Made some Magpie ATCs using the number stamps Susan Renshaw sent me.  I don't have any magpie stamps and couldn't find any to buy, so used clip art magpies, printed out and stuck on.  Brusho backgrounds, with some faint stamping in the background also.

 

A panel on the theme of achievement.  Quite an achievement just making this as I'm on holiday in the Greek Islands without much crafting stuff.   I bought the beads here to spell out FLY and HIGH.  Most of the rest came from a craft magazine I brought with me.  I don't think I'd have used this praying image if I had had access to more stamps/images.  But it gives me the idea of aiming high, doing your best, all with the help of prayer.

Path of Positivity - Desire 2

I was thinking of the desire to do something positive in life, however small, and love this Indigoblu sentiment.  I made a background of timepieces, and added a small sparkly dragonfly as an illustration of a breath-taking moment.

Path of Positivity - Desire 1

For the older married couples among us, I thought is sentiment from Visible Image was great, and it goes well with a vintage heart stamp by PaperArtsy.  The couple in the heart remind me slightly of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten, now our Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, whose marriage has lasted an amazingly long time.  Distress ink background, stazon stamping, with sakura pen on the roses, gold pen around the heart and distress sparkles over the heart.

Block printing

Made a card using acrylic block printing technique - lots of interesting texture but I found it hard to show this in the photo.  I stamped a bit of small text around the edge, and stamped the Craft Stamper flowers onto another printed sheet. Left the tag with the sentiment plain so it would show up well.Very messy and great fun!

Embossing background

Played with the Craft Stamper Magazine's embossing background idea.  I thought I would make an ATC but I backed it onto black card so its too big.  As I did not have very many coloured embossing powders, I used dull silver, dull gold and pink, then the stencil was embossed with silver pearl, which added texture but not colour, then I put a bit of sparkly gold on using my finger to add the versamark ink, and the stamping was embossed in black.  I love the way the images slide around a bit, adding to the distressed look. The final layer of the background was to add some sprinkles of sparkly gold powder, without any ink, and heat from below to melt them.  Mind you, I got a similar effect on the flowers I made, by adding gold glitter glue, but still... it was embossing!  I made a few matching flowers separately, and put them on with sticky pads.  Nice idea, I'll try it again sometime.  I like the fact that it looks a lot more textured than it is, although the background is not completely flat.

Some cards

Never seem to have enough time to blog, but I have done quite a bit of crafting this year though I forget to photograph most of it.  Anyway, here are a few pictures.  I made some inchie cards inpsired by a Craft Stamper mag article a few motnhs ago.   I'm still managing the daily art journal - see pictures of the calendar on my other blog.

Jan & Feb ATCs

I'm using the Craft Stamper mag free stamps to decorate my Art Journal Calendar this year, so I thought I would make a series of ATCs each month using them too. The backgrounds are watercolour paint, then stamped and for January coloured with Sakura pens. I gave away most of the January ATCs, so the two pictured here are not the best ! I also bought some things in Create and Craft TVs sale, and made the vintage style ATCs in January with some of those bits - love the roses. And I found some super Tim Holtz stamps for sale on ebay, so I had to buy them and use the umbrella man to make ATCs in Feb. He is stamped onto acetate, heat embossed, and fixed using brads over a background made from distress ink stains splattered on blue card - I was playing with the stains to see what effects I could do.

ATCs

Sorry for the long delay in posting. Somehow I never got back to it after our holiday, I was so busy. Anyway, for my 2012 calendar see my brand new other blog - Sheila's 2012 Calendar. And here are a few ATCs I made in 2011. We decided to give up having themes for our monthly swap, and decided to do "Anything Goes". Inspiration was flagging in November so I did dome random choices using a die, and for December it came up red and black, cute style, seasonal theme, so although I don't usually do cute, I dusted off some unused stamps made ATCs.








For November, my random choices were yellow and purple, distressed shapes. I forgot to distress the edges of the shapes so they are not really distressed style, but I did use some purple shamrock brads I got ages ago in a mystery parcel. And blue and brown, oriental, flowers (a great idea - I enjoyed doing htis, and I did use a bit of distress ink round the edges of these!)









And here are a few ATCs I made for UK Stampers network swaps. I got the panda stamp in a craft shop's closing down sale - sad to see the shop go, but we still have the chance to meet fro workshops in local halls now we can't met at the shop in Twyford.

August Calendar

Scanned images above and photo below.

Another month is here and I've hardly had time to blog, but I have made my August Calendar pages (and finished writing up the July Calendar). Another great stamp from Craft Stamper magazine which gives me my pink, blue, green colour scheme and floral decoration theme for August. I painted my pages with acrylic paint, and I've put the journalling squares directly onto the page, painting them with a bit of pearlescent white here I thought they were too dark. Not sure how it will look when I write on them, but I like my multi-coloured pages now. I like drawing the doodle-ly squares straight onto the page. I coloured the stamped flower images softly using distress inks.

July's ATC swap theme was "Jewels" so I made one with pink pearls
and one with jewellery on black velvet paper.

