CoronaCrafts - Just say no...

I was going to talk about stencils today, but that will keep.

Today is not a good day.  I know the virus is not done, but I am.  Officially.

...and no-one says it better than a baby groundhog.

Groundhog:  Rubber Hedgehog
Sentiment:  Mary Engelbreit for Rubber Moon

CoronaCrafts - He's pretty, but...

I took a blogging break this weekend because a) it was gloomy and being productive when it's gloomy is just impossible, and b) the craft theme of the weekend was FINISH THINGS!

Here's the first of the cards I finished:

I used a the Collage Windows die from Scrapman as a mask and inked over it, then stamped Monsieur Coeur from Carabelle Studio, and added a sentiment with a stamp I had custom made a bunch of years ago.

This is not a complicated card, but I got stuck on it the other week for a stupid reason.   After I inked and stamped the main panel, the card wanted to be 4-bar size (about 3.5" x 5"), rather than A2 (4.25" x 5.5").  I wanted to use a frame die for the panel so I had 90º angles everywhere, but I convinced myself that running the panel through my diecut machine with an A2 die twice, or using my paper trimmer, which produces only mostly clean, straight lines, would fail and I would ruin everything and the world would crumble and disaster would ensue.  I mean, it's possible that I would have ruined the card panel, but in the calm view of many days later, I could have just remade it, right?  This is a thing I have to remind myself of over and over again.  In this case, I threw money at the problem instead.  I found a set of Lawn Fawn 4-bar frame dies and ordered them.  They arrived Friday, and worked perfectly for the card.  The world was saved.

One of the best parts was that after I made this card, I had the inked die I'd used as a mask nicely colored and ready to use on another card.  I went for even simpler this time, adding just a small sentiment from Mama Elephant's Tres Amigos in one of the die openings.

Tomorrow:  Fun with stencils.  Eventually.

CoronaCrafts - Day 10

Happy Friday!  I'm making a cake, sitting outside as I write this post, and listening to some great dance tunes - not bad for my quarantine-like existence.

Today's card was built from a background I had made who knows when at a moment when I was experimenting with emboss resist techniques.  I used two of my favorite Distress Oxide colors:  Chipped Sapphire and Seedless Preserves and a favorite background stamp, French Script by Darkroom Door.  I did the blocks of color side-by-side, and didn't know what to do next, so I set it aside.  Here's what I came up with the other day.

I have a whole list of Jane Austen quotes to make into stamps someday, but this is one I found on Etsy from a store called Makistamps out of Germany.  The image comes from Blank Page Muse and has the descriptive title Lady and Man Clock with Writing.  So it is.

The card came together pretty quickly, but at the last minute, I decided that both the quote and the image needed a black mat to help them stand out against the background. I cut the mat for the quote, but couldn't face my diecutting machine, with which I have an adversarial relationship, again that night, so left it for the next day.

When I've been sending out these cards, I'm doing a little bit of stamping on the envelopes.  Here's a perennial favorite:

I've had this stamp for ages.  It's appropriate for every occasion.  It was originally made by Rubber Poet, but is now available from StampaFe.

What are you working on this weekend?  I'm making more of my Dangerous Business cards and have one more person with snarky quote card ready to go.  Something will happen tomorrow.

CoronaCrafts - Day 9

It's a beautiful, sunny day in my little village, and it took me less than an hour to do my grocery shopping this morning, so things must be looking up!

Today's card is one of my fastest on record...

Maybe like many card-makers, I'm always coming up with stamps I wish existed: an image I would love to work with, or more often, a quote or a phrase I want to put on a card.  I keep a list of stamps to make someday when I have unlimited time and money and suddenly develop the design skills to make something graphically interesting and useful.  I know there are companies out there who make stamps for cardmakers, but the prices are often outside my budget.  I had a bunch of stamps made locally in 2016, but I used a shop who did a fine job, but just doesn't know from deep-etched art stamps.  I can and do use the stamps I had made, but I have to stamp carefully.  Late last year I found another company online who had good prices and an easy, online stamp set-up process, so I tried to have another stamp made.  The results were the same as the first situation - fine job, exactly what I paid for, but not the same quality as the art stamps I love using.   But I'm going to use the stamp anyway - just stamping lightly and many times to get a good impression. 

