there will be no more...

So - after all that, I could finally get started.  I stamped the words and the guitar in Versamark and heat embossed with clear detail powder, then built up the colours in layers.  After that it was a quick bit of spritz & flick, some faded words built up letter by letter in London Fog Memento, then iron the whole thing to remove the embossing powder.  Simples!