Some quick shares

My productivity has surpassed my sharing lately, so here are some recent projects.

A card:

A scrapbook page:

Funny sort-of Valentine – Tim Holtz February Tag

When I was in college, my friends and I were part of the medieval club. And in someone’s strange humor, Valentine’s day was dubbed “Gargoyle Day”. As I recall it, regardless of dating status we celebrated with break-up comedy movies, chocolate, and gargoyle crafts. There was also a “Black & White Ball” around mid-February as an official club activity which involved modern formal apparel and medieval-style group dances. Yeah, I’m a big nerd, I own this.

Gargoyle Day and the Black & White Ball were my favorite versions of Valentine’s Day. I didn’t mind the kiddie version of passing Valentine’s to every fellow student and making our own mailboxes. And I remember my parents giving me candy and toys. But I guess I don’t remember seeing big romantic displays of chocolates and roses. If my parents did a romantic dinner or something, either I didn’t know, or it didn’t make an impression on me. I do remember them showing each other love and kindness all along the way, and making time for each other on a regular basis.

So in my own dating life, I’ve voted for regular displays of affection over big romantic gestures. Don’t get me wrong, I like the opportunities for creativity inspired by every holiday. And I’m impressed by the romantic efforts other people go to for their loved ones. And maybe, just maybe I’m looking forward to making pink heart-shaped pancakes and other silly gestures for my little boy in a few years. But otherwise, Valentine’s Day just isn’t my holiday.

So that’s a long preamble for my take on the February Tim Holtz tag. But I felt the gargoyle required some serious explanation! I loved the look of his background of embossed hearts that call to mind vintage enameled heart jewelry. I loved the little Industrial sticker details. I’m not sold on the popular chalkboard look, yet. Maybe it will grab my imagination at some point, but for now I’m skipping that technique.

So then the other thing this Gargoyle Day tag needed was a gargoyle! I drew a gargoyle as Cupid, colored it with Distress markers, and pinked up the edges of the circle diecut with Distress ink.

Ingredients: Watercolor paper, #8 Manila tag, Industrial border stickers, Distress markers, Distress ink pads, Sizzix Movers & Shapers hearts, Distress rock candy glitter, Seasonal chitchat stickers, Sizzix decorative strip ticket die, Grunge board, Stampers Anonymous Odds & Ends stamp, glitter glue, foil tape

Learning: I feel like I barely squeeked by with the hearts. I had cut them last month from foil-covered Grunge board that was left from the previous tag. I had hoped that I could cover them with red glitter glue and have a cool, mirrored, slightly glittery surface, but I had trouble getting good coverage with the glitter glue. So then I tried to cover with Distress glitter and go with the technique in Tim’s tag tutorial, but I should have just pulled off the foil or removed the glitter glue to switch Glossy Accents, because the glitter glue didn’t hold the glitter on very well when I inked it. Glossy Accents seems to be a really strong adhesive. I did like how easily the Distress glitter dyed with the Distress ink – that is a good trick to remember!

Something I tried with much more success was masking off part of a stamp. I don’t know if other people do this, and maybe there is a better way, but this is the method I came up with. I used bits of painter’s tape to mask off a section of the stamp I didn’t want to print, inked the stamp, pulled off the tape and stamped it. This gave me a nice blank space to scrawl “Gargoyle Day” instead of Valentine’s day.

My lettering on the ticket is kind of primitive, and I like to think that my gargoyle was taking over Valentine’s day, like maybe Cupid needed a day off or something. I think I could have pushed that idea a little more, but I didn’t have any other ideas.

Loving: I may have said this before, but I really like how the Odds & Ends stamps go with the Ticket Strip die. It’s just really cool to stamp a custom ticket, and I’m getting a lot of mileage from the concept.

I like the background every bit as much as I imagined, and despite the minor glitter losses I like how the Grunge board hearts came out. I like my gargoyle Cupid too, at least conceptually. I still haven’t decided if I like my “cartooning” style. But that is an issue for a different time.

Love notes for our baby

When I saw the “Love Notes” challenge at Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge blog, I thought first about romantic gestures, of course. But that will be a later project.

My next thought was of the baby book I’m creating for my son. I consider it one big love note, something that will tell him how much he was loved right from the start, in case his mama is not around to tell him sometime. My own baby book served that role for me, once, so that’s a big part of why I started scrapbooking.

The page I’m sharing today also covers a different kind of “love note”. A musical one! This page shares a little song that my husband made up for our little guy just a day or so after he was born. We are always making up silly little ditties around our house.

Ingredients: bubble wrap print I made a while back, MFT hearts stencil, Tattered Angels Glimmer Mist, Archival ink, Distress ink & marker, Martha Stewart custom letter stamps, Sizzix circle framelits, gesso

Learning: Lots of innovations and new combinations of techniques here for me. I’m mixing media like never before, and I think I’m starting to hone in on a style I can be proud of.

