I am absolutely delighted to be guest designing for Uniko who have a new feature called Stencil Sunday. I love Uniko and I especially love their stencils - great price, great quality. Bev very kindly sent me a few stencils to add to my collection and I'm using the Natures Treasures II set with these beautiful leaves. You also get the negative and the positive which means even more options, but here I'm just using the negative.
All I did was take a blank white card base, and very carefully holding my stencil in place, blended some distress ink through the stencil. It's easier if you use a sweeping motion almost as if it's a blending brush. I didn't even tape it down with masking tape as no matter what I do, I end up tearing the card. I did one in each corner of one colour, and the other in the other corner in another - Mowed Lawn and Evergreen Bough.
Then all I did after that was stamp the sentiment in Versafine Onyx Black and Distress Oxide Lucky Clover. Done! With not getting much time for card making in between
running a business, stencils can make beautiful and simple cards so
easily. Indeed a friend recently said to me how much she loves my latest
cards because they are so simple!
Thank you for having me Bev and thank you all for reading. I will be back this month with more Uniko goodies - release week is coming up and I shall be joining in. So excited to share! It's really got my mojo going again. Happy Crafting Everyone!
Why hello! So, now that my birthday is over, I'm going into Christmas organising full tilt. How I'm doing is debatable, but the will is there! I wanted to get at least 30 Christmas cards made and today I finished up another four to finally get there. I then decided to write my list for handmade cards and realised I needed 40..... so another 10 will have to be found from somewhere soon!
Anyway, here are the four I made today from Clearly Besotted Stamps supplies. Some very simple Copic colouring on the owls and moose before I fussy cut them. Then I masked of a central piece in on the card blank and lightly dusted different light Altenew inks onto them through one of the new Clearly Besotted stencils. This one is birch background and the inks are very light through them, and the photo doesn't do it justince. I then just glued on the moose and owls.
I then found an old set called Sweet Little Sentiments, which at one point I was going to sell and I'm glad I didn't. The Merry Christmas fited just nicely and I inked it up with some VersaFine Onyx Black as it give such a clean impression first time round.
That, as they say is that!
I did my first ever Christmas Fair last weekend. Just a little one in the school. Oh my was I nervous, but I've had so much support from all my friends and family, it really kept me going. I had a couple of 'too expensive' mutters, but apart from that it was very positive - and exhausting. If you want to find out what I've been up to with my sewing, you can follow my adventures on Instagram and Facebook, as well as my Etsy shop itself.
So I'll be back before Christmas I hope with some more cards now that I have to make those extra 10! Thanks so much for stopping by, Happy Crafting Everyone :)
I've been MICA (Missing In Crafty Action) for a few weeks as I've been working on finishing off stock for my Etsy shop and adding listings. Nobody should ever think Etsy is just take a photo, stick it in your shop and it will sell. You have to know what you are doing and I am very grateful to have the help of Jewellery and Gems with it. Getting my head around all that is needed to get noticed and to get sales on top of looking after the girls and the household just about finished me off last week! Onwards and upwards! It's nice to be able to switch crafts from time to time, so I had a good play with some Copic refills, acetate, card and some large stamps trying out the Alcohol Ink Lift Technique I've seen in passing - Teresa Morgan's video is very good. I know Ranger and Tim Holtz have come out with an alcohol ink lift stamp pad, but these days all my money goes on fabric, so I decided to try it with my Copic refills and some colourless blender as well as the copic cleaner.
I have a video of how I got on. Of course, during the process, my video camera died, so I had to scrabble around for the charger and the best results I had have been lost, but I hope you still find the other footage useful. Please remember that YouTube is a third party and as such you may want to look at its privacy policy if you have any concerns about cookies being placed on your machine.
What I've learnt is: Colourless Blender is best - the cleaner pushes the ink away too much A detailed stamps works better than a semi solid stamp Acetate works quite well, but it can take a while to dry, and it does leave it a bit sticky Don't put foil flakes on...... see video as to why! Don't put too much colourless blender on your sponge when using with stencils Have fun making a mess - I know Michelle Short uses gloves and now I know why!!
When it works it works really really nicely and I have three finished projects as you can see. I even made a shaker having seen Lisa's recent fantastic efforts. It's been a while!
Have you ever tried this?? It was a really great session! I've seen people using gelli plates with alcohol ink too, so maybe that's also something to try. Happy crafting everyone!
I'm staying on the theme of Christmas cards for the time being, and mass production, but unlike my last video, I've done a bit more colouring and added in some stencilling and die cutting. I've still kept it fairly clean and simple.
