Guest Post - Steampunkery Fun by Debs Smith

Our guest blogger this week is Debs Smith and she is probably our most far flung contributor! Debs has been playing with  some of our steampunk themed stamps and designed this wonderful card.

Hello everyone, 

My name is Debs Smith and at the moment I live in Shanghai!! First let me thank Glenda for inviting me to do this post I feel so honoured. And secondly thanks to all of you for reading this post. I knew as soon as Glenda asked me to do this post which sets of stamps I was going to use. So here we are -  it's taken a while!

The stamps sets I have used are Punky Flowers and Steampunkery.  These sets are great for both male and femail cards, the designs are really edgy and a little bit different from other steampunk set!, I must admit I had a couple of cards made before I got to this design, they just seemed a bit ordinary!!

This one in the end was really simple just using two stamps, one of the flowers from Punky Flowers and the Beetle from Steampunkery. Firstly I stamped the beetle into roughly the centre of the card as I wanted it to look like it had found the clock in the flowers and was flying away with it. Then I stamped the biggest flower image on the left side of the card with Jet Black Archival, and then created a mask of that flower by stamping it onto a post it note (making sure that the sticky bit had the heads of the flowers once it was cut out). 

I placed the mask over the top of the first flower and stamped the second flower and then placed the mask over the second flower and stamped the third flower until the card was filled.  It doesn't matter where you stamp your first image as long as once you have stamped it you cover it whilst you do the second. If, for example, you wanted to stamp the first flower in the middle leave the mask on the first image until you have stamped both the second and third image otherwise you will have stamped over one of the images. 

Then I painted the flowers with Distress Paint using Shaded Lilac, Spun Sugar, Broken China and Dusty Concord. After shaking the bottles I just dabbed a bit of paint onto my non-stick craft mat and then with a damp brush (I used a water brush but an ordinary brush will work just as well) I picked up the paint from the mat and painted the flowers.   

With the Beetle I wanted a bit of a metallic sheen to him so I mixed a little Shaded Lilac with Dusty Concord and some Brushed Pewter (again on the craft mat), painted the beetle and then once he was dry just added a little more Brushed Pewter to give him some highlights to make him sparkle.  Then I painted the clock with Brushed Pewter.

To create the background first I punched a 1” circle out of post it notes and stuck it in the top right hand corner of the card.  Then I took a piece of scrap paper and tore a strip off  to give it a nice rough edge.  Next I placed the piece of paper on the card and with Broken China distress ink I started to shade the background.  TIP: The piece of paper just gets moved  down each time you have finished the section above it, which gives you a nice sky effect (or it can create nice mountains and hills.) 

Once I had filled the background with the cloudy sky I removed the post-it note circle and voila there was my sun (or moon). The Time Flies stamp from the Steampunkery set was stamped onto a piece of card painted with Brushed Pewter and matted onto piece of card coloured with Shaded Lilac.

If you like would like to see more of my work it can be found on my blog (along with other cards using Chocolate Baroque stamps) Notations of a Crafter or I am on Pinterest as ShanghaiDebs.

Please join us in sending our thanks to Debs (all the way back to Shanghai) for this fun design by leaving a comment below.