A Frugal Journey Through January Day 24

Hello again and welcome back to my frugal journey, I can't believe there is just one week left, how time flies.

It's been a very sunny and bright, if chilly week and I have really enjoyed my walk to work each day across parkland with the dappled sunlight through the trees. I have a bit of a thing about bare trees, they always present such interesting shapes and shadows, so today's post features one of my all time favourite tree stamps. It is by Inkadinkado, I have had mine for 8 or 9 years yet it's still in the current catalogue - and on my shelves - the mark of a really great stamp I think.

The other product which features in this project is also an old favourite, Ranger's Perfect Pearls. These are very shimmery mica powders with an inbuilt resin so you can seal them with a just a fine mist of water, mix them with water to create custom shimmery sprays, with less water to make shimmery glazes to apply with a wet brush, add lustre to your plain embossing powders in a ratio of 1:2, and of course use them with the clear embossing ink of your choice applied to the image with a dry brush. All round a hugely versatile, sadly often forgotten and very under-rated product which is available in open stock of over 40 colours at just £2.95 each.

Today I am going to share a quick step by step to using the unique properties of Perfect Pearls to create a faux reflection. You will need some dark coloured card, navy blue and chocolate brown work very well but I am going to be boring and use black. Cut your cardstock to twice the height of your stamp plus a little, and just narrower than the width of your stamp and you will also need that stalwart of all stampers, a scrap piece of copy paper with a torn edge.

 

Place your piece short end to the top on a piece of copier paper to protect your surface and hold your torn edge on your smaller piece of copier paper at right angles to your cardstock at roughly the halfway point whilst you cover the exposed piece of card entirely with your clear ink of choice, I used Versamark. Turn your piece of card top to bottom and inking your stamp with Versamark, stamp the image slightly overlapping your block of ink.

 

Take a small soft brush and apply a couple of colours of Perfect Pearl - I'm using blues, lilacs, greens, and Perfect Pearl itself which is silvery to create a frosty version of my autumnal reflection in the first photo - to the block of ink, and the stamped image, until all the ink has a good solid covering of powder, polishing the excess away with another soft brush.

 

Turn your piece of card so the block of ink is to the top and again inking with clear ink, stamp the image into the block of ink just above your earlier image (which is currently upside down)

 

turn it around again and hey presto you have a faux reflection.

 

You can use the properties of Perfect Pearls which allow you to use both the positive and negative of an image to build layers of one image, creating an illusion of depth

 

or by masking off areas with 'post-it notes' and using a mix of the two, which looks much more impressive, and difficult to achieve than it actually is.

 

That's it for today, thank you for joining me, I hope you enjoyed my frugal project and are sifting through your stamps of trees/landscapes/leaves/flowers etc to give this a go.

Back tomorrow with a very frugal and useful gift to make from just one 12x12 sheet of cardstock. Hope to see you then xx

 

 

 

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A Frugal Journey Through January Day 15

WOW, Day 15 on my Frugal Journey, who'd have believed I could blog a different project every day for more than two weeks! Not me that's for sure, but here we are.

Today is all about using up those leftovers from 6x6 pads, you know the ones you fell in love with and just had to have - but now have more than half the paper still in them.

This layout uses five 6x6 sheets of paper plus a scrap to stamp on plus about half an A4 sheet of white vellum. I used an ivory 12x12 sheet as a base and cut four of the sheets of patterned paper to 51/2 inches square, then die cut the fifth sheet into a large label which I cut in half. The papers were from a mix of Prima collections.

I stamped some swirls and the title with Versamark and embossed them with Wow's Vanilla White embossing powder. The year was stamped in Versafine Imperial Purple then the individual numbers were punched out with a 1/2" circle punch. The lace is from May Arts and the mini envelope an old McGill punch. I made the butterfly by stamping the smaller butterfly onto Grungepaper and the larger one onto Clearly For Art, coloured the smaller with Distress Ink, shaped both and sandwiched a Tim Holtz pin between them.Both butterflies are from Wendy Vecchi. I couldn't resist adding a little stamping with a tiny script stamp from Hampton Art that I have had forever.

