One for Me

I made another grungeboard notebook, this time for me using one of my favourite colour combinations. It looks a bit brighter from the scan than in real life - stamps are Paper Artsy.

And here's my long-suffering friend's birthday present to go with the card I made for her below. She gave me a mint tin because she knows I like playing about with them and I have now given it back to her.

I coloured a domino with alcohol inks and then stamped a face on it and put it in the tin. The tin is coloured with alcohol inks as well, and I used a cropodile to punch the holes in the sides for the cord and in the lid for the beads. I had fun anyway!

New & Improved

This is a birthday card for a friend. She's always on the receiving end of my more experimental stuff and as she's not into crafting herself I think she's often somewhat bemused - but tolerant!

This card took on a life of it's own - it didn't come out as I expected but I like it nonetheless. Although I love all the gorgeous scrapbook papers available I still get a bigger kick from starting with a white sheet of card and making my own background. This one's done by just swooshing the card around in watered down distress inks and then overstamping. The stamps are from the lovely inchies sets by Inkadinkado and the rub on at the bottom is a 7 gypsies one I found when hunting through my stash. The date stamp on the left is from the reduced section of Staples.

Grungeboard Class

Yesterday I did a class at Kraft Crazy at Tidworth using grungeboard. We made the notebook and bookmark shown above (crap photos once again - sorry). The class was hectic as mine always seem to be and overambitious as the various stages of the notebook really needed to dry out more thoroughly than we had time for in a two hour class (even when it ended up being 3 hours!) In the end people took the bits home to dry more thoroughly before either using their own Bind it all to put it together or bringing it back to the shop for Tracey to do for them.

The covers on the notebook are made from a plain sheet of grungeboard cut in half and covered with crumpled up tissue paper, then painted with paint dabbers. The creases in the tissue paper give a faux leather look. The flowers are stamped onto grungeboard and coloured with Twinkling H2Os (all of us very sad to hear they're going out of business), and cut out. The hinge and flourish are Sizzix dies.

The bookmark was more straightforward as it is coloured using Brilliance inks and a quick swipe with the heat gun was enough to dry it. The house and background bubble and swirls stamps are Paper Artsy and the hearts are Sizzix dies again. I wanted to make items that showed the extra advantages of grungeboard as opposed to ordinary chipboard. Both a bookmark and a notebook will get lots of handling but shouldn't get nearly as dog-eared as normal chipboard or card. And of course only with grungeboard could you bend a hinge round and use as a fastening in that way.I'm looking forward to the newly-launched grungepaper arriving in the UK as that will give even more opportunities for play!

Thanks to my ladies on the class - hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

And for Julia who was stuck at home decorating - see what you missed!

Elusive Images Butterfly stamps

Ok, I take back everything I said in my last post about not being over fond of butterflies. Glenda of Elusive Images has just brought out 2 new butterfly sets which are gorgeous - I love the fact that some of the butterflies are patterned!
Check out Glenda's Elusive Images blog to see the new sets and if you leave a comment you have a chance to win them as well.

Butterflies

I took advantage of the special offer in this month's Craft Stamper magazine to order a set of stamps from Paper Artsy called Nature. The sets included 3 images of butterflies - I usually pass those by as I find them a bit pretty for my taste. But when I stamped these out they reminded me of collectors' images so I made a card and an ATC using them. The card uses Diane's daughters papers as the background and for the ATC the butterflies are stamped on some Tim Holtz paper. A different look for me but one I'm pleased with.

My fingers are itching to do some stitching but I haven't got round to getting something started. However today I sprayed a piece of canvas blue and green and hope to get going on a sampler of canvas stitches - one of the make it up as I go along variety!