Christmas cards

It's difficult to see in these photos  But I have used an embossing folder which embosses a pretty frame into the card. the frame is not very big  at all which has meant I ve had to create some mini images to fit within the frame. If you need a closer look click on the image and you should get a larger picture pop up.

These tiny images are very quick to create so you can make a few in next to no time.

I cut my card to  1   3/4   x  2   3/4  inches. I blended a little yellow ink across the middle and then a little melon mambo and real red along to top. Then I took a piece of waste rubber cut roughly to look like a mountain ridge.   ( The waste rubber was saved from sets that you had to cut the rubber stamp images out before mounting them onto the wood blocks) 

Then I stamped a pale lilac mountain range  across the middle. I stamped a few lilac conifers along the base of the mountains, then stamped some  moss green conifers in front of  the lilac trees. I stamped the tiny deer in black then finished off the image by adding some foliage in the foreground and brushed in a few snow drifts to ground the trees and the deer.

I only used a black memento ink pad, a yellow and moss green pad to create this one.

Streak of yellow across the middle using a blending brush. 

The grey  in the sky and the drifts were created  with a blending brush used for black ink 

 

 

 I'm not a fan of lots of  bulky die cut foliage on cards, so I stamped three types of foliage  in three different greens for the base then just added some embossed die cut berries and a couple of  fussy cut holly  leaves with berries, Then finished off with a small bow.

Pancake maker /shrink plastic

Me thinks this is going to be a long post.

                                    

 I have been experimenting with shrink plastic the last couple of days. In the past I haven't had a lot of joy producing anything worth keeping, but I recently saw a video where you shrink the plastic in a  mini pancake maker. Yes you read that right a pancake maker. I wasn't entirely convinced this would improve my experiences with shrink plastic. I found a mini pancake maker for £14.99 So I thought I'd give it ago. It's Good!! no more having to hold the plastic down with a tool to stop it blowing away, no more worrying that its going to stick together as it curls and twist during heating and no indentation left but the tool holding it down. You just shove it in the hot pancake maker on a piece of baking paper, and leave it for 20 -30 seconds take it out and press a stamping block on top to flatten it out...  Job done.

My biggest problem in the past has been finding a suitable product that colours evenly , not streaky and doesn't rub off or wash off.  This post is going to be about the products I have been trying out and the pro's and con's I ve discovered along the way.

I die cut some tags and circles and punched a small hole in each piece so I can add a jump ring after shrinking.

Shrink plastic is glossy on one side and matt on the other. I  have heard people saying you can  you can work on either side, although this is true it's more usual to work on the matt side. The matt side is a lot easier to work on. It's easier to stamp on as it's not as slippery so the stamps don't slide around as much, and it traps in  the colour better, especially if you are are using pastels or crayons. the glossy side is far too smooth for crayons and pastels to adhere to.

But which products work best.  Well, Stazon  ink is a great product for stamping on non porous surfaces like shrink plastic. But if you're wanting to use polymer stamps, solvent based ink pads  are NOT recommended. Although I have at times, (but not on my favourite stamps) and  I make sure I clean my stamps immediately after use.

For my first attempt I used Stampin' up dye based inks to blend a light and airy background on the matt side of the plastic. They went on beautifully.

Then I stamped the rabbit and trees in using the forbidden Stazon.

 The purple trees in s.u. ink.  For the foreground I used Versafine clair ink and a few  highlight dots using a Posca pen.

  Time to shrink... pop a circle of baking paper in the base of the pancake maker to keep it clean and to make it easier to remove the hot plastic after shrinking.

A tip I would like to share is before you get any colouring products near your shrink plastic cover the glossy backside of you cut out shapes with painters tape to keep the back clean. If you leave some tape overhanging you can use this excess tape to hold and move your project around so you don't get your finger in the wet ink and spoil your work.

As you can see during the shrinking process the colours intensified considerably, making it almost too intense and  dark.  I recommend using lighter colours initially, until you know just how intense your chosen colours are after shrinking.

See the photo above, of the pieces before and after shrinking.

My next test was to wash the piece in soapy water to see if the inks stayed on. My reasoning for this is because I wanted to turn these pieces into earrings  and I don't tend to take my earrings out when I have a shower so these pieces needed to stand up to shampoo and shower gels.

Sadly, They didn't all pass the test. the background colours have washed away.  Therefore I am not going to recommend S.U inks on shrink plastic as they have almost completely disappeared. The Stazon lived up to it's name and stayed on.  Versfine ink and posca pens did ok. 

Next was to try out distress oxide, Versafine clair and polychromos pencils on some shrink plastic offcuts.  

I repeated the process on the test pieces and found the S.U ink  lost most of it's colour, distress oxides lost some, Versafine clair and polychromos  pencils stood up to the soapy water test and even scrubbing. 