Loving: I love how the repetition of circle and heart shapes worked out. I think it makes the straight edges of the lyrics pop all the more. I like how the hearts are there, but definitely a muted and unobtrusive part of the background. I had a lot of fun with the “letterpress” style of the Martha Stewart stamps too.

Gesso is a girl’s best friend

Just a short note, as I have been down with a cold and need to catch up with posting. I have really been loving using gesso to “push back” busy papers. This has worked out great for my wish to reuse some of the holiday cards we received this year. The gesso pulls together the different card styles. I think I could do more to pull it together, but this is a great start. The photo for the upper left circle window can be pulled up to see the whole picture.

The gesso came in a sampler set from Faber-Castelle. I think I’ll need to get a whole tub of it when I run out!

Alethiometer – January 2014 Tim Holtz tag

My husband and I recently finished reading the His Dark Materials trilogy. In these fantasy young adult fiction books, a spunky young girl gets into all manner of adventures across many worlds and is helped along by friends and a marvelous “truth-teller” device called an Alethiometer (aka a golden compass, but don’t bother with the movie of that name because they really muffed it).

So when I saw the January 2014 Tim Holtz tag with the “pocket watch” die, my mind traveled to a pocket watch version of the Alethiometer that I made him for the holidays.

I dissected a pocket watch and attached a printout that I had carefully sized and sealed to the watch face.

It turned out really well, and still works as a watch, even!

But when I made it, I regretted that I didn’t have time to draw the many symbols myself. I just got the imagery from the internet and combined with some pearl inlays I had created previously in photoshop for a different project.

So I thought it would be great to use the pocket watch die to make an Alethiometer of a size where I could draw the symbols in for myself. Otherwise, I followed much of Mr. Holtz’ tutorial for the pocket watch and the background.

Ingredients: Manila tag size 8, Sizzix Frame Pocket Watch die, Sizzix Alterations Circles, Super fine gold embossing powder, Glossy Accents, Sizzix tickets decorative strip die, Tim Holtz clockwork stencil, Holtz Grunge alpha stamp, Distress inks and markers, Martha Stewart lettering stamps, Stampers Anonymous Odds and Ends, Archival ink, Idea-ology game spinners, Micron pen, Darice embossing folder, Grunge board, Tarnished Brass Distress paint, and some words I printed. Whew!!

Learning: I screwed up the count on this. For some reason I thought there were 32 symbols, but by the time I got to drawing to the last few symbols, I realized that there were supposed to be 36! Oops! At the same time, I don’t think 36 would have worked out proportionally. It was hard enough to draw in those tiny spaces as it was!

My other mistake was that I had the foil side facing up when I went to cut the pocket watch. So I had to flip it and reroll it in order to get that impressed inner rim. This made the whole thing a bit more fragile, so I backed it all with a diecut piece of paper.

Loving: Grunge board was really fun to work with, very pliable, fun to cover in foil and cut! I also loved how nicely the ticket stamp matched the ticket die.

The words on the ticket die were a happy accident. I initially tried to spell out my quote with Martha letter stamps but my experiment didn’t fit well. So then I printed out what I wanted in a small font. I was going to just use a fresh ticket diecut, but then I realized that my printed word strips were so small that they fit between the stamped lines for a cool echoed sentiment. I love the way that worked and will file that idea for use again!

I also like the way the embossed word “Alethiometer” looks. I had to cut apart the Grunge alpha stamp which was tedious but so worth it! To make the gold pop a bit more, I blended more black soot ink over the gold embossing.

A you’re Adorable

A you’re Adorable/
B you’re so Beautiful/
C you’re a Cutie full of Charm!

The “A is for” challenge at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge blog, initially made me think of the word “alethiometer”, but that’s a project that I’m planning for the Tim Holtz January tag, and I don’t like to mix challenges. I’m just mentioning this as a tease, in case my husband is reading. He’ll be quite interested in an alethiometer project.

So my second “A is for” thought was of a John Lithgow kid’s rendition of “A you’re Adorable”, and who is my little charming cutie these days? My little boy, of course! I just had holiday pictures printed out, so it’s high time to make a 6×6 scrapbook spread for my son’s baby book.

My other little idea was that I wanted to use some of this season’s received holiday cards in the background. I tried to tie it all together and push the bold cards into the background with some gesso and a little Perfect Pearls for shimmer.

Ingredients: Reused holiday cards, gesso, Perfect Pearls, Distress marker, Sizzix Christmas tree die, Distress Stickles, Martha Stewart letter stamps, Micron pen

Learning: This was my first experiment with gesso, and I really like the translucent coverage. I’m not the most experienced with scrapbooking, but I think this went better than some of the previous ones I have done. I think doing a two page spread was a good idea, giving me 12×6 to work with, so I will definitely try that again. 6×6 is pretty tiny, but it’s for a baby book and I want little hands to be able to hold it in a few years. Also, I need to work on my photo setup for large scrapbook pages and spreads!

Loving: I’m happy with how the photos look fussy cut. I really enjoyed giving some of the holiday cards a second life. I think the gesso really pulled everything together, and made a great surface for writing on. And of course, being sentimental, I really love seeing my baby’s great pictures! He is the most adorable in my eyes!

