Florals and Marks (by Sandra)

Hello

I am sharing some more of my cards made for the March shows on Hochanda.

My first card is a clean and simple card using stamps from the  Make Your Mark set.   These are stamps that I would normally use in mixed media, but it just goes to show how versatile and fun these stamps are.  I stamped with Archival Ink and masked each circle off with Masking Tissue.

This is the beautiful Poppy Ledger set. I love how the fresh poppies work so well with the old ledger background. The background is made with Distress Inks and the poppies are coloured with watercolour pens.

Here, I have cut a section of the Poppy Ledger with a scalloped die and layered up onto some card. I have made a background using the small stamp from Make Your Mark which Lesley made from sticky tape!

My last card is the Floral Study set.  I stamped in Versafine Clair ink and used Distress Inks to colour in the flowers. 

Thanks for looking
Sandra x

Book Making and Making Marks (by Judith)

Hello everyone, I have a few more projects to share with you today showcasing the fabulous stamps that we brought to last month's TV shows on Hochanda. The collection of stamps had a little bit of something for everyone, and I enjoyed working with them so much. I am sure that you will love them too!

My first project is a handmade book, I love books, and used to buy so many of them. Nowadays, I like to make my own, from simple accordian books, to fabric covered books that I have stitched together and used more complicated bookbinding techniques. This project uses a corrugated cardboard envelope that I received from a mail order company, and I have simply taken advantage of the fold of the envelope to create the spine of the book. I folded twelve pieces of drawing cartridge in half, splitting them into three groups, and these became the signatures of my book. I popped the pieces inside each other, so that I had four pieces of drawing cartridge sitting neatly inside each other, in groups of three. I made three holes up the fold of each group of paper.

I cut the cardboard envelope to make a cover so that it was slightly larger than the drawing cartridge, and made three lots of three holes in the spine, which would enable me to sew each signature into the cover in a simple bookbinding method. There are lots of You Tube tutorials for this, just do a search online for 'simple bookbinding', and you will find lots of help. If I were to make another one of these books, I do think that I would put washi tape on the spine for added strengthening, but I am not intending to put this book through a lot of tough use, so it will probably be okay.

I used bookbinding thread to sew the signatures into the book, but you can used dental floss if you do not have any specialist supplies.

I used black card as a matting layer, this really sets off the zingy colours that I chose for my masterboard background. I used Distress Inks to blend across some drawing cartridge, and added tone on tone stamping using the bubble wrap effect stamp from Make Your Mark stamp set. I added the cracked stamp and circles in grey ink, and some of the word clusters to build up the background. To finish, I stamped the large circle using black ink onto a piece of scrap card, added the words once more, and matted it onto black card, to create a topper. I felt that these words were perfect for a journal, and especially in these uncertain times, they can remind us that life is not so bad after all.

You could create lots of these masterboard backgrounds and cut them up to make cards, bookmarks, book covers, all sorts of projects, it just goes to show that these mark making stamps can be the stars of the show and not just for backgrounds.

For my next project, I created a background of soft greens, and added leaves and a word cluster from the Glorious stamp set using a darker green ink. I stamped the Floral Study onto a smaller piece of card, and coloured the image using watercolour pencils. I edged both pieces of card with Seedless Preserves Distress Ink.

The background on this card contains a bit of everything! I coloured the drawing cartridge using Distress Ink, and added some stamping using the Large Crackle Background stamp. The circles,words and bubble wrap image are from the Glorious stamp set, and I have used the Chocolate Baroque Strip Stencil set. I have stamped and embossed the Poppy Ledger image onto kraft card using white embossing powder, and coloured it using Koh-I-Noor paints.

Finally, a super quick little masculine card using kraft card once more. I used the tape image from Make Your Mark and three different colours of ink; red, brown and white. I then stamped the sentiment onto one of the strips, which is something that Lesley had always envisaged with this strip image. You could change the colours, as some of the other Team members have done, and make really colourful versions of this type of design.

Thanks for stopping by,

Judith xx

Poppies by Brenda

Good morning, I hope you are all keeping safe and well during these very troubled times across the World.

My shares today use the new stamps Lesley launched in the March Hochanda TV shows. The beautiful Poppy Ledger features on my card at the top, stamped with Versafine Clair onto an acrylic pain background and coloured with pencils. Random stamping using Make your Mark........this is such a useful stamp set and an essential in your crafty stash, I used some sticky EP to stamp the coffee stains and added gilding flakes.

Here I have used the flower from Glorious, stamped onto an Oxide background, dots added using one of the stencils from the four set Strip Stencils and some doodling around the edges. The random numbering is using one of the stamps from Edgy Edges.

As you will guess from this post the Poppy Ledger is a total favourite with me......they 've not called me the Poppy Lady for nothing all these years! Stamped onto an oxide background, the flowers bleached out and then coloured with Distress Markers and the stencil set used again to add texture paste dots and DI for the squares.

Lesley's beautiful seed heads from the Glorious set have been stamped onto a piece of card that was the waste from my brayer after doing some Gelli Plate backgrounds. I also stamped one of the images from Make Your Mark into the background.

This card features Floral Study stamped first onto the base card using Versafine Claire and then again onto a Whiteboard Trading Heart to create a spotlight. The spotty stencil features in the background again and I used the same colour Distress Markers to just one of the flowers.

Finally Poppy Ledges again.....I did say I like this stamps. A scored and inked base card, circles added using the large coffee stain from Make Your Mark, part of the Poppy images stamped onto a Whiteboard circle and some garden gleaning to embellish......A plant tag for the sentiment and a piece of pea mesh across the bottom.

Stay safe everyone and thank you for your visits today.