Stamping Sensations Blog Challenge - sketch and Summer colours

I am so excited, I can't wait to tell you my news! I've been sitting here like a cat on a hot tin plate trying to keep a secret and it's not easy let me tell you lol! Anyway, I've joined the Stamping Sensations Design Team, and I'm so honoured to be joining such a talented group of designers!

This month, the design team at Stamping Sensations would like you to follow this wonderful sketch that the talented Tracy has provided,
and also to use Summer Colours, since the challenge will run from today right through until the end of July. We hope that you will all join in and I can't wait to see what you come up with!

We have a fabulous prize from our sponsor Little Claire for the winning entry:

So, here's my first ever Design Team card and I hope you all like it *bites fingernails nervously* :-)

"Fish"

Years ago, Tom and I were on holiday somewhere in the deepest darkest regions of Scotland. We heard rumours of a brilliant fish and chip shop in the harbour area, and soon came across a queue of people outside waiting for it to open. That seemed like a good omen. We joined the back of the queue...
...eventually a boat turned up, took a crate (presumably fish!) inside the shop, and the smells of fish frying began. People were served, the smell was enticing, and we finally got to the front of the queue. A big sign read "Fish and chips £2" (I told you it was a long time ago!). Now. I've got a thing about dogfish - I really hate it! So I tentatively asked in my VERY English accent "What sort of fish is it?". The reply, spoken slowly and loudly to the stupid English person in a very Scottish accent, was "it's FASH, FASH FRAM THE SEA". It still makes me laugh to this day. So I just had the chips, and I had to drool at my husband eating the best bit of haddock, fresh straight from the boat!! There must be a moral to this story somewhere, but I'm buggered if I know what it is :-)

Anyway, back to my card. Yes, well, I had to make a book card, but this one is a little different to normal. As soon as I saw the circle in Tracy's sketch, I thought "fish tank" and had the idea to set an aperture into a book card and fill the book with fish.

The painting on the front of the card is done mostly with distress inks. Tumbled Glass ink is sponged over some watercolour paper, then lines are drawn in the sea area using Broken China, Tumbled Glass, Stormy Sky and Weathered Wood Distress markers. A water brush is then used to blend the blue colours together and give a watery look. A line of Broken China ink is added and smudged on the horizon. The sailing boat and birds are painted with watercolour paints.

After the painting is dry, a circle is diecut into the picture. A matching circle is diecut into the front of the bookcard. The painting is stuck onto the front of the card with PVA, lining up the two circles and gluing a length of baker twine in between the layers to tie the card together once finished.

A circular frame is diecut from dark brown card and decorated with gilding wax before gluing around the aperture with glossy accents.

The octopus charm is glued over the top with Pinflair, and three little drops of glossy accents are used to stick the teardrop gems to the bottom right corner.

"Inside"

Another circle is diecut into wood patterned paper and a piece of acetate sandwiched between it and the front cover of the book card using PVA glue. This provides the "window" of the fish tank. Another frame is diecut from brown card and decorated with gilding wax before gluing in place around the aperture. Brass buttons are glued around the frame to look like a porthole.

"Fash Fram the Sea"

The background sea started out as two pieces of brown card embossed with twigs and decorated with different gilding waxes. A large circular aperture is cut into one piece and this is glued on top of the book "pages". The other piece is glued behind.

"Fash"

The individual fish are stamped with versamark on watercolour paper and heat-embossed in gold before colouring with distress markers and a water brush, and cutting out. After shaping, the fish are attached to small strips of acetate and glued into the book card so the fish appear to float in the water.

"Fronds"

The fronds are diecut from brown card, decorated with gilding waxes, and stuck into the book "pages" with glossy accents.

