Videos now uploaded

Firstly I must apologise to anyone who viewed the blog yesterday - I'd put the wrong picture in for Country Views and it was also wrong on the website.  Both are correct now, but for the record, here is an image of both - Sunburst Scenes on the left, Country Views on the right.  Also available as a multi-buy special offer.

There are also three videos on YouTube and I am going to try to embed them here for you.

If you can't see the videos here for any reason, try visiting my YouTube channel.

Altered Book (posted by Judith)

When Glenda sent me the new Country Views stamp set, I fell in love with the little folly stamp on the plate, and wanted to make this a focal point of a project. I have made altered books before, and decided to make one for a Design Team piece.

Now for those of you that are horrified at my alteration of a good book, I will tell you where I get my books from! I buy my books from charity shops, so the proceeds always go to a good cause, and I choose books that have seen a better life, and have therefore outlived their usefulness.

Once I had cut a circle in the front cover of my book with my trusty Tim Holtz Tonic scissors, I painted the book first with gesso, then a couple of coats of acrylic paint. I mixed the colour myself, using a couple of colours, to achieve the shade that I wanted. I then dry brushed a darker colour around the edges. I embossed one if the fabulous new Texture stamps onto the book with gold embossing powder. I tore a loose circle shape out of the first few pages, creating a niche, and then stamped the folly stamp onto a spare piece of card. I coloured the image with Polychromos pencils, and blended the colours, adding extra shading where necessary. I then inked around the image with Distress Inks, before fixing the card into the book.

I wanted to add some flowers, and was undecided as to which colour to use, so I looked at a colour wheel for inspiration. The opposite colour to the zingy green that I had chosen for my book, was a lovely plummy pink colour, so I went with that, and added some ribbon in a similar shade as the closure for the book. I stamped and cut out some leaves from the 'Woodland Dreams' stamp plate to go with the flowers, as I love the leaf on this stamp plate, it is a firm favourite of mine. I also added the sentiment from the same stamp plate.

These stamps are so much fun to work with, and I really enjoyed creating this project. Keep checking back to see what the other members of the Design Team have come up with over the next few days. Thanks for stopping by, Judith xx

Texture Fragments and other new stamps

Brace yourselves for a flurry of eye candy coming your way - we have new stamps!  Not only new stamps, but new web videos showing you some great ideas for them.


We have three new sets, starting with a full sheet A4 set called Texture Fragments.

As the name suggests, these are superb for creating texture, whether that is in polymer clay, air drying clay, embossing enamel, friendly plastic, shrink plastic, wax or any other medium you can think of.  Your textured pieces can be used to adorn bigger projects - a box maybe or a canvas, or you can use cookie cutters to make smaller items like jewellery.

Several of the images were designed with 1x3 inch microscope slides in mind - I was actually thinking about Suze Weinberg's technique of pouring molten UTEE onto a stamp with a Ranger memory frame on top to contain it.

Aside from all the wonderful possibilities with texture, they can also be used for other cool techniques including kiss stamping and one I think I just made up - "Faketangle".  You'll have to watch the video to see what I'm talking about.

The other two sets came about after the immense popularity of our Home Sweet Home stamp set that we launched earlier in the year.  You loved it so much, it's been one of our best sellers this year, so I hope you will like the follow ups.

Here is Sunburst Scenes

and here is Country Views

Not only will these coordinate with Home Sweet Home, but each set alone will give you a huge range of options for creating pretty landscapes.  Mix the two together and the number of permutations grows so you never need create the same landscape twice.

Here's a card featuring a UTEE piece made with Stained Glass Christmas, layered onto a stamp from Texture Fragments, embossed in clear on a coloured background, then rubbed with Distress Stains.




The DT admitted the Texture Fragments stamps pushed them out of their comfort zone at first, but I think you will find they rose to the challenge magnificently.  Watch out for their artwork coming along over the next couple of weeks.


Meanwhile, the White Christmas Challenge is still open until December 15th.  The prize fund is growing and you can now see my own response to the challenge on my blog. 

You can check out the videos on my YouTube channel here: www.youtube.com/user/glendawww

Woodland Dreams tag card

It's been a while since I posted any of my own artwork here, so here's a simple birthday card which I've made two weeks before I actually need to send it - unheard of! 

I used a kraft tag and stamped the tree from Woodland Dreams with Memento inks and coloured with Prismacolour pencils.  I added some shading around the edge of the tag then mounted onto a piece of card which I had previously used to cut out a Nestability shape.  I liked the curved edge, so centred the tag on it and trimmed it to fit.  It's matted onto a lime green layer and stuck onto an 8x8inch card with backing papers from the Essence of Nature CD.  The sentiment is from Craftwork Cards and the gold leaves are cut with a Crealies shapes die.

I love the combination of chocolate and lime, but then I love chocolate with anything really!

Reflections

Hi there, today I'm sharing a card made with stamps from  Echoes of Italy themeplate. I wanted to create a reflection of the beautiful image as a kind of visual echo and it took a bit of experimentation and a happy accident or two along the way.

I've brayered the sky  and the lake on glossy card and created the hills with promarkers and added lots of blender pen which has created a mottled effect. I was quite surprised at the result but I quite like the effect as it looks a little like hedges and shrubs .

The stamped image is also coloured with promarkers  and I added the reflected image using my brayer. This is a large stamp so I had to do this in two parts and it was very tricky so my tip would probably be to stamp the image on acetate to transfer it to the card.

I didn't want to add a lot of embellishments so to finish off I added some ribbon and gorgeous glitter leaves. I created the flower using  clear film from the Studio 490 Art Parts Sample Pack. I stamped the  huge flower from Decadent Brocade themeplate onto the film with Teal Blue stazon, cut it out and then heated it. Once you've heated the film it softens and you can give your flower loads of dimension. Its a lot of fun to work with too and if you don't like the result you can just reheat and try again.

I've really enjoyed working with these stamps, and I've got loads more ideas from the other DT members gorgeous projects. I hope you have too

Claire xx