The day the stamp arrived, I pulled it off of the wood block, cut it into two strips, mounted it on cling foam and tried it out on a pre-printed card I'd gotten at some point from Concord & 9th.  Here's the result:

I didn't come up with this line.  I read it on a Cup of Jo blog post two years ago and have been hanging onto it ever since!  I don't know who actually said it, and as I'm not selling or distributing anything with this quote on it, I'm not going to track down the author and ask for permission to use it, but I'm so glad I have it in stamp form.

Someday I'll spend real money and spring for some custom art stamps.  What do you want to see in rubber stamp form?

Tomorrow:  more fun with quotes and writing

CoronaCrafts - Day 8

I got a bit stuck in my card-making yesterday.  Over the weekend, before I got distracted by the coffee and tea shop dies I wrote about yesterday, I started two cards, and came to a stopping point on both of them for different reasons.  I mean, I will finish them, but I have to figure out how, and that feeling of not knowing how to get out of the rut was starting to take over, combined with that feeling of dread that if I don't make a card, and don't send it, I'll have nothing to blog about, nothing to post in Instagram, and by skipping one day I will get out of the habit of sending and writing and I will have failed miserably.

I'm tired of this disruption to my life, can you tell?

I took a deep breath.

And I tried to remember what the heck I was trying to do with this project to begin with - send cards to friends I can't see right now, use bits of things cluttering up my craft table, and try out some ideas and use products I've been meaning to forever.  Oh, and it's Woodblock Wednesday coming up.

As I'm very slowly unmounting my woodblock stamps, and incorporating all of my cling stamps into my main catalog, I have occasion to look through my stamp drawers, which I love doing.  I was getting out another stamp when I found this one by Stampers Anonymous: 

I have no idea when I got it.  I don't think I've ever used it.  I know this font is one of my favorites (what is it called?  do you know???), and I'm drawn to every stamp that uses it.  As soon as I saw it, I knew it was perfect for my CoronaCrafts cards.

I went for simplicity, and the original tenets of the project.  I pulled out a bunch of background stamps I've been wanting to use, dug out the notebook pages where I'd jotted down some of the Distress Oxide combos I wanted to try, and diecut a bunch of panels.  Here are my first two cards in the series:

 

Top:  Background - My Favorite Things Marble Background; Colors - Tattered Rose, Abandoned Coral, Seedless Preserves

Bottom:  Background - Simon Says Stamp Circle Doodle Background; Colors - Shabby Shutters, Peacock Feathers, Faded Jeans

When I make more of these in the next day or so, I'm going to use the technique from the top card:  Ink the panel, and then stamp the background stamp using the lightest color from the background.  Because the ink has pigment qualities as well as dye ink properties, the light color will stay visible on top of the darker shades.  Unexpected!  I think it makes a better, subtler backdrop for the words.

And I had no idea until I told my husband about these cards that this phrase is really a paraphrased quote from Tolkein.

Tomorrow:  Super-quick cards!

CoronaCrafts - Day 7

I started working on one card over the weekend, got stymied by something, got excited about something else, and ended up with a card I didn't expect.  This card is all about a thing I love doing, and which someday, we'll get to do again: meet friends for coffee.  Or tea.  Or dinner.  Or drinks.  You get the idea.  In the topsy turvy vein, here's the front of the card, which is the last thing I made...

Background Stamp:  Love of Coffee by Picket Fence Studios; Sentiment:  Coffee Talk by Joy Clair

This card front makes me think that I've learned a thing or two from all of the cardmakers out there, and all of those hours I spend watching card-making videos.  I made an A2 card base, and cut an A2 panel.  I stamped the background image in gold on the panel  (I should have embossed it, but as this was the last stamping step of a long card-making session, I was happy this bit turned out as well as it did.).  I used my MISTI to stamp the sentiment on the card base, and then again on the panel so I would know exactly where to cut the window in the center so the sentiment would show through.  Then I was able to trim a bit off of all four sides of the panel before mounting it with foam tape on the card base. 