Finally, charms are glued inside the book card with glossy accents, and more are strung together with beads, chain and jump rings and attached to the side of the card via an eyelet to look like buried treasure rising up from the depths of the sea :-)

I hope you find some buried treasure this week, and have a go at our challenge. Can't wait to see what you come up with! Maddy x

Ingredients:

Kars fish stamps

Versamark ink

Stampendous embossing powder, pirate gold

Spellbinders foliage

M-Bossabilities Tweets and Twigs

Sizzix framelits: circles

Creative Expressions Gilding Waxes: patina, enchanted gold

cardstock: brown 300gsm, white 220gsm, watercolour paper, wood pattern

acetate

distress ink pads: Tumbled Glass, Broken China

distress markers: Tumbled Glass, Broken China, Weathered Wood, Pine Needles, Spun Sugar, Dusty Concord

watercolour paints: black, white, brown

adhesives: Glossy Accents, Pinflair, PVA

brass charms, jump rings, beads, chain

brass eyelet

brass buttons

teardrop gems

bakers' twine

Window Box Tutorial and a Card for Sue

My friend Sue, aka Bearhouse, was the first person I ever swapped a card with and we've been swapping birthday and Christmas cards ever since. She's been a good friend to me and I wanted to make her a special card this year. I know she liked it and I thought I'd share it with you. The brick background uses the technique I detailed yesterday in my "Tuesday Technique" post.

 

"Sue's Birthday Card"

I came up with this idea for a window box to fit the Chateau Gate windows and thought you might like to see it. You can easily resize the window box to fit any window by cutting the piece of card wider at the start.

1. Start with a piece of strong (300gsm) card 10.2cm (4") x 8cm (3 1/8").

2. Use a scoreboard to score lines at 0.5cm and 2cm from each side.

3. Score lines at 1.5cm and 3cm from the bottom edge.

4. Use the score lines as a guide to cut out two tabs (see photo).

5. Use a labels die to make a decorative top edge (I use Spellbinders Labels 1 or decorative labels 1 but you can use whatever you have). Because we are using thick card, it may need a couple of passes through the machine.

6. You can make the box any height by cutting at a different place, but it should be at least 1.5cm from the horizontal score line since the rest of the box will be 1.5cm deep.

7. Fold and go over all the crease lines with a scoring tool.

8. Fold up and glue the two little tabs to the back of the front panel.

9. Cut a piece of florist's foam 1.5cm x 1cm x 6cm and fit into the box. I found a big block of this stuff on sale at Dunelm Mill for 79p.

10. It's all ready to insert your flowers. :-)

"Flowers"

 

11. Just push the flowers into the foam in the window box once you've finished the rest of your card.

 

Entered for the following challenges:

Simon Says Stamp and Show - Anything Goes

Bearly Mine Challenges - Anything Goes

Inky Chicks - Anything Goes

Loves Rubberstamps - Anything Goes

A Little Bit Crafty - Die-ing for it

Papertake Weekly - Anything Goes

Tuesday Technique - Inking With Embossing Folders - Brick Background

Lee suggested that you might like to see tutorials on some of the inking techniques I use, so I thought I'd start by showing you this ink and emboss technique that I use a lot with embossing folders. It's especially useful when you want a different colour in the recesses of the embossing to the colours on the raised parts.

"Recesses"

1. Start by deciding which side of the embossing folder to ink. You want the ink to end up in the recesses, so it's normally the top side (often labelled). Swipe your ink pad all over this side and carefully place a sheet of white card into the sandwich, closing the folder onto the card rather than sliding the card in so as not to smear the ink. Make up your sandwich and pass through a roller-type machine.

I've used Pumice Stone distress ink to look like grouting in between the bricks. You can use any type of water-based ink, but the ones that take a while to dry work the best. Don't forget to give your folder a good wash straight after using.

"Splodges"

2. When you look at old brickwork, you'll notice that the bricks are not all the same colour and there can be quite a lot of variation in the brickwork. Using more colours makes it seem more realistic to me, so I start by giving a background inking of three different browns. Here I've used antique linen, vintage photo and brushed corduroy. I apply the inks with small pieces of cut 'n' dry rather than using applicators. Don't know why, I just get better results that way!

"Uniform layer"

3. Next, cover the whole sheet with a layer of Fired Brick. You can see the different browns underneath giving that wonderful splodgy look.

