WOYWW - January 30

Welcome, WOYWW'ers, thank you for visiting.  If you've been here before, you may have seen the "carriage clock" box I made out of chipboard a couple of weeks ago.  Today you find me in the middle of making a mini album to go inside it.  I'm using the 6x6 Chronology papers from Docrafts - the album is going to be about the Steampunk day that we went to a couple of summers ago. 

Note the handy sticky-tape holder - yes, you are right, I didn't get round to putting the funnel away after I'd used it! 
Anyway, as it is WOYWW, I'm off to take a look at what everyone else is up to.  I hope you enjoyed your visit - please call again!

C is for...

Cat, Cheshire Cat.  And circles, as well.  Alice in Wonderland was one of my favourite books as a child, cats are my favourite animals, so the decision as to what I was going to do for the latest Craft Barn alphabet challnnge wasn't hard!

The Cheshire cat face is a Stamp Attack stamp, which I masked while I coloured the background in shades of blue.  Then I inked up the Circles stamp - from Tim Holtz's Bitty Grunge set - using Castaway ink (another "C"!).  I followed the instructions and let it sit for five minutes or so, then I remooved the mask and ironed the ATC with a hot iron to make the colour change. I love this - you never quite know what effect the Castaway will hsve.  In this case, it bleached the image a bit.   All I had to do then was to colour in Chessie and the job, as they say, was a good'un.

My Top 12 of 2012

One of the joys of blog-following is coming across blogs followed by bloggers you follow (if you follow me).  I followed a link from another blog that brought me to the Catered Crop Top 12 in 2012 challenge.  Now, I've already shared my favourite project - my final assemblage piece for the Timeworn Techniques workshop - but it got me thinking, what were the other 11?   So, in no particular order, I present -

"A Bottle of Firewater" - made for Andy Skinner's Evil Elixir Mixer workshop. 

The Altered Coffee Tin - 

The tag that I made for the "Hammer House of Horror" challenge, which is an example of my sense of humour - well, I think it's funny!

This one was a piece of serendipity - it was almost all made of  "rejects" or surplus bits from other projects - I love it because it came out so well!

I was having fun playing with Viva Terra paints and making paper roses out of paper I'd coloured with mica paints when I made this sundial out of unwanted CD's and a cardboard tube.

I think the rubber stamp I used for this cabinet card is beautiful so I didn't do much with it.  Again, this is a "reject" that I reused (the top left of the image didn't stamp clearly, but it's covered by the frame).

The theme for this next one was "Mona Lisa";  I spent a fair bit of time heating and re-heating UTEE to get the texture I wanted.

The UK went Olympic-mad this year - we went to watch the Torch be carried through our town.  As I tribute, I made my own, to be carried around the office!

A different faux leather and faux snakeskin technique on this little box.  I do enjoy making paper and card look like something else!  

I once had a cat that would go to any lengths to avoid setting paw on the floor (he was a rescued cat so we don't know what he'd experienced before he came to us).  We thought he had ambitions to catch bats instead of mice!  He inspired this tag - 

This is the cover of  a mini album I'm making.  The challenge was "stamping without ink" - I stamped into a thick layer of Viva Ferro paint to get the textured swirls-

And finally, one more time - The Dead Man's Chest.

So that was last year.  Onward and upward in 2013!

Famous Last Words!

Good day, gentle visitor, and welcome to my blog.  Today I am sharing my contribution for Haunted Design House's latest challenge, which is to created something creepy, gothic, or Hallowe'eny on the theme of "Famous Last Words".  After some deliberation, (I toyed with "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist..." for some time) I chose Oscar Wilde's alleged last words - "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do!"

I stamped the skeleton (from the Tim Holtz Mini Hallowe'en 2 set) and then masked it (masking seems to be may favourite technique lately, don't know what's got into me!).  The halequin background (turned sideways) came next - I used London Fog Memento ink on the stamp at the edge and Tuxedo Black for the rest so it would look as if it were receding into the distance.  Then I masked that bit and stamped the background pattern. 

Leaving ALL the masks in place, I coloured the background (Tim Holtz Spiced Marmalade and Rusty Hinge DI, with Frayed Burlap to add shading).  Then I took  the mask away and lightly shaded the skeleton with the ink left on my splodge mat, then added in more shading with a cut & dry nib.

The Famous Last Words were just printed out and distressed, and then cut with a Spellbinders die, as was the frame.   And, quite suddenly, it was complete.  I do hope you like it.  Thank you for calling, and do come again!

WOYWW, 23 January

Welcome, WOYWWers!  As you can see there isn't much happening here today.  I'm between projects at the moment, with just a couple of things to finish off.  The blue blocks to the centre right of the picture are heat-mouldable foam and I'm looking forward to playing with it, however, everything is on hold at the moment as the snow is pelting down  and the big kid (aka my husband) has turned off the lights so he can watch it falling.  I am practicing my touch-typing skills, taught to me at great expense by Her Majesty's Civil Service, and it's probably just as well I no longer have to use them in anger! 

Anyway, sorry it's all a bit boring this week and thank you for visiting.  I'm going to visit some other desks now, as I'm having trouble remembering where the full stop is.  See you soon, I hope!

Tim's 12 Tags - January

I'm not promising anything, you understand.  Last year I failed dismally at joining in with Tim Holtz's 12 tags - I think I only managed one.  But at least I've managed to complete the January tag before February arrives! 

 

 

I've kept pretty close to Tim's original, as you can see.  The only thing I've changed is to leave off the hardware - when I got the tag to this stage I decided I liked it as it was.  I hope you agree.

 

Thank you for stopping by - you'll be welcome back at any time!

The Mists of Time

Hello, gentle visitor, and welcome to my little corner of the Blogiverse - I hope you'll enjoy your visit.  I don't know about you, but I've heard rumours of an Artists' Trading Card revival;  I do hope it's true!  Just in case you didn't know, ATC's are small pieces of artwork and there are only two rules when creating them - they must be 2.5 inches by 3.5 in size, and they must only be swapped or given away, never sold.  They are great fun and usually easy to do, and a good way of making use of all the little scraps of card and material we all accumulate.

The Artful Times Challenge Blog challenge for this period is to create an ATC about "Time", so here's my contribution -

 

 

I used Viva Ferro in shades of graphite, gold, green gold and golden orange for the background, applying it with a spatula and making sure I had a good generous layer on the card.  I then inked up my stamp  (a background of clock faces, from Hero Arts - you can just about see one of the clocks in the bottome left corner) using gold Brilliance ink and and stamped into the wet Ferro (and immediately dropping the stamp into a bowl of wated to prevent the paint drying on it).  I pressed the clock face charms into the paint and left it all to dry.

 

Once it was dry, I went over the places I wanted to highlight with rub-on wax in gold.  And that was pretty much it - as I said, ATC's are quick and easy.  Hope you enjoyed looking at this one!