Happy Pumpkins !

I've got a quick and easy card to share with you this week. I love Autumn/Fall and all the beautiful colours. Inspired by the abundance of pumpkins around at the moment I made a card for a special someone. I just know it'll make him smile!

I stamped two of the pumpkins from Stampotique Originals directly onto my card. The middle one was stamped using Archival Ink onto some cardstock that was painted with acrylic paints. His googly eyes were made by drawing onto a couple of tiny circles with a Micron pen and covering them with Glossy Accents.

Thank you for calling. Happy Halloween if you are celebrating. Gez

schools out!

Extreme Faux Bleaching!

Hello!
I'm not calling this an 'old school' technique, as I've only really been doing this since Distress Inks came out. Not *that* long ago??! Still, this is a technique we all do from time to time, so why not just take it to the next level? Faux Bleaching, or, if you would rather....flicking water droplets at stuff!
 Here is my finished project...

Bright Bright colour, with spots, splashes and drips where the ink colour has been removed.
My card was coloured with 4 different colours of Distress ink, Picked Raspberry, Peacock Feathers, Mustard Seed and Festive Berries to be precise. As we have the primary colours in there in varying forms, we get a little colour mixing going on in places, greens oranges and purples emerge where the colours meet. The first layer of 'faux bleaching' takes off quite a few spots of colour..

As you all know already, big drips of water give big areas of 'bleach', spraying water will give tiny spots! Instead of stopping at the point though, add a little more inks to the dried background. I have kept the colours the same, i;e adding more yellow over the yellow areas. It would be easy to muddy the colours if you tried adding blue over a pink bit! This has the effect of toning down those first 'bleached' out areas, the shapes are still there, just not as 'white' as before. Keep repeating the water, drying, ink technique until you have a more layered look, with the drop marks varying in hue...

The only downside to this technique is that your card will have a tendency to curl because of all the water and heating you've done to it. You can see my background is a little warped in the pic above! This is easily rectified, simply stick (or sew!) the card to another bit of heavy cardstock to keep it flat.
I sewed my background to a bit of black card...

I added a few black splats of paint, and even had a go at 'bleach printing'... the semi circles you can see are the edges of a bottle top dipped in water that has been pressed onto the piece.
Very simple stamping to set off all that colour...

Of course, you could go as wild as you want with the design, for some reason I felt that less is more with this piece!
See you soon,
Trish xxx

An altered frame

As it's nearly Halloween I thought I'd do a bit of altering for a change. It's not usually my thing but for Halloween I can make an exception.

I've had this frame for ages. It was a cheap plastic one which I always intended to do something with and rid it of the Barbie pink, so what better way than with a coat of black gesso.

So this is what I ended up with. As well as the frame I also used the gesso on the doily which came out brilliantly.

The photo was one from my hoard of photo's and I just gave him a fancy hat, a pumpkin treat bag and stripey legs. I think he looks far better than when I started.

I also went around the frame with some Inka Gold cream. 

Have fun this Halloween.

Jaine x

'Old School' 3 -Salt!

Hello!
Another old favourite inky technique today, although this time I've only used bits of the background created on my final piece! My finished creation is this page...

The bright red poppy heads are the product of todays spotlight technique: Salt backgrounds!
Adding rock salt to wet ink is a great way to create fab texture and interest, and it's really simple too!
Step1: Prepare! The is messy, so put your card down on a wipe clean surface.

Step 2: Spray! (or drip...) Any drippy ink will work for this, acrylic inks, ink sprays, stains, you name it. I knew I was going to use the result for a poppy head, so I sprayed in just the one colour. You can go as bonkers with the colours as you want!

Step 3: Reactivate the inks with a little more water so the surface is nice and wet...

Step 4: Add on the rock salt...

Step 5: Spray with a little more water to make sure the salt has a nice wet bond with the surface..

Step 6: Now you can go one of two ways. Leave it to dry by itself, or blast with a heat gun. Drying naturally gives nice results...but for the impatient.....Blast with the heat gun!

Step 7: Once ALL the ink is dry, wait until the cardstock and salt is cool. It's really quite surprising how hot salt gets! Once cold, rub off the salt...

Step 8: Admire the fab textures and design the salt creates!

I then cut circles from my salty background, and added seed beads to the centres to give me my poppies.

I typed straight onto an old book page to give me my title...

Which was very apt, because I wanted to doodle my way around the rest of the piece, no stamps at all. I was a bit hesitant about letting go and creating the stems and leaves of my poppies, so really needed to believe in myself!

I *think* it worked, but need a lot more playing about until I'm confident!
Have a go with the salt, its a really nice technique!

See you soon,
Trish xxxxx

Recycled & reused !!

I've had such good fun making a card from my ever growing box of paper scraps, score!!

It was so simple, I am going to try this again!

Is it just me or do others save the beautiful packaging when they buy new crafting supplies... I couldn't throw this packaging away so I used it as the starting point for my card!

There is a lovely collection of Prima goodies over in the SHOP. I decided to use the packaging from the lovely, scrumptious Say It In Crystals yummy, embellishments!!

