INKY FINGERS

I used it on this one, too. Just a play with some Paperartsy stamps.

And another over a stencilled background..

Then, some simple ink blending for a change...scan on the left, photo on the right. I really like the way this one turned out.

  

And for a bit of fun. Another stencilled and stamped background and one of those images that always makes me smile. 

Linking to 

Watercooler Wednesday Challenge, Occasions

Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge, Heat Embossing

We Love Chocolate Baroque, Favourite Stamps

Retro Rubber, Anything Goes (Lady with broom stamp)

Challenge Up Your Life, Circles

Stamping Sensations, Any Celebration

Thank you for calling in today

Back soon

Cath

xxx

 Thought I'd shock you and post next day 😍

I found my photos of the book I made for an old friend...a friend I really love and respect, to be honest.  Although more my mum's age than mine, her youngest son is the same age as my younger son and they were best friends at school, until we went to live in France, many, many years ago. She's now one of a group I belong to in the church I'm currently at, and always someone to turn to - a real spiritual Mum. Because of lockdowns, we obviously haven't been able to meet up for the last year, communicating via Whatsapp  instead. The first day we were able to meet up again - socially distanced, in our Community garden - was her birthday, so I was asked to make something for her. 

It was a disaster from beginning to end. I started by trying to make someone else's design - very NOT 'me'. Because of the mess I was in with medication problems I had, I tore it up and restarted it 3 times and was tearing my hair out by the time I finished it, crying every time I went into my craft room.. So, I decided against the die cut book and made a concertina. I still tore out pages and started over again a couple of times, but that was mainly because no matter how hard I tried, I ended up with marks on my white space every single time I touched the book. So by the time I gave it to her, some of these pages were missing - mainly tag pages - but  I'd added a couple, too. I did a LOT of die cutting, as you can see - plus all the pages and layers I threw away!

Front of folded book

 Hello bloggers! Happy Sunday! and wow! We have more sunshine 😁It may still be cold, especially if not in the sun, but it feels so bright and spring like - it's so uplifting. There are flowers everywhere - what a joy! I finished off a couple of things I was doing this week and decided to make two into journal pages for my 'planner journal'. I love these dies because I can die cut the binding side but make the page any size I like - plus I already had some great planner page dies and they all work really well together.

Aren't these stamps (Art by Marlene) fun? Everything Marlene does is BRIGHT, so I had to follow suit. Her t-shirt is actually lime green and white but it scanned as aqua for some reason...??? It's an A5 page.

This is another one I began last year and finished off this week... I've used it before, but this time I'd cut around the top edge so that I could add it to any b/g - don't know why I ended up putting it back on white!

And a very simple one...The image is stamped and clear embossed, then I added colour in the darker parts of the flower and drew them out with water, hoping to create paler colour, but there's so little card remaining after embossing that it doesn't really show up. Nice, bold image, though. This is a 6" x 6" card.

I've just finished and photographed another book, so I thought I'd better post the first one I made after Christmas, when I hadn't been able to stamp for a month or so... but I'll put it in a separate post. 

 Hi all.

I hope you're enjoying the Autumn sunshine where you are. It's so bright and sunny here, and it can be deceiving, fooling you into thinking it's warm until you get outside and feel that sharp wind...brrr! 

My crafting and browsing time have been seriously curtailed of late, due to spinal problems, but I finally managed to finish this little concertina that I've been working on for around 10 days - very unlike me. I only had the cover to finish early in the week, but it's taken me until now to get around it it 😉

I wasn't going to get embroiled in Autumn colours and images, but how can you resist? Especially when I've just set this month's Mingle, or challenge on KCUK and chosen Autumn Glory! This isn't what I'm using, because the additional challenge is to make tall cards or tags and this certainly isn't that...

I used Crackling Campfire, Toasted Marmalade, Fossilised Amber, Aged Mahogany and Walnut Ink Oxides, smooshed for the most part, but sponged on the cover, and Versafine inks for stamping the images. I did take lots of photos, but I've just checked them and the colours are very washed out, so I'm showing you the scans.

Here's the cover...using Aall and Create stamps, Prisma pencils and gel pens. It's just over 3.75" square.

Hello, Strangers! I do hope you are well and wonderfully surviving in the Covid crisis. Life has definitely changed for most of us - and drastically for some. But change isn't always all bad.