Card for a gamer

For a friend’s birthday, I decided I needed card inspiration. I haven’t done any non-holiday cards yet in my recent plunge into paper arts, and I knew I wanted them to be more sophisticated than the ones I made when I dabbled in birthday cardmaking ten years ago.

I turned to the latest sketch from Mojo Monday – Round or Square. But then my immediate thought was ‘oh, I’m in a hurry, I don’t want to mess with a custom envelope too!’ My next thought was ‘ack! But putting in the extra effort is what cardmaking is all about. If I didn’t want to make it special with effort, I could just go to the drugstore’,

So that was my mental self-correction dialogue. After that I set to work to make a cool, masculine card using the square sketch.

Ingredients: The base was Tim Holtz Lost & Found paper stash, the tiny cards and blue pattern were something I manipulated based on stock imagery and had leftover from a previous project, the torn card – again left from a previous project – was made with the Card Faces Texture Trades embossing folder, Alterations ATC die and Distress ink, the stamps are Flourishes and Martha Stewart, the diamond pattern paper is from a DCWV mat stack.

Learning: I need more ribbon options. Last night I was telling myself that less dimensional seemed more masculine, but in the light of day I see that I was just kidding myself to deal with the fact that I didn’t like my ribbon options.

Loving: I’m really excited about how all the bits came together from different previous projects. I feel like this really validates my keeping of random bits from previous projects – so many fun ways to reuse! It’s like I’m creating my own eclectic ephemera.

Dotty with joy

For the last card project, I had some kind of weird gluing accident. The glue made the paper translucent and blotchy where it dried. Then I tried to correct it with some distressing, but it made a total mess of the pattern.

Cue sad music.

Waste not want not – I used this botched card front as the base for today’s card for the Shabby Tea Room challenge using polka dots and buttons. The inspiration photo had an adorable button tree, but I wasn’t feeling that ambitious, so I did button mistletoe instead.

I cut the circle with a rotary circle tool, but it made me want to get nested circle dies, it was kind of fiddly.

Ingredients: My Minds Eye Lost & Found Christmas paper, David Tutera A7 glitter card, Sizzix sizzles mistletoe die, red button from stash, Distress inks, glitter glue

Learning: This project went pretty well. The main issues I had were that the rotary cutter pin would widen the hole in the paper causing slippage. Next time I will tape my paper down and that should prevent the need to trim afterwards.

Loving: I love that I rescued a failed project. I also think the button is pretty cute for mistletoe!

Stamping snowflakes with flourish

For the Simon Says Stamp Monday challenge this week, the goal was to use flourishes. I wanted to combine flourishes with snowflakes for a snowy, wintery scene. But I had some trouble getting the stamp impression to look the way I wanted.

At first I thought it was something about Distress inks, because they were beading up on the stamp surface. Then I tried it with some craft store brand inks, and they reacted similarly. Then I washed the cling stamps very well with soap and water. That seemed to help the most.

I need to learn more about using these cling stamps. Are they prone to beading? Are certain inks more susceptible? Is it just because I had the stamps sitting in their package for a really long time before using them?

In any case, I was eventually satisfied with the impression. Then I embossed it, and added some die cut details.

Ingredients: Snowflake stamps by Inkadinkado, flourish stamp by Scrappy Cat, flourish Movers and shapers die by Sizzix, Perfectly Pierced oval by Flourishes, Ranger super fine embossing powder

Learning: Obviously, I need to research better stamping technique, but I feel like I made some progress. I also feel like I’m making progress in coming up with my own layouts, although I still think this one could have used a little ribbon or something. I also think I would have preferred the more muted tones of the Distress inks for this project. The punchier blues make it seem a little hectic to my eye.

Loving: I was really happy with how the die cuts added to this one. I was also pleased with my combination of snowflake and flourish dies – it’s a lot of fun to compose a bunch of cling stamps on a big acrylic block!

Music and tags

This card was for the Shabby Tea Room challenge -Terrific Tags.

Alas, I missed the entry deadline by mere moments.  The linky tool literally closed on me just after I had entered my info and selected my image.  When there is a fussy baby in the house, creative project deadlines mean nothing.

It’s too bad, too, I really liked this card and I actually had enough good natural light for a decent picture.  That never happens!

Ingredients:  David Tutera Celebrations pearlescent A2 card, ribbon from stash, Flourishes Christmas Music stamps, Flourishes Perfectly Pierced Oval die, Inkadinkado snowflake stamps, Sizzix sizzlets snowflakes dies, Sizzix tags #3, Archival ink, Distress ink, Core’dinations cardstock

Learning opportunities:  I don’t know why but the little stamped snowflakes always seem to get a little blurred, maybe I press too hard?  I’m not sure I’ve quite got the best technique for rubber stamping yet.

Loving it: I’m really happy with the way the colors came together for this, I’m also really excited about the way the layers look for this!