"Lowlights"

4. A light swipe of Aged Mahogany brings out a little more detail from the embossing.

"Frame"

5. Adding Walnut Stain around the edges provides a frame.

Use the finished piece like this, or cut it down if you want it smaller. If cutting, add more Walnut Stain ink to the cut edges. I hope you'll join me later in the week to see a project using this background.

Taking it further...

6. Once you've finished the brick background, you can take the process further by embossing a different pattern over the bricks. Here I've embossed twigs over the bricks and coloured them by lightly swiping with Pine Needles ink to provide a contrast. The finished effect reminds me of Sleeping Beauty's castle where the plants grow all around while everyone in the castle sleeps for a hundred years...

7. Here's the same piece after being swiped with versamark and heat-embossed with glittery embossing powder giving even more contrast.

The Beehive

Hubby is a beekeeper and I've been meaning to make him a beehive card for ages, but this week it finally came together. The third challenge for Craft Stamper magazine is to use the "Embossing Powder technique demonstrated so beautifully by Birgit Koopsen on pages 30-31 of the July 2013 issue". The hard part is that they would like ALL of the colour on your project to come from embossing powder! Now I love embossing powder, but I would normally use some distress ink with it to add extra colour, and really had to resist that big box on my desk.

"The Beehive - Front Cover"

This card has the same structure as the screen card tutorial I shared earlier this week. Rather than dry embossing, each of the frames is heat-embossed. Usually I make the inside of the card more highly coloured and decorated than the cover because I like a contrast, but this card has the opposite approach. I wanted to fill the card with "frames" of bees such as you would get in a real beehive, so I made the cover more colourful.

"Colour Detail"

Every bit of colour comes from embossing powders. These are nothing special, just a cheap set bought from Ebay when I first started heat-embossing a few years ago. The background uses Birgit Koopsen's technique, but I wanted the more detailed images in the foreground to have some colour too, so the beehive itself is stamped onto scrap white card and the stamp used as guidelines for colouring with the embossing powders, before heating, cutting out, shaping and sticking onto the background using Pinflair for extra dimension. The flowers are diecut from white card and also decorated with heat-embossing. I really had to stop myself reaching for the inks to decorate the edges of the diecuts as I would normally do. I hate those white edges lol!

"The Beehive - Inside Panels"

The inside panels are also decorated solely using embossing powders. The frames use a bronze-coloured cheap powder, which is used patchily to create lots of texture (hopefully it looks like beaten metal). The panels are all joined together using bailer twine. Bailer twine is a magic item on the farm. Historically, it was used in the hay bailer machinery to tie the bails of hay, although these days they don't make much hay any more (it's all gone over to great big tractors making silage wrapped in black plastic). But bailer twine has a million and one other uses too - repairing all sorts of things, tying farm gates to broken gateposts (usually broken by those big tractors!), makeshift leads for the dogs, etc. Today I found another use for it - joining screen card panels together. It seemed apt somehow :-)

"Individual Panel"

The background is made by dry embossing white card using a Darice embossing folder rubbed with versamark, then colouring with "honey" coloured embossing powder and a sprinkling of light brown (real honeycomb always has bits of bee poo in it lol!). I added more of the light brown to enhance the outline of individual cells using a versamark pen.

"Another Individual Panel"

This panel has more of the brown colour. In a real hive, older frames are darker than newer ones. If you want to produce honeycomb to eat, it has to be made from scratch in the year it is produced so that it is a nice, clean, light colour. It's obviously more work for the bees because they have to make the wax as well as the honey, whereas they prefer to reuse wax they made in previous years.

"Bee!"

These fat-bottomed bees are bumblebees rather than honeybees, but you'll just have to allow me a little artistic license :-) The bees are stamped onto spare white cardand heat-embossed in gold. The individual stripes are made using a versamark pen and heat-embossed in honey colour. Finally, the bees are individually cut out, shaped and mounted onto the frames using Pinflair for extra dimension.

"The Back"

Even the back is decorated with heat-embossing, but has been left much plainer to allow the future addition of sentiment panels if required.