I know, I've been a BAD blogger... sorry. I've had/still have keyboard issues, but that's not why I haven't blogged - I've been busy with one thing and another, including making a lot of mess all over my house. I also went 'off' cards for a while, so when I was able have been making other things, which I've really enjoyed 😁 But, please accept my apologies for not visiting you over the last few weeks. This laptop is the one I use in the evenings, but because I've had to relocate my external keyboard (repair that needs 'fixing' when my son escapes quarantine, following his return from Spain) and this one hasn't been working, it's been difficult. I tend to use the other one for streaming while I'm in my craft room, where I spend most of my day, even if I'm not crafting! 

But I'm here now because my main laptop keyboard decided to work and I know I need to clear some of the artwork in my folder, so I just thought I'd check out the challenges. In the meantime, I've been moved over to the new Blogger - yuk! That shows how long it is since I was here 😟

Firstly, a butterfly from Aall and Create, on a smooshed background... I do like this stamp.

 

(Edited…)

(Please accept my apologies if you think I’m not commenting on your posts – I am!  Sadly, my comments seem to be disappearing into the ether, even if I click on Preview, which is my usual ‘fix’. So sorry. I’ll keep trying )

I woke up this morning to beautiful Autumn sunshine – again!  I really AM thankful for the mild Autumn we’ve had until now in NW UK. Seeing a bright, sunny day makes it so much easier to be thankful.

I made a quick, very simple journal page to celebrate it... the birds are die cuts and I really like them

I love trees and I know I’m not on my own… my sons have, in turn, called me tree hugger, tree woman and bird woman.  I think they think they’re insulting me but nah, I think it’s great! I’m a nature lover and proud of it and I DO hug trees – or at least touch them. There’s something very powerful about a tree and especially the older ones. They’ve seen a lot of history and withstood a lot, with storms, wind, rain, lightning, drought, snow… yet they stand tall and solid. You can almost hear them breathing if you listen closely enough…

This tree doesn’t look very old. It’s one of Lynne Moncrief’s stamp designs from That’s Crafty and there are some fab words on the plate, too. 

There are a couple of Winter Foliage challenges around – a little early for over here, but I thought I’d give it a go. I hunted through my ‘C’ (eeek! the ‘C’ word!) stamps and found this stamp. It came with a spider attached and a little verse about the legend of the Christmas spider. I didn’t want that, so I cut it off.

SSS Wednesday have an All that Glitters is Gold challenge at the moment, so I stamped the verse in Versamark and embossed, but the small font was lost in the dark background, so I stamped again on white and made a narrow tag from it. The small decoration (or spider’s webs…) are gold glittered.

This is a simpler version, with no background colour. I coloured the pine cones and the strings in gold ink. I decided to use a die cut word, so I inked it with Versamark ink, then embossed it with Gold Glitter EP. I haven’t used that for about 10 years! The gems were added as an afterthought, just to add more sparkle. The edges were dragged (roughly, as you can see) through a Gold Delicata inkpad.

The Winter Foliage challenges are at

Make My Monday and

Daring Cardmakers

Shopping Our Stash have a Tic Tac Toe challenge:-

Today I‘m thankful for miracles…those little, everyday miracles we take for granted, the little ‘coincidences’ (or God incidences, as some of us call them) we are thankful for AND the BIG ones we don’t see quite as often, but we DO see them now and again... totally inexplicable events and occurrences.

Time has been short today, so I made a quick card. The Inkylicious words just happened to be on my stamping mat because I took them out for some reason last week and left them out so that I would use them!

I took my favourite Penny Black stamp off the wooden mount last week and attached it to some EZ mount, so I could use it in my Stamping Platform so I decided to use that. The stamp itself is more of an artistic impression than a defined image, so it doesn’t make a great deal of difference, if I’m honest, but it’s better in some ways. I used Tombows and scribbled some onto my mat for spattering over the stamped images.

I ended up having to mount this onto a 7” square card – it would, perhaps, have been more suitable for a journal page and will probably make its way into one of my journals in this form or a similar one.

These other cards use one of my favourite Miracle stamps, from Impression Obsession. The first was dry embossed after making the card front, the second was an Oxide background, with a white embossed image and some Brilliance Moonlight White overstamping and stencilling. The flowers were coloured with Prismas.

I’m sharing this with Art Every Day Month

Retro Rubber Challenge – Anything Goes (I’ve had the PB fuchsia stamp around 15 years!)