Above is the photo of the samples before shrinking and washing and below is the photo of the inks after shrinking and washing. 

You can see the S.U ink has lost most of it's colour and the distress oxide has lost a little colour but the Polychromos pencils and the Versafine clair have stayed on and intensified.

I decided to try out a couple more products, water colour pencils, normal colouring crayons, and pan pastels. I really wasn't much from the pan pastels but I was really impressed with the result.

Water colour pencils with and without water. Normal crayons, posca pens  neat and diluted.  

After shrinking, you can see the colours have intensified and stayed on.

All stood up to the tests. Although  the water colour pencils puddled a bit leaving an unevenness I didn't like, and it took longer to dry. 

 

Posca pens neat and diluted stayed on well as did the normal crayons.

Now I have some idea on how things are going to work, it's  time to play  on some real projects...fingers crossed.

You maybe confused by my side notes, I've written Versamark, that should read Versafine Clair.

If you get a missed patches when stamping, load a small paintbrush with the same ink and fill in the misses.

You may notice some faint leaves at the top and toadstools at the bottom . 

 I  just wanted to map out their position and paint them in with posca pens. so I took a clean dry stamp and stamped where I wanted them to go.  The dry stamp removed enough ink from the plastic for me to see where to paint them.

Note the overhanging painters tape at the top of the witch.

I did several post box scenes. 

These ended up as a zip pulls.

A blast from the past

I have been raking through some of my very early cards that have been lurking in my craft room. I decided that some of the elements were still  viable and I  didn't want to throw out good flowers and ribbon, when all that needed changing was the discoloured card stock.

So I ripped them all to pieces and revamped it with some new gold embossed text, new card layers and tag and changed the base card to a 6x 6 inch square rather than a 7 x 5 inch  rectangle. On r

on reflection I wish, I had stayed with the rectangle as I could have used the space left  at the bottom to emboss a sentiment.

If you were card making 25 years ago you too would probably have been making  a cards like this. We were very limited in those days for good quality crafting supplies. There was a lovely little art supply shop in town that sold beautiful  products, but being small it didn't offer a huge range, but as a beginner it didn't matter to me as I had no card making supplies at all. 

 Hobbycraft and The Range was miles away.  I didn't have the internet then to shop online.  A trip to the closest town with good craft shop was called for and meant 

  a whole day out  craft shopping  (my idea of heaven) and I would stock up a loads of these  flowers in different colours, far more than I thought, I would ever need or use.

I have enjoyed revisiting my cards of the past, though I don't think I would make any more in this style.

Golden Rocking Horse

I love the simplicity of this card, the contrast between the gold embossing paste on the really black card works a treat and it really sparkles.  Not unlike the diamonds in a jewellers display case.  

Hubby wasn't quite so sure about it  though....Eww... that's different for you, not sure about that.  I told him, I loved it and that it was made a long time ago,  I just hadn't turned the card front into a card until just now. He walked away totally unimpressed and said no more.  Which was probably just as well.

A tip I would like to offer now,  is to use a smooth really intense black card, this wouldn't have turned out nearly so nice if I had used the... umm.... black card  on sale in most craft shops that's pretending to be black.

I think this was a card I made using a sweet poppy brass stencil, which I picked up at a craft show some years ago, it retailed at around the £7.00 mark at the time. 

I used a gold embossing paste through the stencil to create this golden rocking horse, (after removing the stencil from the paste and dropping the stencil into a bowl of warm soapy water immediately to soak)  

 I sprinkled some ultrafine diamond glitter over the wet paste and let it set overnight. The glitter stuck well to the paste  and  many years later its still sticking well.

Once the paste was completely dry and had hardened off  I add a small red bow to the horses harness for a pop of colour. Then mounted the black panel onto a matching red paper and gave  it a very fine  1 /16th  of an inch border of red before adding it to my cream 7 x 5 inch  base card.

As much as I like the look and simplicity of these embossing paste cards, I do not have a lot of patience or space to spare when it comes to waiting for things to dry or set hard,  the consequences have usually been a total disaster so I mostly refrain from working with these types of products . Having said that...I am tempted to give it another whirl , that is, if my embossing paste hasn't hardened in the pot!

summer silhouettes

 I have made this 7 x 7 inch card before but in navy and crumb cake inks. I fancied making it again but in a different colour. So this time I used crumb cake and blackberry bliss.

I think this colour combo works quite well. The stamp set is an old S.U set called summer silhouettes.

Post Box Christmas cards

I have been doing a little reorganizing in my craft room  and I came across the post box stamp in these cards, It was one of the first stamps I ever bought. I was never happy with colouring mediums at the time. There were none of the quality colouring products that are available today. So I was always disappointed with the results.

 So this stamp got packed away along with  the rest of my meagre collection. That was when I decided stamping wasn't for me. 

