All at sea.

I thought today I'd show you a quick card made using two of my stamp sets, Beside the Seaside and Don't be Crabby.

When I was young, my parents nearly always took their holiday at the same place in North Wales, which as a child, I found very tedious and longed to go on exciting holidays like I thought a lot of my friends did. It's funny though how you see things and now looking back on those times it wasn't boring at all. In fact I remember lots of fun times there.

These memories sparked the ideas to design these two stamp sets and it seemed rather appropriate to create this card to send to my Dad for his birthday coming up so he can remember  the good times we had.

The background is a simple watercolour wash and each element was fussy cut out and stuck down on top. It seems a fiddly thing to do but with a small pair of sharp scissors it's not too difficult.

I hope it brings back some memories for you too.

Jaine x

Using Up Some Scraps

Good morning, folks, it's Susie here today. I love to use up my scraps in new projects, which is just as well given the amount I have!

So, for today's card, I started with these scraps from various different A Few of My Favourite Things kits:

• I cut the striped paper into a square and matted it onto the navy card.
• The teal card was cut into a smaller square and also matted onto the navy card.
• The turquoise house was cut out and windows from the cream house were glued into place.
• The grey card was cut to fit across the card and small scraps of navy added to either end of the grey. (There was no navy piece long enough to match the grey, but the squares we're going to be placed on top so that wasn't a problem.).
• Some small flowers were punched from the teal card and my favourite gems were stuck to their centres.
• I added some Platinum Stickles to the grey and navy strip and to the house roof and left it all to dry:

Once the Stickles had dried, I stuck it all together, with foam pads behind the house to add interest. 
The greeting is a rub on that I have had for years and was pleasantly surprised that it still worked!!

So, from some scraps of paper and card I now have a cool New Home card, suitable for male/female/couple. What scrappy projects can you come up with?

Susie x

Make your cards pop!

I'm not a huge fan of 3D layered cards I will admit that but occasionally I will use it just to give an image a little bit of a lift.

This particular card I made for someone special and I really wanted the image to 'stand out' as it were so I applied a few tricks to help it do just that.

I used my own stamp set "How's the weather" (who had one of those umbrella's?) and layered it up.

 I stamped the image once onto white card then again onto some coloured and patterned card. I think the secret here is to get in as many details as possible so I stamped and cut out a pocket and the gloved hand. They're tiny but worth the trouble.

 I rolled the pieces around my tube of Pritt glue to get a nice curve on them and coloured in the legs and puddle before layering everything up.

I made good use of my grey alcohol marker and coloured in the shadows. I think the grey is my favourite as it's so versatile.

Here you can see the dimension once everything was layered together.  I also added some glossy accents to the wellies and umbrella handle.

 I hope you like it.

Jaine x

Easy watercolour technique.

I love the look of watercolour painting, it's so soft and subtle and it's really easy to achieve the look in card making too.

Here I've used my new Christmas stamps once again, these are called Traditional Christmas Ornaments.

To start stamp one of the ornaments twice with a little gap between. Use a water proof ink for this.

Stamp twice more on a post it note to create two masks. With the masks in place stamp the third ornament.

 With a clean paintbrush, paint a thin wash of water over the whole paper.

With watercolour paints or waterbased ink (I used my spray inks for this) touch the colour to the images, the paint will spread out on it's own.

Any areas you want to leave lighter, simply blot up with a piece of kitchen paper.

Watch as the paint escapes out from the border of the images. If the original wash has dried you can help the process along by painting clean water around the edges and the paint will follow it.

When it's dry, flick a few painty spots around the paper.

Happy Christmas crafting.

Jaine x

How to stamp a wreath.

Originally when I designed my Robins stamp set and especially the fern branch, in my mind I was thinking door wreath decorations which I like to make myself every year. As soon as I got my own set of the new stamps I was itching to try out my idea and if I can say it myself it worked better than I could have hoped. Here's how I created it;


I drew around a small saucer lightly. I wanted to fit an A5 size card in the end so I knew how big I wanted my wreath to be. 

The fir branch itself is already slightly curved but there is room for a little more flexibility if you're careful and it's possible to bend it a little more when it's placed on the block.

I started stamping first with Peeled Paint Distress ink around the circle shape.

I went back with a lighter colour of ink and filled in some more with the smaller, separate branch.

You can fill in as much as you like with this smaller one and in fact I went back in with the first ink colour too.

The separate branch will do the same for a much smaller circle, for example on this tag. The principle is the same except for mine I only took one ink colour this time.

To finish off I added some stickles and sticky backed pearls.
 

 On the tag I just used the liquid pearls.

Happy crafting and look out tomorrow for more of our Documented December series.

Jaine x

A simple water colour card.

Today I'm sharing with you this water colour effect card which is created pretty simply using only spray inks.

I chose to use this huge butterfly as it has a large surface area. Stamps with a larger surface are better for this to work properly.  

Spray the stamp while it's on the block with your chosen colour of ink. Don't hold the spray too close otherwise it'll result in too much ink puddling. It might stain your stamp afterwards but that won't do any harm.

Stamp down onto some water colour paper. The result won't be perfect but you're not aiming for perfection anyway.

Let it dry or dry it with a heat tool, then spray some ink into a mixing tray. Use a paintbrush dipped in water to paint the colour into the background. I watered the ink down a bit to make the colour a bit less bright.

Flick on a few ink spots and you're done.

Have fun with your inks, you can do so much more than just spray with them.

Jaine x

A bit of nostalgia with a retro card.

It's my brothers birthday coming up and he's a bit of a bike fanatic. When making my card for him I knew I'd use the "On Your Bike" stamp set from my own collection as it features the trike we both had when we were little. Well actually it was always mine but I let him use it when he was a toddler! I was a generous sister like that :)

I stamped it with Memento ink so I could use my Promarkers to colour it in. I used a Sizzix polaroid die to cut it out which has a separate centre panel. This meant I could take it out and use Distress ink to add some ageing along with some water spots. I popped the centre back into the frame and used some foam pads to mount it onto the background. The background too was given an ageing treatment with Distress ink and water spots.

I layered up a film strip with some notebook edge and the Notebook Paper washi tape was attached to a piece of wax paper and put into my typewriter so I could add a little text.

I wonder if any of you had the same little bike or similar?

Jaine x

A little 'Tweet' love.

I've just brought you a fun card which features my Tweet Tweet stamp set from the Special Editions range.

The background is made using the woodgrain background stamp pulled from a geli plate which gave a subtle patterned backdrop for the birdhouses behind the fence.

I know it's a lot of fussy cutting out but it was worth the effort and I enjoy it.  

Jaine x