NBUS #6 Quickly sneaking in!

With only hours to go I wondered how (with my lack of mojo) I could enter the NBUS challenge at Darlene's place. Then I remembered this NBUS that I had made a start on but not completed - voila!

I fell in love with the (NBUS) Katzelkraft Grumpy Penguins rubber stamps that are stocked by That's Crafty and while I was there the water drops set and some crazy birds also fell into my basket, well you have to get the free postage don't you?

The background is a technique I tried from Craft Stamper magazine, you stamp onto watercolour paper with Versamark and heat emboss it with white EP. Then you get messy by spritzing the paper with water then sprinkling on tiny buts of Brushos, letting some run and flicking water on it when it's dry - isn't it lovely?

The penguins were also stamped on watercolour paper in black Versacolor ink and heat embossed with clear powder, then I coloured them a little with Pan Pastels cut them out and mounted them on the background. How unusual, a totally hand stamped card!

The penguins are grumpy about the rain, they are all wet!

Happy Birthday is from a Hero Arts clear set, and Brother is from a Papermania clear set of stamps, both stamped in Indigo Versacolor and heat embossed with clear EP.

There are so many things I wanted to do but haven't got there yet. At least I made it for this one!

So that's my Brother's birthday card sorted for this month! Need one for Dad now.

Challenges entered:

NBUS #6 - Sunday 13th March

Tuesday Throwdown - create a scene.

Love to create - #6 anything mixed media (27th March)

Craft Stamper - Take it Make it for March, anything goes with a stamp.

Have a lovely day

I recently bought a Sizzix Framelets and embossing folder set that makes a scene, clouds, sun and umbrella. I decided that the scene would be perfect for Warren Rabbit (by Craftwork Cards). The image is coloured with Promarkers and Copic glitter pens, and fussy cut. The background is embossed then coloured with Distress Inks for the sky and hills, and Promarkers for the rainbow and flowers and ground. The clouds and sun are die cut from Coredinations paper and then embossed and sanded.

The sentiment is a free stamp with the current issue of Craft Stamper magazine which I stamped, heat embossed and then die cut with Spellbinders. I know my rainbow colours aren't in the right order, I will do better next time!

I have entered the following challenges:

Craft all day - anything goes (March)

Avenue 613 - anything goes with optional 2d or 3d flowers (Sun)

Faux airbrushing, Craft Stamper technique.

This is my first attempt at Faux Airbrushing, and the Take it Make it challenge at the Craft Stamper blog is to make a card using the technique which was explained in the Feb issue of the magazine (take the technique and make it).  Having done this one I will have a go at some more, the examples on the blog are inspiring me to try this in a different form. I am not totally happy with this one.

There are a couple of stray blobs opf Distress Ink (I used Dried Marigold and Spiced Marmalade), I hope that adds to it. Stamps by Hero Arts the flower is stamped and die cut with a Sizzix/ Hero Arts set of dies and stamps.

Happy New Year and a few cards

This was my last attempt at Craft Stamper of the Year, and this round was Indigo Blu. Having learnt my lesson from the previous round where I only bought one stamp that proved hard to use, for this round I bought a set called Wild Meadow and a Sunflower stamp and I had the freebie small butterfly from Craft Stamper magazine. I also bought black stamping card from Indigo Blu, as previous winning entries had used 3 or more elements from the sponsor. I actually got this one in a day before the closing date, or maybe it was hours as I was up to the early hours of the morning finishing it because we were leaving for Devon the next day. I stamped onto the black card with Brillance and the pad has three colours of blues and greens, and then heat embossed with crystal pearl powder, and I trimmed this and mounted it on some gold card then onto the card blank, I think I left the image a little long, however I had been stamping and practicing for hours and forgot to make it a little shorter and had no time to do it again. I stamped the sunflower onto white card several times and coloured them with Promarkers and Trias, then cut and decoupaged the images so each layer gets a little smaller, and I stamped and coloured the butterflies in the same way. I painted over the sunflower and butterflies with artists irridescent medium to give it shine, and finally I stamped the sentiment onto parchment paper and die cut it, edging it with the same brown ink I used to stamp it. I actually bought stamps to complete the last round but ran out of mojo, so got nowhere! I love the stamps and I am sure they will get a lot of use.