Since then, stamps and the products used with them have come a long way, making the whole experience a lot easier and more pleasurable. 

So upon reacquainting myself with this lovely stamp, I decided to try creating a scene around the post box using Lavinia stamps.

After blending in the horizon and the sky, I stamped the postbox , masked it off and began building up the scene.  

Using the edge of a piece of torn paper and a small blending brush with next to no ink on, I brushed in a few snow drifts.

 Then stamped in the background trees and foliage in the foreground.

I used copic markers to colour the post box and white Posca pen to add snow to the branches and create  snowflakes.

This was the finished card . I enjoyed creating this card so much I decided to make a few more and tried to vary the background, by either using different tree stamps or drawing in the  trees myself.

On this card I decided to draw in the background trees with copic markers.

I stamped a fence in but didn't line it up too well.

On the card below I added a rabbit and missed out a few trees.

Most of the stamps I used to create these scenes are from Lavinia's mini stamp collection.

The sentiments are from an S.U set called itty bitty Christmas.

The size of these cards are 4 x 8 1/2 inches.

The smaller witches

 On this card I used all three of the smaller witches in the set and one of the small cats on this blended background. I added some tiny evergreen trees along the horizon and larger deciduous trees behind the witches. And an assortment of mini foliage stamps as silhouettes around the outer edges.

spooky house

The spooky house used on these cards is also included in the dream witch bundle from Lavinia stamps.

 The tree branch and moon are quite old stamps from the same company, but are still available.

I used S.U inks to blend the sky. First I lightly blended in some yellow then stamped the moon and masked it off  while I added more yellow, orange and red to the sky. and dark grey to the bottom half,  I stamped the scene and  drew in a the path and grave stones and highlighted them with a white paint pen.

 
 This one I'm not so happy with.  I loved the purple splattered background I started, but I didn't think one through before starting. But as I said, I was just experimenting with background colours.

Halloween cards.

 

I think this card has a very autumnal feel to it.  It was my  first attempt using the  witch bundle from Lavinia stamps. 

I have had some extra time to play with them this week. 

Many of my creations this week were just about experimenting with colours and backgrounds.  

I used diluted lemon Brusho powder and painted the entire piece of card lemon. While the card was still wet, I brushed in a little  diluted black brusho into the corners and let the black bleed into the wet lemon. 

Once dry I stamped the images and added a bunch of sparkles using Posca  paint pens.

 For the card above, I blended light brown ink over the card  using blending brushes to colour the background.

 I used an old Lavinia tree stamp in the background to give a little depth.   Then used a selection of the mini stamps to add foliage to the trees and sides.

 Along the bottom I used larger plant stamps to fill in.

I think this one has be to my favourite colour. 

 I am including a link to Lavinia stamps witch bundle.

https://www.laviniastamps.com/product/the-dream-witch-collection-bundle/

Halloween cards 2024

 

Another Halloween card using the newly released witch bundle from Lavinia stamps.

  I have used the same stamps as I used in my previous post below

 I just changed the background colours.  I used S.U  dye based inks,  regular stamping card rather than watercolour card.

Halloween cards

I haven't done a huge amount of crafting of late, partly because my employer has said we can no longer give the children treats and partly because I have been busy trying to get the work we want done in the gardens organised and completed. (easier said than done).  Along with trying to repair all the damage caused  by a leaking roof and  having our cloudy windows replaced. 

Any crafting I have done has been very last minute, and I have forgotten to photograph  it before giving it  away .  I realised  this too late.  But enough of the excuses. I have severely  neglected my blog for way too long, for which I apologise. 

BUT THERE IS A LITTLE GOOD NEWS.  I was  recently inspired by new set of Halloween stamps  by Lavinia stamps based here in the UK.  

( I believe they're available in some parts of  the U.S too)

So I  purchased  the newly released bundle of witches stamps  and had some playtime.

The bundle consists of three individual witches and two trees small and large, a stamp with three smaller witches on, a cauldron , a verse , two tiny cats and two larger cats a set of three bats and a dotty flourish .

 On these two cards, I used two of the larger witches, sections of the larger tree, the small bat, one of the small cats, the flourish, the verse and the cauldron, along with a foliage, a berry and  a twig  from the mini stamps collection. Which retail at £1.10 

 These mini stamps are not included in the bundle. In my opinion  these minis  are worth their weight in gold.  They don't look like much but they are so,so useful for building up scenes.

 I  have enjoyed playing with these stamps after my long break from stamping.

if you're wondering how I created the background . I used a brayer and applied thin layer of  Versamark Clare ink  (colour twilight) onto my gelli plate  then sprinkled  splatters of  yellow brusho powder  mixed with water over the top.

I placed a sheet of watercolour card stock on top of the inked up Gelli plate and rubbed over the back of the card well  to transfer the colours to the card, peel off the card and allow it dry before stamping in black Versamark Clare ink. 

