TIPsy Tuesday - From Rags to Riches

One of the techniques for using Ranger distress inks is to press the ink pads directly on an acrylic block or a craft sheet and spritz with water.  Then dip paper (I use watercolor paper) into the inks for a background.  You can do this repeatedly on the same paper for more color.  

Eventually, you need to wipe of the acrylic block or the craft sheet.  I've been using a paper towel and I always notice what pretty color combos you get on the paper towel. I wondered if you could get similar results with fabric?  So I tried wiping the ink off my craft sheet with a piece of plain muslin. 

Here is my 'dyed' piece of muslin.

Before using it to make the flower below, I stamped the flourish in Vintage Photo.

And you get a really interesting fabric to make a flower or other embellishment.

I did find that I still needed a paper towel to get the surface completely dry.

The remainder of the card was inspired by a tag Tim Holtz made for 2 P's month of cardmaking and stamping.  I layered a lot of different stamps and mostly used distress inks for a soft, worn look.

Thanks for visiting today, Happy Tuesday!

Ingredients:  Stamps:  God's Beauty, Baroque Motifs by Stampin' Up!; Line dots by Hero Arts
Ink:  Vintage Photo, Tea Dye, Concord Crush, Weathered Wood, from Ranger
Cardstock:  Plum Pudding by PTI
Lace:  Prima
Brad:  Vintage from Stampin' Up!

Studio Wall Quilt

The room that I use for paper crafting is our guest bedroom.  It has a wonderful high cathedral ceiling that brings in beautiful morning light.  Opposite the wall with a window is another high wall which until this week held and old wall hanging I made for my stepdaughters back when mauve, green and a country look were popular.

About I’d say five years ago(?),  I made a wall quilt top that was the perfect size for this space in the guest room.  I kept putting off quilting it until I mastered free form quilting on my machine.  While I’d like to tell you that I finally quilted it because I have indeed mastered machine quilting, the reality is I got awfully tired of the old wall hanging and was ready to finally finish decorating this room.  (It is pretty bad for someone in my profession to have a room with nothing matches.) I realized that the wall hanging would be so far up above eye level that not one would really see my quilting!  I did a fairly decent job (though certainly not masterful) after I ripped out some of my first work.  Most importantly I got it done and here it is - something a bit more modern and in colors that match the room.

The quilt is composed of 2 inch squares sewn together.  This is similar to the process of watercolor quilting which I fell in love with several years ago.  However my hands do not allow me to use a rotary cutter.  I don’t know why but I can cut with scissors; however, a couple of minutes with the rotary cutter and my hand just aches.  Anyway, to piece together my hand cuts slightly off squares I rely on a wonderful product called Quilt Smart  http://www.quiltsmart.com/.  It is fuseable interfacing with a 2 inch grid.  So you have a terrific background  to lay out your project and add a great way to hold everything together to make sewing easy and best of all accurate.

My goal with this room is to have only handmade items for wall art. This is the only thing I have up so far so I have quite a ways to go. My next task is to get my uncle to build me a picture ledge to hold completed scrapbook pages. 

I hope you'll stop back by tomorrow for Tipsy Tuesday. Also coming up next Sunday I am participating in my very first Blog Hop. It's very exciting what we're up to - more details to follow up… 

Looking Up

It was funny.  I picked this sketch challenge because of the photo collage.  I thought I would just use a variety of our hiking photos from Redwood National Park.  When I started laying out the photos, I noticed a pattern.  Lenny was looking up in so many of the shots.  I guess we did a lot of that surrounded by some of the tallest trees on the planet!

It is another of the Joys of Papercrafting that you really notice patterns when you start playing with your photos to create a page.

Anyway, I thought it made a good subject so I concentrated on just the photos that emphasized the size of the trees.  Here is the journaling:


Lenny was determined those trees were not actually 300+ feet tall!  He walked out measurements to try to 'compute' their real height before finally acknowledging that the park service was not trying to deceive us - like they do for trail lengths, of course.

Have you ever noticed that hiking trails are way longer than they are posted for?  I guess it could just seem that way, but I think it is how they measure.  I know we have walked at least 4 miles when the trail only says 2 :-)

As for the layout, I already had many of the photos printed so I made my own collage.  I did a Panorma (see this post for details on doing that in PSE) for the tree.  I didn't realize until I printed it that I'd picked an option which resulted in my husband being slightly taller than he really is - and thinner too.  I'm sure he won't mind.

I used SCAL and the Cricut to cut the title like the one in Nichol's sample.  The edge is distressed in Vintage Photo and stamped with a little Whisper White using the Itty Bitty Backgrounds stamp.

