INKY FINGERS

Today is a good crafting day

I live on the main road, not too far from a large Tesco, Aldi and Iceland, not to mention pretty close to an M6 junction and to the A580, so the roads are always MAD busy here. Not to mention that there’s a primary school behind my house and another one across the road, plu a busy Nursery directly across from me. My craft room is at the front of the house, so I have learned virtually to tell the time by the sound of traffic. I love being in there on Sundays and Bank Holidays because the roads go really quiet when the supermarkets close… it’s great! 

Today, it suddenly went quiet just after 2pm. I wondered what was happening and suddenly remembered the football. Sure enough, the football was live at that moment. The roads are almost empty! If I hadn’t already been shopping, it would’ve been a great time to nip over the road for some

The challenge for this week at Allsorts is Sweet Treats. My first reaction was ‘eek!’ – I don’t have any ‘sweet’ stamps… so I hunted around and surprise, surprise – I actually DO have some ‘sweet’ stamps! I just don’t use them very often – or in some cases have never used them, shame on me

So I thought I’d have a change and go seriously cute and sweet… even using a deckle card, which is rare these days.

…just realised I forgot to add the glitter to the butter cream!  I’ll so that later.  I coloured these very sweet House Mice with Prisma Pencils. Although they look very sweet here, I wouldn’t be very happy if I found them lurking in my kitchen!

Sweet Stampers have an ‘Animals’ challenge, so I’d like to link that, and Sweet Stamping have a ‘Food and Drink’ challenge, so I’ll link to that, too.

I was playing around with some new stamps and trying to do a CAS design, but I wasn’t over happy with my results…

Then I really messed up on one by adding a few bits of painted Distress Oxide – it just didn’t work. SO, with nothing to lose, I started dipping into Oxides smooshed onto my craft mat and spritzed with water. Then I added a little stencilling with Moonlight White and finally, a few spatters with white paint.  I have to admit, I really like the end result.

I’d like to enter this into the Word Art Wednesday Challenge.

I liked the inks over the white embossing, so I did a little resist with them, stencilling over the Oxides with Moonlight White. I was also challenging myself to use more die cuts; I used five on this

This is for the Make My Monday Resist embossing Challenge.

The previous day I found one of my old ‘Faux Batik’ backgrounds, with a stamp I used to use a lot, so – knowing there was a Faux Batik Challenge at Art Cards Challenge,  I started playing with it, adding inks and experimenting to see if the Oxides would cover the FB image or not. They did, but I used a baby wipe to wipe them off, so you can just about see the (reverse) image in the background on the right hand side. I discovered that if you use another piece of card instead of (or as well as) newsprint or Kitchen roll when you iron off the EP, you get a lovely reverse Faux Batik effect.  You can, of course, take this a little further and create another resisting image, but I hadn’t done this on the piece I found, so I just overstamped it.

With the SSS Wednesday challenge of ‘Bright and Cheerful’ in mind, I made this next card, which was so much fun to make… the astute among you will notice that the words and stamps do NOT belong to the same plate…oops! I may just have ordered two sets…

I’d like to enter this into

Simply Papercraft Anything Goes challenge

A Perfect Time to Craft – Anything Goes

Back to Basics – Heat Embossing

and

Daring Cardmakers – What a Wonderful World

I’d also like to thank Brenda for sharing the ‘fix’ for receiving Blogger comments again!  Yay Brenda! Many thanks – I really missed being able to reply to the lovely comments people make.

That’s it for now.

Back soon

Thanks for looking

Cath

xxx