Using scraps of Tissue Paper by Tim Holtz, patterned scrap papers and old pages from a dictonary! Each were matted and layered to produce a simple card. Using a couple of stamped images from Stampotique Originals.

 Bella, Bella...

Happy creating, Gez

Courage my friends.

Oh I do love it when something comes together so effortlessly like the page below called "Courage",

Working in my big journal I had already used the Prima 12 x 12 flower stencil to add a base layer of texture paste. I painted over that totally with Claudine Hellmuth Studio paint in Classic Teal which is an absolutely gorgeous colour. Once this was dry I took a sanding block and gave the whole page a gentle sand to take off the top layer of paint and reveal the beautiful stenciled image below.

That all done I seriously didn't want to cover it up and would have been quite happy to leave it like that but that doesn't make much of a page really, so I clustered a few off cuts, a piece of glittery tape from My Minds Eye, a bit of journaling and I stamped and embossed the lace border by Prima and Finnabair taking a paintbrush to flick off some of the powder to give it a tattered look.

I think that's all it needed as I wanted to leave plenty of "white space" as they say.

See you soon

Jaine x

A bit of graffiti.

It looks as though Agatha Moon is dreaming of the future and what life has in store for her.

My page was kind of created by just adding stuff and doing what I fancied. No plan, just winging it so to speak. I slapped on a bit of paint here and there and used a few off cuts of paper as a collage element on the page. I then added some paste through a Crafters Workshop stencil and wrote my journaling with a paintbrush. Agatha who is designed by our own Magda, was painted with water colours as these are my favourite colouring media to use.

Happy crafty Sunday

Jaine x

Old School 2: Shaving Foam Backgrounds

Hello!

Part 2 of my ''Old School techniques revisited" series!

Today..... Shaving Foam Backgrounds!

Yes, we've all played about with this technique in the past, I think it's about time we tried it again!

This is my finished piece....

Just LOVE the swirly colourfulness going on!

Right...refresher time..here's how you do it!

Firstly, squirt some shaving foam onto a paper plate...

Paper plates are brilliant because you can just bin the whole messy lot when you're done. If you want a bigger print though, you'll need to find something bigger! You really need the cheapest shaving foam you can find, nothing posh with fancy bits added, no need for them. This can was 26p from Tescos!

Next, smooth it out so you have a flat-ish surface...

At this point you need to restrain yourself from going all 'slapstick clown' and shoving the resulting pie into someones face. Unless that's just me.......

Next, drip on some inks. I've used a combination of Bombay inks and Daler Rowney inks, but I'm sure any drippy ink would work. Experiment!

Using a skewer, drag the inks into each other. I've just used a simple design first..

Take a bit of card (I've found the thicker the better, and NOT coated!), and place it on top of the inky mess. Gently press down so all the surface touches the inks..

Peel it off....

Now we need to remove all the excess foam! You will get the best results if you scrape it off all in one go, so try and use something a little wider than your card. I have used a bone folder here, but things like long rulers work just as well.

Scrape the foam off in one movement, dragging your chosen implement in one direction across the card.

Then admire your design!

You can also go back to the foamy mess and do a little more pattern making...

This time I have created swirls and circles with the skewer on top of the lines already made. The result from this looks like so....

You can also take multiple prints without messing about with the design in between...

With these three prints, the one on the left was the first 'pull' from the foam. I went straight back in with more card to produce the middle print, then the print on the right is the design created when going in for a third time. As you can see, the inks get less the more prints you pull, but the designs are fab!

I chose to use the middle print from the three above in my final project.

The ink swirls are great, with no mixing or muddying of colours..

You can add stamping over the top of the design...

I used a bit of another print for the dress of my Stampotique figure...

I must warn you though....once you start you can't stop. I now have a big stack of prints all ready for use!

The other thing you need to know is that it's messy...very messy! Make sure you have a lot of paper towels on hand to wipe up after yourself!

Have fun,

Trish xxxxx

Spots of colour!

Good morning, Gez here in a rather wet & windy part of England today!!! 

Gosh, we're having some rain!

I am excited to be sharing an on going project with you today that will just keep growing & growing!

If like me when I get new supplies I can't wait to try them out... I have decided to catalogue them and keep them altogether on a metal book ring...

I've got 4 tags to share with you today using some of my favourite products from A sprinkle of imagination.

First of all I stamped a brand NEW stamp from Stampotique Originals, (it's from the Circle Cube by Daniel Torrente) Vicki stocks lots and lots of their stamps and can order any that you see online. I have used an Archival Ink Pad for stamping which are both water and fade resistant and a Sakura Pigma Micron pen for labelling.

I managed to fit the circle stamp 8 times onto one tag as you can see using various products.

On my first tag I have used acrylic paints, sometimes it is so much better to see the paint on cardstock rather by just looking at the pot or tube as you get a better idea of the finished look when it's dry.

This is true of all the different products, so I went ahead and had great fun using Distress Inks,

 Bombay India inks,

and also, 

 Inktense pencilsby Derwent

Here is my finished swatch...

 for now!

I can keep on adding to my ring and so on!

Thank you for calling, Gez