Easy Christmas Cards

Posted on October 27, 2013 by thecontentedcrafter

Here I am again with more cards – what can I say, I’m on a roll!

Before we get to the Christmas card design I thought you might like to see the blue card that was shown in the second photo of the previous post as it is now finished and I’m really excited – I made ‘who-would-know-they-aren’t-really-pewter’ flowers 🙂

What do you think – have I managed to capture it well enough in the photo?

While I was still in the playing around with embossing folders mode of a few days back I also made some Christmas cards – yay me, Christmas in hand already!

I picked up a couple of Tim Holtz Christmas themed embossing folders for a song in a sale early this year. One is no good for me as it features snowflakes and icicles and that is not our Christmas experience – but I liked the old fashioned swirliness of this one:

All I did was matt up the embossed and inked cardstock and then I went over the raised letters with a water based pen. Easy-peasy

Same process with this next one and then I filled in the centrre part with gold metallic pen:

The next two are created using Spellbinders ‘M-Bossibilities’ EL-014 [which gives a lovely deep emboss] on white cardstock. I inked over the raised areas using old paper distress ink in the centre and two shades of green around the edges. The embossed card is matted a total of three times – first to dark green cardstock. The ribbon is attached at the back, the greeting strip is added and then the bow is attached with a brad. When all those bits are in place the second matt was added, I used brown paper on both these cards.

The flowers are another Spellbinders die ‘Poinsettias’ the large leaves were cut from green cardstock and had a good coat of glossy accents spread over them and were left to dry overnight. I dribbled a bit of glittery stuff over the petals when the flowers are made up and hot glued a half pearl in the centre of each one.

The greetings are stickers which are practically idiot proof.

And finally, as there are still dozens of tiny butterflies lying about all over the work table from my enthusiastic experimentation with faux metal I used three on each card as well.

Detail:

More detail:

This is all so easy to do – and makes for highly detailed cards whose only drawback is I can’t make envelopes big enough to contain them! Drats – if you have a recipe I’d love to hear it!

The last two cards are 21 x 15 cm [81/2 x 6″].

Thanks for coming by and having a look, I love that you did 🙂

Journalling With Discards

Posted on August 24, 2013 by thecontentedcrafter

Hello there! Lovely that you dropped by 🙂

I’ve been posting about the on-line course I am doing in 10 minute journalling. It has been quite challenging for me and today I will tell how the challenges continue.

For now the lovely lady wants me to use some of the leftover – discarded – ruined – experimented on stuff that I have carefully collected over the past three years – which is stored randomly in a drawer and two boxes, because one day it might come in handy and we crafters never throw anything away…….. Did you note that? She actually wants me to use it…

Blimey – there’s a challenge!

The theme was tags and other discarded ephemera, and the suggestion was made that something of interest pertaining to a particular day would also be incorporated.

So I scuttled about in my drawer and two boxes and found some tags and also a piece of paper from which a heart had been cut.

The background is Dylusions sprayed over gesso, which I discovered muted the colour palette right down. With a background of bluey-green splattered with yellow and pink and daubed at with a toilet paper roll dipped into brown paint, I worked within the daily 10 minute guidelines [well, mostly] and over four days journalled on some of the tags. I adorned one brightly coloured tag with the outline of my cat – which I’m quite enamoured with – and then included a note that says my blog hit 77 followers – which is a miracle to me – for the ‘item of interest’! And finally, I faffed about with the open heart, writing ‘doodles’ inside it as that is my latest passion and that ended up taking much longer than the allotted 10 minutes!

The scraps of left over paper I punched in my 1″ punch and made phases of the moon to accompany the note about the brightness of the full moon and the fact that Spring is coming!!

I have never made a journal page like this before – I probably never will again, but it is quite liberating to think you can go to the discard drawer and produce an interesting looking layout.

This is the double page spread:

Three close-ups to save your eyes a bit …..

Tag below made with Tim Holtz Stains ages ago and never used, thought it was too murkey:

And the negative left over from cutting out a heart die stuck directly onto the journal page and outlined with a glaze pen.

That’s it for now my friends, the second page of my ‘experimental’ journal done and 8 days of the course completed. Thanks for dropping by 🙂

Learning To Dance In The Rain

Posted on May 4, 2013 by thecontentedcrafter

It’s time to post the final ‘retrospective’ journal page, completed sometime in February I think. My [previous] bad habit of forgetting to date my journal pages caught up with me and I now own, and use, an actual date stamp! Hola!!

This is the page where I learned about using car polish over gel medium to stop pages sticking together. [Thanks to Claudia Rossi – again!] The added benefit, as you will see, is that the sheen adds to the wet look I was trying to achieve.

The first thing I did was cover the pages with various shades of paint in blues and watered down reds and drag the colours downwards with a variety of makeshift instruments as I was trying to achieve the impression of falling rain. It actually looked really effective until I started applying the mod-podge when, of course, the water reactive thing occurred and I lost my lovely down-pour! Never mind – live and learn is the motto of the hit or miss crafter!

The house shapes were cut from old encyclopaedia paper – I like my art work to look learn-ed!

I used stains and paints to colour the houses and hit them with a ‘crackle’ stamp to add texture.

I die-cut the clouds from more book paper, stamped the winged flock and made the text using my trusty ‘Dymo‘ label maker.

This side retains some of the downpour texture I was trying for:

Tim Holtz stamps make another appearance, I stamped the rain man and the Model T onto tissue paper using black staz-on ink and bunged them into place. My white gel pen outlined rain man:

I was feeling pretty contented at this point – and then decided to try the mod-podge and car polish effect. As soon as I hit the page with the medium the colours started moving and blurring – I worked as quickly and lightly as possible to try and minimise it, but as I said before, I lost my downpour effect. When the medium was dry I raided the car cleaning kit and applied a liberal coat of car polish, buffing vigorously. I really like this – the finished page shines with a wet look sheen that is really effective for the theme and the pages don’t stick together – an added bonus!!