Tuesday Travel

I thought I would share some travel photos with you.  My favourite place to visit is Venice, we have been three times now, twice during carnival when the costumes are so fabulous.  These pictures are from February this year.

Gondola on the Grand Canal

Steampunk couple

If I won the lottery, Venice would be the place I would go to first :-)

Stamped background page for layout

At the crop yesterday, I was winding down for the day and decided to mess about with a bit of background stamping.  I used a sheet of Bazzill in Natural as the base.  Most of my backgrounds start the same way - using an ink duster brush to apply and blend distress inks in Antique Linen and Tea Dye.  It looks a bit splotchy and uneven at this point, but that's OK :-)

Next step is the crackles - swoosh distress ink onto a splotchy shaped area of your crackle stamp (I use Indigo Blu) in Tea Dye and apply randomly over the page, especially in the clearer areas between the previously applied inks.  A non-wood mounted stamp is more flexible for this as you can hold in the hand to apply.  I also tried using Antique Linen for some of the crackles.

Next I added the 'speckles', again using Tea Dye and a Paperartsy stamp.

 Now for the corner stamping.  I knew I wanted to have a graduated stamped image, fading out naturally towards the edges and disappearing into the background.  The ink was Kaisercraft 'Vintage'.  The stamp I chose to use is a tile pattern by Hero Arts for the Basic Grey 'Spice Market ' range - another new purchase used!  I applied the ink to one corner and upwards/along from that corner, then blurred the edges of the ink with a baby wipe before stamping.  This gives the 'fade-to-background' effect at the edges of the image.

Finally I blended some Brushed Corduroy distress ink around the edge, then went over the whole lot lightly with Antique Linen again, plus a bit more Tea Dye.

There will be more stamping on this sheet, but that will depend on how the layout is arranged, so for the moment, that's it.  I am rather pleased with it :-)

Black Sheep of the Family ......

My work colleague gave me this box to 'do something with', so I offered to decorate it to match her newly re-done bedroom.  She gave me a scrap of the curtain fabric to get the colours from, which were white, orange, yellow and green.

I decided to make paper panels for each side and ordered some papers from the Basic Grey 'Spice Market' range, as I thought the colours looked right.  I was going to use one paper over the whole item, but my colleague liked two of them, so I have made the side panels from one design and the front/back panels from another.

I cut and attached the panels, then decided that a gold line border would look good all around.  Sy did her best to dissuade me and I should have listened to her ...... it all went horribly wrong and when I took the lines off, the paper tore in a couple of places.  We made a quick dash to the market haberdashery and bought some fabric roses.  I attached these to the side panels with some pearly swirls and they do look rather nice :-)

I think I would have preferred it with just one paper on all sides, but it's not my bedroom it will be living in!  I will be handing it over tomorrow ... let's hope she likes it :-)

New stash - Buy it, Use it

I may have to make this a regular feature ...... how many times do we buy something we simply must have - only to put into a drawer and forget about it?

Recently I bought a butterfly stamp from Visible Image.  I already had a previously inked and stamped background, so decided to stamp and emboss the image using Verdigris embossing powder.  I then added some spots (also Visible Image) in copper over the body of the butterfly.

Now to die-cut the image - I had also recently bought Nesties Labels One, after seeing a project on Pinterest that used them (!), it turned out that the largest in the set fit nicely around the image.  Unfortunately, I wanted to mat it .... so I also bought the Grand Nestabilities Labels One and used the smallest die from that set for a mat.

To make up the card, I embossed some cardstock and cut to fit the card blank, then rounded the corners of both blank and cardstock.  The matted image was attached to the card with 1mm foam tape and I added a peel off sentiment.

So this card uses three new purchases.  Not bad :-)

Embossing powder index

Today I thought I would share with you my system for indexing embossing powders.  Not only can you see which ones you have, it also shows the end colour, which is not always possible to see from the 'raw' powder.

I have this many powders .......

I didn't dare count, but it must be somewhere around 70.  Plus a few I haven't got around to indexing yet, still waiting patiently on the desk for their turn.  Then there are the ones languishing in a drawer because they don't work very well, yet I can't bear to throw them away......

Luckily, a few years ago, I hit on a system.  I bought an A5 pocket display file and cut several pieces of white card to fit inside.  Then I sorted the powders into colour groups and assigned a page to each group.  Each embossing powder has a stamped/embossed sample A B C in the book and I write the brand and colour name beside it.

Metallics

Greens

 

 

Each card is only stamped/embossed on one side, but two cards fit back to back in the pockets.  It's proved absolutely invaluable over the years, as I can check for the right shade to match whatever paper I am using.

I really must get around to indexing the ones on my desk....... ;-)

Throwback Thursday

One of the suggestions on the Blogtoberfest list of prompts, was to have a 'Throwback Thursday' and look back at some old work.
It was quite interesting to look back through old layouts, I don't like half of them as much as I did when I made them .....LOL. 
I have chosen the two pages from 2007 below, DS1 and DS2 because I love the photos - they are so neutral even though they have colour in them.  For DS1 returning from uni for the holidays, I used a strong colour for the background paper and circles.  I probably wouldn't do much differently with this photo today, maybe a couple of layers and doing the title in another way.  For DS2, in an underground car park somewhere in London, I did the opposite and used monochrome papers.  Again I wouldn't change much on this page. 
Both pages, if I made them today, would have many more steampunk elements on, I think!

Return of the Prodigal

Industrial Cool

Sun and Moon Dragons

For the first day of Blogtoberfest, it seems right that I share this project, as it has been so long in the making and now is finally finished! 
About 12 or 15 years ago, I bought a self-published cross stitch chart booklet from a charity shop.  It was called the Moongate Book of Dragons and I painstakingly copied the Moongate Dragon chart into my cross stitch software (Easy Cross) to make it easier to work from, then stitched it.

It was my intention to then change the colours to make a Sun Dragon and flip the chart so I would have a pair of dragons facing each other.  But before I got around to doing that, we had a computer crash, I had to re-install the software and all my previous files had been corrupted.  It meant putting in the entire chart again, square by square and I couldn't face it at the time!

Fast forward 12 or 15 years ....... I bit the bullet (been doing a lot of that recently .....) and redid the chart.  Stitching in my car before work every morning and also putting in a few hours at crops, meant I finished it in three months, which is probably something of a record for me!

Here is the Moon:

And the Sun:

Both together:

Hung in their final positions above the window:

The Sun Dragon is stitched on light blue fabric, though it does appear white when hung next to the other one LOL.

I am so pleased to have finished them off, finally!