Here's what happens when you open the card...

Both of these dies are from Hero Arts as part of their My Monthly Hero release in 8/2018.  I didn't want the whole kit - I really only wanted the café die (on the right), but as it wasn't sold separately, I contented myself with the Tea Party die, which I bought at some point, and promptly never used.  Recently, I got to thinking about that café die, and wondered if maybe, by accident, I could find it on Ebay for a not-exorbitant amount of money.  I could!  I did!  It came on Saturday, and this card idea was born:

Contrasting scenes - one coffee, one tea, different color schemes, and different backgrounds, seen side-by-side on the inside of the card. 

The dies are the perfect size for A2 panels, and cut beautifully.  The hard part for me was deciding on the background.  I looked on Pinterest to see how other had used these dies and didn't find a ton of examples.  I was about to go for just a colored background when I remembered two cityscape stamps I have from Technique Junkies:  Watercolor NY (retired, on the L) and City Watercolors (on the R).  Perfect!  I stamped each city image with light ink on a white panel, added color with blending brushes, roughly following the lines of the image, and then stamped the image again in black.  The tea scene uses Aged Mahogany, Tattered Rose, and Spun Sugar inks; the coffee scene Vintage Photo, Tea Dye, and Sea Glass inks.

Once the backgrounds were done, I adhered a diecut over each, and then glued them to the inside of the card.  To write my message, I slipped in a plain, white card.

I love how this card came out!  I kept holding my breath waiting for something to go horribly wrong, or for me to spill something on one of the panels, but that just didn't happen, for once.  These dies make me so happy!!  I'm so glad I now have both of them!!

Tomorrow:  Woodblock Wednesday, and an unexpected, timely find!

CoronaCrafts - Day 6

Of all the Tim Holtz Distress Oxide combos, there's one I return to over and over:  Antique Linen, Victorian Velvet, and Seedless Preserves (okay, anything with Seedless Preserves works for me.  You see the background color of this blog, right?).  Here are a few different cards I've made in the past few years with that set of colors:

Image:  Tim Holtz Cityscapes

Tim Holtz Floral Layering Stencil; Sentiment:  Altenew Signature Words

Images:  Oxford Impressions Jane Austen Collection

Today's card using that color combo came out of a day of exploration with watercolor block printing.  I love this technique for simple one-layer cards, and often stamp botanical silhouette images over the color blocks.  This card is a little more involved.

I'd made the print, stamped Hero Arts' Small Newspaper Skyline (retired), and trimmed it down to size a long time ago.   I loved it mounted on black, but wanted to add some interest to the background.  I thought about adding a background stamp to the back panel for a subtle tone-on-tone look, but instead went for Cuttlebug's Old Paris embossing folder (also retired) to add some texture. But when I put the two pieces together, something was still off.  I had a scrap of glitter paper lying around that was in the right color family, so I added that to the bottom.  I liked how the glitter paper broke up the monotony of black in the background, but adding it threw the balance off.  But, like magic, adding the sentiment from Miss Ink's Decaf Background set, fixed everything.

Tomorrow we stay in the city and celebrate café life, which we'll someday be allowed to have again.

CoronaCrafts - Day 5

Happy Friday!  Today was an exciting day!  I ventured outside to the bank, post office, and the grocery store.  I was so excited for this outing, I even showered and put on earrings.  But my household is not sick, so in the grand scheme of things, all is well.

As I was downloading the photo of today's card, I found the photo I took of the stamped image, dated 3-2017.  Yes, I started making this card three years ago, and held on to it until now.

The Gibson Girl image is from Flonz, a company from New Zealand.  I've long had a postcard of this same image, which reads, "Unucky at Cards, Lucky in Love."  I love how she is looking straight at you, and seems to be poised for trouble-making.  I paired it with an appropriate sentiment from Lockhart Stamps, which is scarcely available these days - maybe through Pink Ink?  Maybe through Stampassion?  Ebay has one!

To turn this into a card, I added some quick color to the dress and hair and mounted it on foam and then a card base.  