This card was also for Stamper of the Year but the round before Indigo Blu, which was sponsored by Crafty Individuals, and I have a lot of their stamps, however this all went horribly wrong! I started by trying to glue book pages together to make an altered book, but it was clear I wasn't doing it right and I didn't have time to look for the instructions - again this was the last day! So I carried on with the book theme and used a page from the book which is about a beautiful garden outside a house window, and I cut a window into the middle and used a Sizzix cut and fold window die with the top part hidden. Inside the window I stamped and embossed the bird cage and some blue birds. Outside I stamped branches and birds, and then went to grab the flower stamps - it wasn't until I had spent some hours colouring them in that I realised I had grabbed the wrong make of stamps for the flowers, I had stored Graphicus (Chocolate Baroque) stamps on the same sheet and the Crafty Individual stamps were right next to them - whoops! Again with no time to redo the whole thing I had to just finish off with some Distress walnut coloured ink painted onto and around the page, which is mounted on Kraft card on a lighter Kraft card blank. Oh Dear!

Christmas Eve make, delivered to a neighbour at 11:30. I was making quick cards by this time, and this was the Crackerbox Palace santa and sleigh stamped onto linen effect card which was embossed with the snowy village and I added Ice Stickles to highlight that image. Crafty Ribbons of course, and by the time I got to Boxing day and still making cards I had refined this a little but didn't take more photos so I need to make some more so I can!

This was inspired by the Crafty Ribbon DT, and used up some short ends of ribbon. I only had one of these card blanks left but I am sure I can reproduce this in some other way with the tools I have! Ribbons are Crafty Ribbons except for one tiny bit, black and silver which is Papermania. I sprayed the card blank with bronze Glimmer Mist and added a star and some wooden ornaments, and this was for Shaun.

Not a card, this is an insect hotel and was one of my Christmas pressies!

The Quirky Crafts challenges will begin on 6th January for 2013, and the winners of the last challenge will be announced then!

Craft Stamper of the Year - Round 3 entry

Now that the winners are published for round 3 I can show you my entry, which again didn't get anywhere!

The sponsor was Imagination, and I didn't have any of their stamps so set off to find some. First hurdle when I got to the web site the company had closed for a couple of weeks and I needed it to be here before then, so googled to find someone else selling them. I found some, and I picked just one large stamp called Echinacea which really appealed to me. I was being frugal, not working now so I try not to spend as much as I was on craft stuff.

Anyway I had an idea and, once the stamp arrived, I spent a week or more stamping images on card and acetate and I wasn't getting a good image. I don't know if the ink pads are drying up, or it was just me, I tried different inks, I tried brayering the card onto the stamp. I also bought some Imagination paints to use on the acetate but when I tried them the effect wasn't good, maybe I need to gen up on their use.

So with only a day to go I changed from trying to stamp and use images on card and acetate to stamping into  melted UTEE. I got the melt pot fired up and melted some Hot Pink UTEE, then poured it out and stamped into it. I then applied some Mica powder to the center of the flower. I used a Kraft frame which I think is paper mache, and was brown Kraft colour (why is it called Kraft I wonder). I painted the frame with white gesso then applied alcohol inks to it with an applicator, the ink mix I can't recall now, it included a mixative. I stamped over the frame with the free Indigo Blue butterfly. Then I die cut first some DCWV paper with a scalloped inside, and on top of that a Kraft frame which was stamped with a Wordsworth quote stamp and I finished off with a few of the butterflies stamped and coloured slightly.

I am pleased with it, there are issues I am not happy with, like the frame center not being square so it was impossible in the time I had left to get the frame to fit, and the UTEE not being totally even in thickness though that is hidden by the frames. With more time I might have found a solution to the not fitting problem!

Looking at the winners I see that they all used more than one Imagination product, they probably got their entries in on time and not at 1:30am which was an hour and a half after the deadline, but I did have to put up with numerous power cuts that evening which didn't really help.

I bought more Imagination clear stamp sets at the Exeter craft show, which is the first place we went on route to Torquay last weekend. When I was looking I didn't see these online, for 3 sets it was a little more than it cost me for this one stamp, and I might have got on better with them.

 I didn't spend as much as I have in the past at craft shows, I could have easily spent more. I bought a set of punches I had wanted last time but they had sold out then, some Kraftin Kimmie stamps at £2 each, bargain,   two Memento Ink pads which I was ripped off on, they were 50p cheaper on the next stall I came to with them, and nobody else was selling them for £4 so I picked the wrong place to buy from. I also bought a larger than usual embossing stencil, some envelopes, some beads to use on crochet flowers (though the first ones I was sold might be too small, I did tell them what I wanted it for but then came across the wholesaler's stall where I was told that wasn't the ones I needed, I bought some larger ones I have been using - so another rip off). I also bought some cheaper than Pinflair non smelly silcone like glue from Spike the punch magician, which is where I got the punches and bargain stamps!

