This is how I spent last weekend with those lovely people at lovin ink retreat. Thank you Janet and Michelle. It was great to catch up with people I only see at this retreat and to meet new crafters. We also made buttons and other embelishments to fill the box.

This is a piece of altered art created by my 5 year old grandaughter Elise. She lives in Leguevin France. When the family came to visit last autumn she put this together. Firstly we went for a walk where Elise caught the leaves as they fell from the trees. When we got home she gessoed, painted and stamped the frame. Then she arranged the leaves and put them behind the glass.

Since Elise came to visit she has had a birthday. This is the card I made for her 6th birthday in February

Tent Card and Alterd Frame

This is a tent card that I made for my niece.

I used a piece of A4 card measuring and scoring to make it stand up.

I covered the inside and outside with matching papers and stamped some trees using a stampingup stamp and memento ink.

The apeture was made using a nestability.

I stamped the images of the woodland folk and coloured them with copics. They were then cut out and fixed to the card using stickyback foam pads. The owl and happy birthday are fixed to the inside using ribbon and tape.

This is a photo frame that I altered on Friday at the stampman club.

It was black. Firstly I covered it in gesso to prevent the wood absorbing all the ink. It was then painted in duck egg blue acrylic paint.

I stamped on some tissue paper using a text stamp and applied it to the frame.

Then I stamped some swirls over it and made some roses and a butterfly. These I finished off with some 'pearls'. The butterfly is fixed using silicone glue.

To show off the flowers I used skeleton leaves and a Tim Holtz ticket securing it all to some lace with silicone glue.

saturday workshop

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I went to a workshop yesturday run by Janet and Michelle from 'Lovinink' at the 'Stampman' Skipton

It was brilliant we learnt lots about the different inks and how they should be used.

Also lots of different techniques which were put together in book form for easy reference. A handy reference system also a useful prompt for when I run out of creative ideas. I recommend these workshops as they are fun and informative. The following shows some of the stuff we did.

As you can see the first example that I have shown is of layered stampimg using distress inks and a Tim Holtz stamp.

This is layered stamping again and using stencils. I used bleach to lighten parts of the image.

Here I used adirondack raspberry and sunset orange. I then stamped the image with versafine ink and highlighted with the bleach pen. The Floral stamp is from stampman.

Other techniques that we played with included brayering, stamping on acetate and vellum and age distressing using Tim Holtz distress inks.

exploding box and tags

Hello everyone I'm back. I've had a lot going on over the past few months and a loss of confidence. I love my box, thanks to Michelle (Midnight Crafter) for the idea and the roses.





These are a couple of tags that I made using leftovers from my Christmas stuff. Thank you to Tuesday taggers for the inspiration.




I've used flower faries on both tags with papers from my Christmas paper collection finishing off with embelishments, again from my festive stash. For the grunging I used my whispers ink pads.
There will be a lot less in my Christmas box now. Thanks again to Tuesday taggers

This is a technique that I saw in a magazine and liked so this is my first successful attempt. I used a candle to create soot on some glossy paper then used one of my lovely tree stamps from the stamping up collection. It was sealed using spray and shine. I'm looking out for other ways to use this technique if anyone has any ideas I would love to hear them. I'm still experimenting. NB There are sensible precautions to be taken when using fire with paper. It is very messy so I do it outside with some water to hand to put out any flames

This is my entry for this weeks tuesday taggers competition. It is one of the decoupage sheets that I bought because I liked it then I didn't know what to do with it so thank you to the taggers for the inspiration.

First attempt

I have been persuaded to do a blog so here goes.