My July Calendar pages

Long time no blogging, due to busyness at home and then holidays. I did do a bit of Art Journalling on holiday - pictures later when I finish putting the holiday journal together. However, I have done my July Calendar. Yesterday I painted some patterned card in pink and pearlescent white, decorated it with the lovely Craft Stamper chandelier and a bird, stuck on squares using only two patterned papers, and used Distress Inks in Victorian Velvet and Frayed Burlap. I like this colour co-ordinated effect - less colourful than most months. What I don't like is having to stick all the squares on - there is a lot to be said for painting the squares when painting a background on plain paper !

June Calendar

Yesterday being a Bank Holiday Monday I was at home, so I painted some pages for my June Art Journal Calendar. I've gone back to painting the whole page in acrylic paint, and sticking paper squares on. I love these papers ! This is the first month where I have not used the 2011 Craft Stamper Free stamp - I decided I didn't like it enough, so I have used their black cat stamp from June 2010, which is great. Not sure it has come out that well on my pages, but at least I like the overall purple (and silver and black) effect. You can't have too much purple !

May ATCs and Tags

This month's ATC swap theme was Men. I made a vintage style ATC using bits and pieces from Creative Craft Cabin's bargain bundle bags. The blue one uses a football stamp I bought at Ally Pally, and some foam tool embellishments, also from Creative Craft Cabin. And I made some tags using chipboard tag blanks that I got from Capture the Magic at Ally Pally.

May calendar

Better late than never ! We've been very busy recently - Easter and lots of Bank holidays, which meant days volunteering at the Reading Beer & Cider festival. Great fun but also hard work. So I painted my May pages a few days ago, filled in some of the entries and finished the stamping yesterday. This month I did the pages with watercolours again, but I masked off the squares before doing the background - more or less - some of them are neater than others. Then I doodled edges and stamped with the Craft stamper balloon stamp. Today I added a couple of photos of the lovely balloon flight that was my birthday present a few years ago.

Sakura Pens Workshop

Fab workshop on using Sakura pens at the Creative Craft Cabin this morning with Michelle Johnson. Made two cards and several toppers, which turned into two ATCs, a pink topper for another card and some more left over bits that I can use later. Great fun, learned lots of techniques for using sakura pens, and I bought some more - gold, silver and sparkly.

Artful Splodger Blog Candy

Pop over here http://artfulsplodger.blogspot.com/2011/03/shop-opening-giveaway.html for some lovely candy - open until 18 April !

April Calendar

Another month has flown by. So its time to make my Art Journal Calendar pages for April. First I painted the background in watercolours, then painted squares for each day.

As the Craft Stamper magazine stamp for April was a butterfly I thought I should do some delicate pastel pages with fluttery butterflies. So it s a bit different this month. I painted my background with watercolour paints, instead of acrylics, but they came out a bit darker than I had intended. Then I painted the squares for each day in watercolour, quite dark. And stamped the butterflies using dark Distress Inks, and added a few stamped & heat embossed onto dark vellum. I like the effect of painting the squares directly onto the background, rather than sticking patterned paper on, and will probably try doing this again later in the year, but the finished pages are not that good. I should have redone the backgrounds and restamped the images to get a better finish, but ran out of time and energy. I took a picture after I'd finished painting, and then scanned and photographed the finished pages.

Another great stamp from Craft Stamper, and next month should be good too.

Artist Trading Club ATCs for March

Finished my finger painted old book page background ATCs today, for the Artist Trading Club swap this month. I painted an old paperback copy of "Othello" which was falling apart, using some lovely bright acrylic paints. Then I stamped black swirls and text - very, very similar to my easel ATCs, I realised, too late. And added stamped, heat embossed vellum flowers with big bright brads, and a few words from the book to finish them off.

Stitch and Craft

"Beautiful" scrapbook page and MJM's instruction sheet.

Pampered pets - workshop shaker card on the right.

Had a super day out on Thursday at the Stitch and Craft show at London's Olympia, travelling up by train. I got there about 10.45, and was able to join the docrafts card making workshop at 11, and Michelle Jackson-Mogford's scrapbooking one at 1pm. Also saw Dawn Bibby of QVC demonstrating at 4pm, and made a few cards. I bought various things, including some lovely stamps, especially docrafts things that I don't usually see. We used their new pampered pets range to make a shaker card - mine fell apart when I picked it up at the end of the class, shedding beads, so we stuck it back together but it came apart in my bag on the way home too. I made the other (pink dog) card at home, using some of the papers they gave us. Michelle Jackson-Mogford's "beautiful" scrapbook layout was lovely. We ran out of time to finish it, but when I got home I realised I had some good pictures of my husband on Santorini, where we went for his 50th birthday last year. The main photo was the wrong size, but I added two other pics, so the title "beautiful" might refer to Santorini or our whole trip, not just my husband. His favourite bright blue shirt and the blues of Santorini fit the page well, but I left off the lovely pearls Michelle used and the lace (fab ideas, but they don't fit my photos). I tried to take a pic of Michelle's instructions, so you can see her finished layout, as well as the one I made.