I nearly bought either a Scor-pal or Martha Stewart scoring board, both were at good prices, but I didn't do it in the end. I was really finding the plethora of pretty dies confusing, everyone has jumped on that bandwaggon, I know if I am seeing a good price on Spellbinders or Sizzix but I really didn't know if the prices on the other dies around were cheap or not. Looking when I got home I don't think they were any less than normal. I also saw some Just Rite stamp sets that are designed to go with certain Spellbinder sets, this is another exciting development that stamp companies seem to be taking up, Hero Arts with Sizzix, Just Rite and Unity with Spellbinders and who knows who else. I resisted buying any, though it was hard to resist, I have just received a set of Unity Stamps from the US and bought the Spellbinders set to go with those and got a really good deal on that!

Stamper of the Year attempts - so far

Now that Craft Stamper have announced the round one and round two winners of Stamper of the Year I can blog my failed attempts! This was for round 1 which was PaperArtsy. Good, I thought, I have PaperArtsy stamps.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this one before beginning, and I haven't done an altered frame before. I had a little hinged pine frame which I bought for altering and wish I could get some more. I decided to go with a Victorian school theme. I painted the frame all over with white gesso to start with, then painted the inside frame with black gesso for the blackboard effect. I stamped the children (is that Princess Di in the bottom row?) with Distress inks and added a little distress powder and embossed them. I stamped a center panel onto Stampbord. The teacher was stamped in the same way then masked as I stamped the ruler to appear in the background behind her, and again a Stampbord panel with a pink cheek. I added a Stambord "slate" inked black and with Cat scratched into it. All round the blackboard I added sums, and phrases like lines, or the teacher taking register and teaching or telling the children off, and some of this I scratched into the black gesso revealing the white (which worked on my test board but not on the finished frame - and I did a lot of testing), some was done using a chalk marker. I added a strip of corrugated card for teacher's desk, and made some Fimo apples and chalks. Finally the apples were glazed, can you see the bite out of one of the apples from a cheeky child?

I wanted to decorate the back of the frame too. All over the frame is stamped with HOTP flowers and sentiments from various sets. The hinges and photo tags were inked using a Krylon copper pen to age them (I unscrewed the tags to ink them, the hinges were a little messier as I inked them in place). I stamped the Gentlemen of industry onto In My Minds Eye papers, matching up the two sides so they both had corner designs, and then stamping more sentiments. Disapproving adults?  

Round the frame I added Dymo tape words, which read "We don't need no education, and children should be seen and not heard. This is the part I had most problems with as the tape will not stick down on the stamped gesso, if I had to send it in I would have had to find something that would stick the tape on! I was considering also punching out An apple for the teacher and sticking it round the inside edges of the teacher, but didn't get that far, and they wouldn't stick if I did!

What went wrong you might ask? Well I was working on this until nearly midnight on the closing date. I took these photos, apart from the first one - that wasn't such a good photo and the glue wasn't dry, the apples weren't glazed and I forgot the chalks. I didn't have time to take better photos, or do a proper write up of how I did this, I had to press send at 5 minutes to midnight and give a very brief explanation, and apology and say I would provide a full description and better photos if required!

Did it even get there by midnight and did they even look at it? I will never know.

Round 2, well I had good intentions, and I had some Chocolate Baroque stamps. Couldn't decide what to do then on holiday I spotted some little bird boxes and an idea was forming.....

Unfortunately with days to go to the deadline I had a violent allergic reaction to some eye drops used in an eye test and couldn't continue, I tried to carry on when I got to the actual deadline day (when I felt a little better) but had to give up when I reached midnight and nowhere near finished, and I have still not finished my project.

Round 3, I can't show you as it hasn't been announced, I had to buy stamps for this one, and I chose to buy just one stamp that didn't prove easy to work with (at least not for me and I tried every trick and tip (and type of ink) I could think of). I had an idea which I had to abandon after working on it for several days and I was pleased with what I ended up doing instead, however we did have several power cuts leaving me sat in the dark (imagine me sat in the back of my craft room in pitch black unable to see a thing or move for fear of tripping over one of the many things on the floor! Shaun has since given me a glow in the dark torch for that corner which is is magnetic and stuck to my shelf brackets in case it happens again), and that didn't help so it was past the deadline when I sent it in (might have been less than an hour and a half past without the power cuts), and therefore it will probably never be looked at!

Round 4, I had several of the required stamp sets. Tried to do an ambitious project for the first time, something that didn't work - my fault, needed to find the instructions in a past mag but after some explorations gave up due to lack of time). , so switched at the last minute, made a card, and made what I see as a terrible mistake (which I spent considerable time completing before realising what I had just done) with no time to change it (there is nothing in the rules to say I couldn't do what I did, but it would have been much better if I did it properly). It was well within the deadline this time so should be looked at and binned I imagine!

Round 5, deadline is looming, I have bought a set and a single stamp, and not yet started - ideas are buzzing round in my head! Why do I feel the urge to make art projects for the first time, and not just stick to the cards? Well it must be years of pent up creativity awakened by this challenge!