Words to Craft by – Blessings

and

Creative Fingers – Anything Goes.

Thanks for visiting today – always lovely to ‘see’ you

Back soon

Cath

xxx

Today I’m giving thanks for glorious Autumn sunshine, brightening the world outside!  It really is a beautiful, sunny day (again) and doesn’t it make a difference?

There’s a ‘Resist It’ Challenge at Fashionable Stamping.

I love stamping techniques and my favourite all time technique is  definitely Resist, in all its variations. There are a quite a few different ways to get that ‘resist’ effect and Nancy Curry wrote a book on them… and yes, I have it I must get it out and jog my memory.

I had a play with Faux Batik – just a quick one because my time was limited – I may just have to come back to this in a day or two. Basically, you just stamp an image in Versamark, clear emboss it, then add colour and other images over the top. To achieve the ‘faux batik’ look, you place a piece of paper/kitchen towel over the image, put a hot iron over it and melt off the embossing powder, leaving a white image behind.

A few years ago I experimented with placing another piece of cardstock over the image, instead of using scrap, and using that reverse image to make something else. To my delight (and absolute, sheer excitement at the time) it worked.

Today’s offerings are an example of this, though the image I chose didn’t, perhaps, show the technique too clearly. You can just about see the reverse image on the second card – I hope!

I used Distress Oxides on the first and Distress inks on the second – dye inks work better because they don’t obliterate the image.  Oxides give better coverage and so don’t show the effect as well.

This is the first ‘resist’ image, ironed off, after stamping the words and adding colour, then overstamped with the black images.

Here’s the second, using the reverse image from the above… and Distress dye inks. I also used my favourite ‘feel good’ colours – Turquoise, blue and violet.

I just picked up a stamp that happened to be lying on my (very untidy) beautifully organised desk but now I’m seeing it again, I should have used the original image for the background stamping…I may have thought of that IF I’d cleaned my stamp straight away

I’ll link this to

Dare 2B Artsy’s ‘Thanks’ challenge (it’s a thank you card for a friend)

Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge – Thanks/Thanksgiving

and to

AEDM – Art Every Day Month in November

Thanks for looking

Back soon

Cath

xxx

The theme at Art Journal Journey this month is ‘Inspired by…’ – what a great theme

My first entry for this is inspired by friends and friendship…

I think the hardest thing about getting older is losing people who’ve had a big influence in your life and been very precious. Sadly, we tend to take people for granted until they’re no longer here, and this is my inspiration.

I firmly believe that everyone who comes into our life is sent by God for a reason… sometimes it’s only for a season, but other times the friendship lasts a lifetime and as we are the sum of our experiences, so each friend makes a contribution to who we are – some more than others….

I gessoed my pages first, applying some thickly so that I could stamp into it for texture, and some sponged with natural sponge before it dried. Then I decided I wanted pastel type colours and grabbed my Adirondack acrylics – I really ought to use what’s left before they dry up like the others…

I stamped with Distress Oxide, then clear embossed it. I’ll probably add a lot of journaling to this later because it aroused lots of memories, especially of friends no longer with us and others who are quite poorly.

On another note… this is my entry for the Allsorts Penny Black ‘In the Garden’ challenge, and I’ll also enter it into the Penny Black Saturday challenge, which is ‘Anything Goes’… obviously, I haven’t gone for the optional challenge of ‘Masculine’ in this one…

I’ve been playing with one particular stamp the last few days – variations on a theme. Here are the results.

I stamped three of them in black, then coloured with Prismacolour pencils, the other one is stamped in a dark brown, though it’s hardly apparent that it isn’t black!

Here are the individual cards.

I had to reimagine the last one because my very reliable stamp smudged when this very unreliable stamper stamped it

I stamped the flowers first, then overstamped some text in Delicata Shimmering White, which works well on Kraft card, before colouring. On the third, I stamped the background first, using Versamark, then heat set it before stamping and colouring the final flower.

Here’s another card using the same stamp, obviously focused again on friends... I stamped this one in the Stamping platform, using Tombow pens, adding colour little by little.

I’d like to link to the following challenges:-

Country View Challenges – The Written Word

Dragonfly Dreams – Anything Goes

A Bit More Time to Craft – Anything Goes

Not Just Cards – Anything Goes

Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge – All things Bright and Beautiful

That’s all for now.

Thanks for looking

Back soon

Cath

xxx