For the sketch that goes with this layout, see the weekly challenge at Two Peas - Apr 8 '11 Challenge

Thanks for visiting today!

Ingredients:  Campy Trails DSP by American Crafts
Stamps:  Stitches by Hot of the Press, Woodgrain by Hero Arts and Season of Friendship by SU!
Ink:  Soft Suede, River Rock
Cardstock:  Crumb Cake
Stickers:  On Holiday from The Girls Paperie
Chipboard:  Basic Grey

My SU! experience - then and now

First, today's card.

We have card class coming up and I have mostly floral cards for the group to make.  So I thought we needed a masculine card and I turned to the old favorite little truck stamp which most of the ladies have in their collection also known as Loads Of Love.  Splitcoaststamper’s color challenge this week is to use Pear Pizzazz, Baja breeze, and Poppy Parade - such happy colors.  I also used the sketch challenge turned up on its end.  In place of the circles which would probably be brads or buttons I embroidered X’s for some extra love on this simple card.

Doing this card using all Stampin Up supplies fit in well with one of my first activities this morning which was looking back two years on my blog.  Now that sounds like something strange to do.  It came from Shimelle’s prompt from the Blogging for Scrapbookers class.  She suggested that we use our blogs if we’ve been doing this a long time to see how things have changed in the last year or two years or whatever.  A blog is a great way to find something by date.

So I went back to April 2009 which was shortly after I started my blog.  It was also shortly after I began my few months as a stamping up demonstrator.  I was pretty passionate about stamping and using Stampin’ up! products.  Now I still loved to use other manufacturers’ paper but I had not ventured out into a lot of different kinds of inks.  I was trying to encourage others to stamp, just starting to participate in challenges, and just beginning to teach some card making classes.

Now two years later I still use a lot of my Stampin Up collection of stamps and the inks and markers.  I use their cards stock almost exclusively now except for a little bit of Papertrey Ink.  I have though expanded the variety of stamps and inks in my collection.  I’m a pretty brand loyal person however I like a lot of variety in my crafts.  I get bored pretty quickly and I find that has increased as I’ve gotten older.  For example when I was younger I loved to crochet and while I tried out a lot of different patterns I had some that I would make over and over again.

Now I find that I want to try more and more new techniques, scrapbooking layouts, scrapbooking subjects.  I love to watch videos on techniques and see what I can learn.  I’m not as adventuresome as some of you but I really like to stretch my style.

While I didn’t really like trying to sell Stampin Up, I am very grateful for my time as a demonstrator.  When I had to meet a quarterly minimum, I gave myself permission to spend a bit more money on my crafts –cutting back in other places to do so.  I realized how important paper crafting was to me.  I had to produce quite a bit of product –cards and pages to show to perspective clients.  So I really increased how much I got done in my crafting space and that has carried over even though I’m not trying to sell anything anymore.

I still teach some classes.  We use a lot of SU materials but of course we use a lot of other products as well.

Whereas I was just getting started entering card challenges, I now enter several challenges a month many of them for scrapbook pages.  I make a lot more one page layouts these days.

I really think that blogging, reading other blogs, watching You tube videos, participating on message boards has helped me grow as a crafter.  I’m very thankful to all the wonderful crafters I connect with online.

Thank you for visiting today!


Ingredients:  Stamps: Loads Of Love
ink and card stock: Baja breeze, pear pizzazz, poppy parade 

TIPsy Tuesday - Filling in the Letters

Typically, I throw those little inserts from from my raw chipboard in a bin. One of these days there will be a TIPsy Tuesday on what to do with those, when I figure it out :-)   Today's tip is a simple and hardly, original one.  You can color in the middle of the "p", "e", "o", "a", "g" etc and add a little more punch to your title.

For "pet", I painted the letters red and the middles gray.  After the gray dried, I stamped in white craft ink to go with all the other polka dots on this page.  You could also cover them in pattern paper or just use pattern paper behind the centers of your letters.  It just adds a little bit of fun.

For the rest of the page...

the layout is based on Shimelle's sketch for her 4x6 Photo Love class in March.  I opted for the 4x4 version of the photos.  Otherwise, I stuck pretty close to her example.  See the class here:  4x6-photo-love-with-shimelle-laine/  For one of the journaling spots, I created my own with the Cricut.

It was great getting some use out of my scallop stamp set.  I keep forgetting I have it.  This Cats set from Inkadinkado has been used quite a bit.  Colorbox fluid chalk ink does such a great job!   The bow on the kitty is not in anyway meant to imply that MY cat would wear such a thing.  If I tried to put a bow on him, I'd be needing serious bandages on me!