I love colorful cards, and cards with layers and fancy diecuts, but somehow this is the kind of card I come back to again and again. 

Tomorrow:  Cityscapes!

CoronaCrafts - Day 4

I've mentioned before that I gravitate toward certain themes in the stamps and dies I buy and the cards I create:  coffee, Gibson Girls, women and snarky sayings, city skylines, etc.  Another of these is oceans, waves, and waterlines.  I love swimming, seafood dinners, river boat tours, ferry rides, and the like.  Today's card celebrates that love.

The showpiece of this card is the Layered Wave die set from the Ton Stamps.  It's amazing.  I'd cut out a few pieces from various shades of blue forever ago, but never used them because I wasn't quite sure what to do with them.  So I went back to the Ton's website and took a cue from one of their card examples just to get me started.  I even found the remants of the blue paper I had used before, and cut out a few more wave pieces, just to give me too many options.  Now that I watch the video on the Ton's website again, I might follow their example more closely next time.

I cobbled together a sentiment mostly from Technique Junkies.  At a stamp show some time, I got a grab bag of stamps from them, which included "Meet Me," and "the Sea."   I scoured my collection for anything containing the word "at" and found one.  I took my time lining up the words, and silver embossed each one.

Though very imperfect, this card, and these wave dies are amazing in person.  They would be great for a diorama or shadow box card, or over vellum, or paired with one of my layered ocean stamp sets! I have to use these dies again, so send your ideas.

Tomorrow:  Here comes trouble...

Becoming less socially distant - Day 1

So everything is cancelled, and we're just home forever, or at least until the dire threat of dread disease passes.  And you would think that with all of this time on my hands, all gigs off, and work scarce this week, that it would be prime time for crafting.  And you would be right about that.  But amidst all my craft room organization tasks, and the millions of things I have to play with, I still need something to focus on - a project, a goal.  Enter letter writing.  Remember that?  And why not, while I'm at it, look at those pieces of cards lying on my table, the backgrounds I'm going to use some day, the techniques I'm trying to get better at, the new stamps I want to use, and make a daily card and send it to a friend I miss seeing in these days of isolation.  Okay, here goes...

Stamp:  Ornate Background by Simon Says Stamp
Sentiment:  Little Halo Hello by Poppystamps

I love this background stamp.  Months and months ago, I stamped it a bunch of times in a bunch of ways just to have pieces ready:  white embossed on white card stock, gold embossed on black cardstock, Versamark ink on white with pan pastels over top, etc.  This version is black ink with clear embossing on bristol paper, I think.  I used my watercolor markers to highlight a portion of the design and stopped there.  I don't know if I planned to come back to it and keep coloring, but this is how I found it.

The other morning, I watched a Jennifer McGuire video where she was demonstrating a technique with alcohol inks - a product I don't own, and don't really intend to explore, even if the results are stunning.  In one of the cards she made, she used a colorful, busy background, and just added a die-cut sentiment, with only a little more embellishment to make a lovely card.  And I thought, hey, I have a million background stamps, and a million sentiment dies, let's give it a go.

I took my possibly unfinished background, decided to use a Hello sentiment die I've had for over a year and not touched, and went crazy and broke out some metallic paper and even some tiny gems (so on-trend.  Yes, I am).  I learned something important about my metallic paper:  it's too thin to manage if you don't mount it on cardstock first - excellent lesson, especially since I've owned that paper pad for years and not used it before either.  It took three tries, but I eventually got a dark pink, metallic Hello that I didn't tear.

I really like how my card turned out.  I need to work a bit on gem placement, but the relative simplicity suits my style, and I succeeded in my goal of using bits and pieces of my stash.  And I even wrote the letter and put it in the mail!

What are you doing to stay busy?

CoronaCrafts - Day 3 - Woodblock Wednesday!

I'm not talking about distancing anymore.  I may be practicing it, but it's not going into my post titles as of this minute!

It's Woodblock Wednesday!!