This layout took me less than an hour to create - once I got the photos the right kind of black and white for the papers, I had to use them as one is the same design as the background curtain in the photo!

I used this layout for a workshop and, as I never make the same thing twice, I changed it around a bit and used entirely different papers, My Mind's Eye this time, and photos in the class.

Of course you could use the same idea on cards or journal page too.

I'll be back same time, same place tomorrow with lots of scraps of all sorts which become a very interesting background.

Hope to see you then xx

 

 

 

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A Frugal Journey Through January Day 2

Welcome back! If you missed Day 1 of this series just scroll down to find it.

Today's project uses paper piecing. I have used scraps from just one collection, a beautifully simple stamp of a very stylised flower, stamped on a craft card and the paper scraps with Versamark and WOW ultra fine bright white embossing powder. A tip I was given a long time ago to perfect your cutting out is to use really pointed, fine based scissors and move the paper, not the scissors. Whaaaat? Try it. When you are doing it right you will find yourself cutting out faster and more accurately.

A simple hand cut message tag tied with very fine twine, a few random pearls or gems, and you are done. If you are short of time or not keen on fussy cutting chose a very simple open image such as this one from Donna Downey Studios - back in stock later this month with many more from this inspiring artist - but almost any image will do. Really quick, simple and effective.

If you have a go at this then do leave a link in the comments below so I can drop by your blog to see your work.

That's all for today.

See you same time, same place tomorrow x

 

 

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Sew Much To Do with Chapel Road Artstamps

Hello again Snazzy stampers!

Both this week's workshop projects featured Chapel Road Artstamps new Sew Much To Do stamp sheet..........

............... and the Tim Holtz Alteration's Sewing Room and Mini Sewing Room dies with
his On the Edge Pennants and his Riveted Metal and Flourish Texture Fades, some Ideaology Grungeboard, Studio 490 Art Part scissors and matching stamp, some Studio Sticky Back Canvas stamped with some Hero Arts label stamps (CL398), some scraps of lace, embroidery thread, trimmings and Ric Rac from my stash, and some Eco Green Crafts paints in Lake and Orchid and WOW embossing powders in Vanilla White, Olive and Burgundy.

That seems a really long list of materials doesn't it but, I bet you all have similar products in your stash that could be adapted to this type of project, and I did make two versions!

 

The original workshop 'for instance' I made using Carta Bella's Beautiful Moments papers on a Orchid base, yes I know, pink - so not me!

 

 

I then recovered myself and made a second version with a Lake base to co-ordinate with Authentique's Loyal papers.

 

Both paper ranges are double sided so, to create the faux patchwork effect for the frame insert, I only needed a scrap of 7cm x 11cm of three papers to get six different designs to play with. I then embossed each piece with the same Riveted Metal Texture Fade I used for last week's Steampunk projects - versatile or what lol. I used the embossed design to create a mini patchwork of papers, sticking it down on the insert base with Herma repositional adhesive as I went. I added a mini label from Hero Arts CL398 stamped with Versacolour Bamboo/Cardinal ink onto sticky back canvas, frayed a little around the edges and smidged with a little Old Paper Distress Ink to shabby it up a bit.

 

 

All you have to do is paint your frame back & front, make sure it is completely dry, then stamp the images from the Sew Much to Do stamp set, and the mini doily stamp from Prima's Fairy Belle collection in Versamark. I used the same colour embossing powder each time for each image and added a swipe of Inca Gold in Pale Gold around the frame edges once the Embossing Powder was cool. On the pink version I used some of the leftover embossed papers to create a little border of randomly sized strips along the top edge of the frame, and on the blue one I trimmed the top of the frame and the insert with Pennants cut from some of the laftover Loyal papers.

 

That's all for today but if you pop back tomorrow I will run through how I made all the other embellishments.

 

Take Care xx