Journaling:

"Daddy can open doors, he can actually get Jasper to respond the word "Out," and he can get out the fake bird for a game of catch any old time.  But when it comes to love, Mommy is the only one who gets to pet the cat."  For some reason, Jasper does not really want Lenny to pet him.  Oh well, it's his kingdom and we only live here.

Thanks for visiting today, hope you will come back soon!


Ingredients:  Stamps:  Cats by Inkadinkado; All Scallops by SU!  Ink:  Charcoal by Colorbox; Brocade Blue by SU!
Cardstock:  Brocade Blue
DSP:  Cherry Hill's Sunday Dishes by October Afternoon
Ribbon:  All by Stampin' Up!
Stickers and Chipboard by Basic Grey

Three Thanks from One Stamp

It is stamping and cardmaking month at Two Peas in a Bucket!  The first video and challenge was to make three cards using one stamp - using the stamp a different way in each.  I chose a simple flower image and did these three things:

• For the card on top, I stamped the back side of DSP and cut out the orange flower and the front side of another DSP with only the edge colored in and cut that out as well.
• For the next card, I stamped the flower image in Baja Breeze on Baja cardstock over and over to make a background.  This was a little more time consuming using a wood mounted stamp since I had to use the Stamp-ah-mah-jig.  It would be a piece of cake with an acrylic stamp.
• Finally for the card below, I stamped in Versamark and colored with pastels.  After cutting it out I inked the edges with a little Rich Razzleberry ink.  It sort of looks like the white part is stamped but is is just the background paper. 

So you really can get a lot of mileage out of one simple stamp!

I also used the same DSP and greeting stamp set to keep the decision making process to a minimum.

Thanks for visiting me today!

Ingredients:  Stamps:  Office Accruement by Stampin' Up!; Spring Blossom (greetings) for Inkadinkado
Ink:  Baja Breeze, Rich Razzleberry, Versamark; Pastels by Stampin' Up!

Nature's Painted flower

If I colored a stamped flower in like this, people would probably say I was nuts!  Yet, here is a white and red combined Camellia.  I love it when people ask me "Did you grow these?"  I always respond, "we planted the bush" because truly that is all we did with this multi colored camellia.  It was recommended by our favorite garden center.  I don't think we have ever even pruned it.  It just produces beautiful pink, white and red bloom all on the same bush. Sometimes you even get mixed colors within the same bloom!

Such a bright sunny day here in NC.  It's windy though so the perfect day to finish cleaning my sunroom when the sun gets on that side of the house and warms things up.

I even get a break from the kitchen today, my hubby is cooking lunch!  And I hear him doing dishes already.  Heaven!

Hope you are having a great weekend, too.

April Opportunities

Happy April!  Much is going on in the on-line papercrafting world.  It seems most of the challenges I follow haven't been posted yet. I'm sure they will be up in the next day or two.  Here is one that is:

Scrapbooker's Anonymous challenge to use eyelets:  April Challenge Eyelets  Oh boy!  Eyelets?  I'm not sure what I have but I'll give it a try.  The Crop-a-dile will get some exercise.

Also, Two Peas in a Bucket launched a change to their website yesterday along with a video that explains they are really expanding their product offerings.  I'm excited to see what they have in store for us in the stamping and cardmaking world.  This month they are doing a month long card making/stamping event.  www.twopeasinabucket.com/

Now for my layout...

On Tuesday I posted tips on how to create a panoramic photo in Photoshop Elements.  Here is the layout that goes with that picture.  It is more from the gardens in Northern California.  The journaling explains how I really planned a portion of our trip around seeing this particular garden and was very concerned when we got there because it did not look like that much from the roadside entrance.  Fortunately you can’t judge a garden by its entrance.  It was absolutely gorgeous once we got inside.

Project notes:

I created the flowers using tips from an article in Scrapbook etc. magazine.  I punched the flowers with the scallop punch, spritzed some with water, and crumpled them up.  I also used tips from a Tim Holtz video tutorial for creating your own glimmer mist.  However I must’ve got a little carried away with my Perfect Pearls because these are really glimmering!  Clearly, more playtime is required.

Happy, no fooling, day to you!

Ingredients: DSP: Karen Foster design and check by October Afternoon.  Colorful designer papers from a variety of sources.

Chipboard: Ashley by Maya Road; swirl by Oriental Trading

Brads: vintage breads and Vanilla Hodgepodge Hardware by SU

Stickers: on holiday by the Girls Paperie.