 Black Versafine in  is an intense black,  so silhouettes really pop out.

The sparkles were created by drawing small circles with a yellow posca pen and adding a smaller white dot in the middle once the yellow has dried.

 I also added dots of stickles (glitter glue) randomly over the scene.

News

 I have some news to share... After 14 years, I have finally dropped as a Stampin'up Demo.

I found there were not enough products in the catalogues I liked enough to buy. Which means I couldn't make my quarterly figures. So last month I decided to drop.

 I will now be a customer and buy only the products I like, but from another demo.

I will continue with my blog as and when I make something worth sharing. You'll probably find my creations will be more varied now. 

I have a few projects in mind I want to try.  I think you'll love a couple of them. But it's going to take some planning and some time before I can get started. My craft room is due to get new windows in a couple of weeks,  so I need to clear everything away and make space for fitters to work in. I don't want to start  this project until the windows are done and I'm back to normal.

Laptop Mended I'm up and running.

 Wow!!!  I can't believe how long it's been since I last posted. It's been a few months now.  There are a couple of reasons for this,  the first being my laptop has been playing up for quite a while. To log on would take about an hour on a good day which was really frustrating. 

The last two weeks it's been in the repair shop having new organs fitted and programs.  It came home yesterday and I am now up and running.

The second reason is because, I haven't been making any cards.  No handmade Christmas cards this year, no handmade Valentines card for hubby, and no Birthday cards.  However , I have been  kept very busy sewing. 

We were supposed to be going to a wedding in October, as we were packing, I realized  we didn't have any toiletry bags. This gave me the idea to make some. Everyone that saw them said they were lovely and that gave me the idea to make sets of travel bags for the granddaughters for Christmas. Then it was suggested the other female family members may like a set , either for Christmas or those with January /February birthdays.

I then extended the three bag set by including a tissue holder and a chap stick holder .

This set was made for my eldest granddaughter. I also bought some single sided emery boards those ones that usually have a really garish design printed on the reverse.

 I found,  I could peel off the tacky printed side and replace it with a print to match the bags.  

To achieve this, all I did was to photocopy the fabric (a laser printer is best for this)  I used to make the bags. Then adhere the printed paper to the back of the nail file and trim off the excess paper , if necessary  use a second emery board (a fine one) to neaten any rough edges.  

This set I made for myself. I needed a new bag to keep my hair accessories in, I didn't need three bags for these so this set is just a two bag set.

 Below is a photo of a small selection of the bags I've been making.

I made quite a few more  bags in different fabrics and vinyl's that I didn't photograph.

These bags are pretty easy to make  and can be addictive to make.

If you're interested in making these, there are countless tutorials on Youtube.
There are a few different methods to put them together, I suggest watching a few tutorial and decided which way suites your sewing skills the best. 

You don't need  a lot of fabric either. A large bag will take two fat quarters, one for outer and one for lining.

I bought the larger metallic coil zippers by the metre from Amazon.

 The wadding however was a bit more problematic. We don't have any sewing shops here now.  So I had to order online. The problem with this is you can't feel the thickness or the quality from a photo, so you  don't know how much body it's going to give the finished bag.  I order a wadding from Amazon which was perfect, so I re ordered the same stuff....what I received was so thin it didn't even offer enough body for the smallest bag.

So I ordered more from somewhere else... that arrived and it was fine for larger bags, but too rigid for smaller bags.

In desperation to get the project finished, I ended up going to a well known craft shop and paying  £26 per metre. To my mind that's way too much money.

If you plan on making them in vinyl  I strongly recommend  using a walking foot or a teflon foot. for the top stitching.

Two tone floral wedding card

I have to confess, I did not enjoy making these 7 x 7 inch cards at all. I had five or six attempts at this card before I came up with something I was happy with.  I am glad I persevered, I think these have turned out quite well. I do hope the bride and groom will like the one they receive.

 

I had intended for these to be single layer cards. I masked off the centre strip to keep it clean, unfortunately  I stamped over the masking tape so often, the ink started to seep through and under the the tape. So I had to resort to stamping the Mr & Mrs on fresh strips of card and  place them over the inky marks.

I 've listed a lot of stamps sets used in the making of these cards, but I only used one foliage stamp from each set, apart from the two tone florals.

The card below started off as another 7 x 7 inch card, but I managed to get inky finger marks on it where they couldn't  be hidden or disguised.  

I decided I would try something different to try and save a portion of my work rather than put the whole thing in the bin.  So I cut off the bottom section, and use it on it's side.

I don't find this one quite so appealing, so I wouldn't use this for an important occasion like a wedding .

The funny thing is... I found out yesterday that the colours I chose to create these cards are very close to the brides colour scheme for the wedding.