Tag time

After the trial of last month's tag swap in orange I found the May colour scheme of white with a touch of gold much easier to deal with.

I'm sure I have said a hundred times before that I usually buy white embellishments and colour them, so I had lots of things I could add to this months tags.

If you look carefully you will find book pages, doillies, feathers, flowers, die cuts (still obsessed) and buttons made from polymer clay on the front. I only just remembered the touch of gold and added some toned down gold brads to the book plates.

On the back I used molding paste and gesso through stencils to create texture over painted book pages for a minimalist contrast to the mountain of different things on the front.

Thanks for taking the time to look.

More inchies

I knew I would eventually get round to using some of the many Gelli print backgrounds I made. I'm going to have to make an awful lot of inchies though to get through the ream of A4 sheets!

The challenge for this swap was to cover a 6" by 4" postcard with inchies using a maximum of three colours. I've chosen blue, green and turquoise which counts as three even if I've used lots of different shades doesn't it?

So armed with a mountain of coloured backgrounds I punched out squares with interesting bits of pattern on them. I then either stamped an image or glued an embillishment on to each one before assembling the postcard.

In my usual fashion this involved colouring some bits and pieces to fit the theme: spray ink on the fabric flower, Brilliance ink heat set on the heart shaped button and alcohol ink and StaZon on the giant brad.

I couldn't resist a bit of doodling with gel pen and the odd bit of Stickles glitz to finish.

I haven't made a lot of inchies before and have found working on such a tiny scale quite hard. I'm really looking forward to seeing what my swap partner has made for me - hoping to get lots of good ideas and inspiration for tiny projects in the future.

Inspired by Dyan

One of the swaps I am doing in May is to make an item using colourwash spray. Eagle eyed readers will no doubt have noticed that I use spray inks in quite a lot of the things I make. I love how quickly I can create a background using sprays and I enjoy the messy unpredictability - speaking for myself here, I'm sure others make perfectly planned, neat effects with their sprays.

So to cut out a great deal of umming and aahing over what to make I decided to go all out with sprays and nothing else. Inspired by a great class that Dyan at Art from the Heart ran a while back I decided to make a journal where every part was coloured using sprays.

I used sheets of watercolour paper as the base and sprayed Dylusions inks through a variety of stencils to create colourful pages.

 

The pages are folded in half and then stuck back to back to create the book. The spine is covered with a piece of sticky backed canvas. The ribbon tie and ric-rac braid are coloured using spray ink too. I nearly always buy white and colour it myself in this way.

 

Here are pictures of the finished book: Closed...

 

 

 

....and standing open.

 

I just hope my swap partner likes bright colours and journalling.

Have a heart

In April a group of fellow crafters and I have been altering some wooden hearts. I think they started life as Christmas decorations and were in a sale at 10p each. They had natural dark wooden front and back surfaces to start with, but not for long.

Often I find I spend more time trying to decide what to do than actually getting on with a project but in this case I had a new toy to try out - Kroma Crackle paint from Indigo Blu - so I knew there would be some texture involved.

I hadn't used this product before so I was interested to see how easy it would be. On the front I don't think I used a thick enough layer, and perhaps added too much paint to the mix. There is definitely a very even crackle pattern created but on a very tiny scale. To contrast I used Terra paint on the right hand side and stamped into it to create bold texture. I painted over the terra and sprayed the whole heart with spray ink which settled into the cracks and stamped indentations. This side is quite an orangy red overall with gold higlights.

 



 

 

On the reverse side I applied a thicker layer of Kroma Crackle with less paint added, hence the paler pink colour. This gave crackle on a larger scale and with more texture because of the bigger cracks - much more what I was looking for. I think there will be more projects coming along that feature crackle now I'm getting to grips with it. I used tissue tape to cover the portions on either side of the crackle and then sprayed ink over the whole again. I don't think the picture represents the colours terribly well. They aren't quite so fierce in real life.

 

I've signed up for a quite a few swaps next month so please call back soon.