Easter cards

Two quick and easy Easter cards, Crafty Individual stamp and Brenda Pinnick papers.  Very spring like.

Texture paste sample book

Last July (that long ago! I thought it was about October!) I played around with texture paste and fabric and made a load of samples - if you click here you can see them covering my dining table.  I'd been meaning to put them into some sort of book and finally a week off work has given me the time to get on with it.

I tried out 3 different texture pastes (Dreamweaver, texture gel and gesso) and knew I'd made notes at the time of what I'd used on each piece but of course I couldn't find them.  Eventually I found them in the first place I'd looked - it had obviously seemed sensible at the time to use the back page of the notebook.  So it's now a more useful record than just leaving them shoved in a plastic bag.

New Distress Inks

Like many people in Blogland I knew I had to have all 12 new colours of Distress inks as soon as they appeared and I decided to make a sampler of the colours based on a project I found on the Ranger website here.  I applied ink to some old book pages using the applicator tool and stuck the whole piece to a canvas also coloured with ink (stormy sky, rusty hinge and bundled sage - don't you have to have them just for the names?!). The mosaic squares are meant to be stuck on at an angle, the canvas is meant to be straight but as usual my photography skills make everything look lopsided.  The really fun bit, of course, was selecting the embellishments.  Love all the ink colours - buying them all was definitely the right decision.

The sampler was a welcome relaxation after a traumatic start to the weekend.  About 11pm Friday evening water started gushing behind the kitchen sink, the stopcock is outside in the road and guess who couldn't turn it off in the dark!  I did eventually find a lever under the sink which I managed to turn to stop the leak but imagine my daughter and I at midnight on our hands and knees in about 3 inches of water mopping up the kitchen floor.  The plumber is coming Monday morning.

My class last weekend (see post below) went well apart from the fact that I forgot to take the birdhouse stamp and how can you make a card featuring a birdhouse without a birdhouse stamp?  I was so chagrined that I offered to go home and get it (only 50 miles away), but Linda, one of the class, came up with the solution.  For some reason I'd put a birdhouse I'd stamped on a scrap of card in the box and everyone used that to draw round and then overstamped with a background stamp.They all looked very good!