This is another of the cute angels from Pretty Pink Posh (you can get them in Dies to Die For in the UK). I've used a cloud stencil on the background, die cut the top panel with an MFT stitched window die and added a simple sentiment. I've popped up the die cut panel over the clouds and added in the Copic coloured and fussy cut angel with some foam pads. You can see more of the process in my video either below or over on my YouTube channel (this is an external site and will have cookies).
I'm also only 1 away from 300 subscribers! I know this is peanuts compared to some of you, but for me this is a huge leap, so thank you to everyone who stops by to watch and support. You are all appreciated more than you know!
I find with mass production as long as you have a clear production line, even more complicated cards can be pretty quickly done. I'm pretty busy with getting my Etsy shop up and running and have an Etsy mentor who is making me do lots of inventory and work on my processes and make up as many bags as possible.I'm hoping that in the next three weeks, I'll have some more in the shop. Watch this space! As always, thank you for stopping by and Happy Crafting :)
So I'm back and with a video too - yay! I'm finding that I have time on Fridays now to do a bit of mass producing and with Christmas coming up, the best kind of mass production are Christmas cards. I try to keep mine super simple when mass producing and these are the superest simplest you can possibly get. Card blank, some patterned paper (Lawn Fawn Let's Bokeh in the Snow which I've had for ages), and a plain stamped image on the front.
I've even managed to make a video of the process, so I hope you enjoy this little foray into my mass production of Christmas cards, which you can watch below (please note this links to a third party, YouTube, which may require Cookies) or via my YouTube channel. If you like what you see, would love to have you as a subscriber.
Wishing you a splendidly happy and crafty day, thanks for stopping by :)
I'm a bit sad not to be going to Happy Stampers this weekend (6th October), but since I'm still working through the products I got back in May when I went, and I recently purchased from Dies to Die For at the colouring class a couple of weeks ago, maybe it's not such a bad thing! I aim to get away in May when I've had a chance to have another destash, and save up as well. Anyway, Christmas is actually less than 3 months away now, which is slightly worrying as I have yet to get really going on my Christmas cards. Given a large amount need to end up half way across the globe, it's about time I started. So today I'm sharing this cute card I made with the Taylored Expressions Llama set I got from that trip to Happy Stampers back in May.
I do like mass producing Christmas cards, and this stamp set, which includes the dies, is rather good for that. Stamp, colour, cut and add to background, which was simply made using a snowflake stencil and a bit of scrap green card and a grass die. Both of those products were given to me by friends which makes them really lovely to use :)
I've made a set of these for my sister, so I am feeling good at having given this stamp set a really good play! I'm hoping to get into Christmas card mode now it's October, hopefully she says....hopefully! Thanks so much for popping by today. Happy Crafting Everyone!
A couple of weeks ago I did another colouring class with Faye Wynn-Jones. I officially finished my European Copic Colouring Programme earlier in the year and you can read all about my exploits in my earlier blog posts on ECCP 1 & 2, ECCP 3, ECCP 4, but I really benefit from the classes, so when the Crazy Chicks and the Starry Skies classes came up, I had to do them. Especially as the location had now changed to the next town over from me :) These are two of the shorter classes and were in the afternoon, which was a little odd, but nice as Jen came round to the house for lunch first and drove us both to the venue, where we met up with a lot of the usual crowd, including Dawn. Both classes were a lot of fun and as always having the shop next to it makes for a nice relaxed atmosphere where you are drawn to purchase things.... of course I did, despite telling myself I didn't need anything!
Crazy Chicks is all about colouring the Stamping Bella chicks as other birds like penguins and robins. This is so much fun! Jen then went off and coloured them as blue tits. It just shows you what you can do with a bit of imagination and some Copics. I learnt a lot about the colours to use for black - we used BV a lot for the penguins - and blending techniques that made the robins look very odd to start with, but with patience (not that I have a lot of that!), it all comes good.
Starry Skies is all about creating, well, starry skies and we coloured in this Gerda Steiner penguin with a very dark blue background behind him with snowflakes. This uses the colourless blender and the white gel pen. I think it would also look great with some Spica pens too. Had a great time as always, and I'm hoping Faye will be back up north with another class next year. There is talk of Copic backgrounds which would be a fabulous technique to have. These classes always inspire me to break out my Copics and try new things. I highly recommend! Thanks for stopping by, see you again soon. Happy crafting! :)