One of the craft organization projects I'm doing is adding all of my unmounted cling stamps, including those I've actually unmounted from their wood blocks, to my main catalog, which is a physical binder sorted by image subject.  This binder includes all but my most recent woodblock stamps (recent being from the last 3-ish years or so, a time when I all but stopped buying woodblock stamps anyway).  My goal is to catalog one unmounted sheet everyday.  This process involves finding the right place or places in the catalog for each image, stamping it onto the page, or creating a new page if there's not enough space, and adding a label to each image with the name, stamp company, and location in my stamp bins.  Doing one sheet a day is not arduous, and it gives me quality time with my catalog, which has so many images I still love from my early stamping days.  Today's card uses one of those images and continues a card series I will probably never get tired of.

I don't remember who made this image stamp.  I think it was a company called the Stampsmith, but whoever it was, they are long gone.  The ironic thing is that this was one of the images that came on a sheet of plain rubber featuring stills of dancers from the movies:  Fred & Ginger, Shirley Temple, etc.  Although I rarely gave unmounted stamps a second look in those days, I had to have this sheet and I took the time to mount each image on foam and a wood block a friend made for me.  Today, I undid that work on this image.

I mounted the image on a panel I diecut using the now-unavailable Tonic Studios Art Deco Collectible set (which is amazing!!  I have the Art Nouveau and Celtic versions of this set too!!!) and mounted over a piece of metallic paper.  I added the essential Silently Correcting sentiment from Viva Las Vegastamps.

This was another fun card to make.  The image stamped perfectly on glossy paper.  I almost ruined the whole thing by trying to cut it (twice) with a rounded rectangle die and my terrible die-cutting skils, but I figure that it just makes the image look more like an old photo.

Tomorrow:  more fun with die-cutting...

Social Distance - Day 2

Another day, another lost gig.  I can go to England some other year, right???  And think of all of the cards I'll make in April...

Today's card went to a friend I have shared many cups of tea with over the years.

I have long been a fan of texture paste and the variety of products on the market designed to add a raised texture to your work, but the few times I've tried, including under supervision at a stamp show, the results have not been stellar.  Here are a few early attempts from 2017 and 2018 respectively:

Stencil by Carabelle:  Le Temps Passe Vite

Stencil made from Simon Says Stamp Die:  Heart of Flowers

Both of these were made with something called Nuvo Mousse, which is a colored goo with a metallic sheen.  It comes in many beautiful colors, and the idea is that you spread it onto your paper through a stencil, remove the stencil, let it dry, and you're good to go.  But if you look closely at the pictures, at least for me, it's easier in theory than in practice.  Inevitably, I use too much goo, or don't spread it out evenly, or something like that. 

Recently, which means probably at least a year ago, the craft bloggers were showing a wide silicon scraper that you use to even out the goo over your stencil.  It reminds me of a 3" square thing I have for scraping dishes.  The wide scraper sounded like a great solution for me, but I don't use texture paste often enough to warrant that kind of purchase.  But recently, as I was doing a little cleaning up in my craft room, I discovered not a wide scraper, but a smaller one that came as a cleaning accessory with a glass craft mat I got a while ago.  I didn't think about it, but just set it aside and forgot about it.  But when I rediscovered it the other day, I thought I'd give the texture paste another go using the Tea Word Cloud stencil by Scrapcosy/Paper Artsy.

Success!!!  The scraper worked!!  It was easy to use, and with a couple of passes over my card, the surface was even and flat.  Amazing!  Once the white paste was dry, I colored it with Tea Dye and Ground Espresso Distress Oxide Inks (my coloring over texture paste needs so much work...), and added a few tea-related diecuts I had from a previous project using the Tea Time set from Altenew.

I'm glad I re-opened the texture paste door, though it is a longer time commitment.  Card-wise, there's the drying time, but more than that, you need to clean your stencil and tools immediately before the goo dries, or it will be hard to remove.  Both of these disrupt the making-process in different ways, so there's no immediate gratification.  And if you paint the textured surface, that's still more drying time.  In all, this card took over a week to make from start to finish, but I count the time worth it because it was not only great to use up some diecuts that have been floating my craft table around for a while, but to get better at a technique I've long admired.

Tomorrow:  Woodblock Wednesday returns!