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!