"Bee Charm"

These little bee charms are hung from the bailer twine for a finishing touch.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this card and glimpses of a rural life today. The weather here in Northern Ireland is cold, windy and frequently wet, but life is good here.

Ingredients

Sizzix Bigz Vintage Cabinet and M&S Cabinet dies

Spellbinders Die D-Lites - Floral Border

Chocolate Baroque stamp set: Honey Bee

Artemio stamp sets: Butterflies, Bugs and Insects, Wild Meadow

Crafty Secrets Stamp set: Queen Bee

IndigoBlu stamp: Honeycomb Background

Cardstock: brown 300gsm, white 160gsm & 220gsm

Embossing folder: Darice chicken wire

Embossing Powders: Imagepac set of 12 colours, Stampendous Pirate Gold

Ink pads: Balck Archival, Versamark Clear

1/8" Brass Eyelets

Bailer Twine

Bee Charms

Entered for the following challenges:
Craft Stamper Take it Make it Challenge 3
Simon Says Stamp and Show - Stripes

Tuesday Technique - Screen Card Tutorial

I love to use the matching large and small Sizzix Movers and Shapers dies to make screen cards and I thought you might like to see some step by step photographs of the process. The dies I use the most often are the Ornamental and Vintage Cabinet dies, but you could use any matching pair of dies of different sizes. Steel rule dies are best for screen cards because you want to be using really good, strong card and that can be more difficult to cut with thinner dies. However, if you only have thinner dies, you could use thinner card and stick it together after cutting to make a thicker layer.

1. Start with 3 sheets of A4 strong card (at least 300gsm) and cut each in half (at 14.8cm along the longest edge) to make 6 x A5 pieces.

2. Set the smaller Movers and Shapers die inside the larger one to cut a frame.

3. By carefully lining up the card near the cutting edge on the die, you can get two cuts from each piece.
N.B. I use a Sizzix Big Shot for diecutting. If you have a Cuttlebug, you will need to cut each of the A5 pieces of card into A6 and make one diecut from each piece of card because the Cuttlebug does not have as wide a cutting area as the Big Shot.

4. Cut 8 frames in total.

5. Remove the smaller die and replace with a magnetic release block.

6. Cut four of the larger shapes out whole to make four panels.

7. Now each panel has two matching frames, one for each side.

8. Decorate the frames and both sides of each panel before sticking the frames to the panels.

8. Stick the frames to the panels, one on each side of each panel.

9. Make two holes in one side of two panels, add eyelets if required. These will be the panels at the left hand side and the right hand side once they are all joined together.
N.B. It's important that the holes match up for joining the panels together, so make them the same distance from the top and bottom edges for all the panels.

10. Make two holes in both sides of the remaining two panels, add eyelets if required. These will be the two middle panels once they are all joined together.

11. Join the panels together using the holes and book rings or lengths of string or ribbon

12. Decorate with extra embellishments as required.

13. I always like to add some extra dimension to the front cover. Here I've used some Wild Orchid flowers which were part of a brilliant birthday pressie from my bessie mate Lee. Another part of my pressie was the most amazing mini and it's well worth a look at Lee's blog to check it out.

Please pop back later in the week when I'll be sharing another screen card. You can also see some more examples of my screen cards in the following posts:
What Are You Known For?
Christmas Screen Card
Tropical Travelogue Screen Card (see Project Six)
Birthday Screen

Ingredients:

Sizzix M&S Vintage Cabinet & mini vintage cabinet

Hunkydory vintage patterned papers & toppers

Cuttlebug embossing folder - Script

Spellbinders - Rose Creations, Carnation Creations

Cheery Lynn mini Fanciful Flourish die

lace

pink brads

leaf gem stalk

gilding wax, enchanted gold

cardstock: brown 300gsm

gold string

Wild Orchid Crafts flowers

adhesives: PVA, Pinflair

Entered for the following challenge:
Hobby House Challenge - Anything Goes
CountryViewCrafts - Diecuts