Dragonfly Dreams

Hello everyone, I am sharing a card showcasing stamps from last month's One Day Special on Hochanda. These stamps have been such great fun to work with and I hope that I have given you a few ideas to use yourself.

I started my project by taking a piece of tea stained drawing cartridge from my stash. I have a few of these ready for a quick start to a project. I added salt when the background was wet for extra texture. I stamped the large playing card image from Ace Card with black Versafine ink, and masked the image with Masking Tissue. I added the small script from the same stamp set along one edge, and then the woodgrain image designed by our great friend Kim Moody from the Fragile Wings stamp set all over the background. 

I stamped out three of the smaller playing cards onto a spare piece of background, plus the sentiment. I added some Seedless Preserves Distress ink around the edges of all of the pieces. I coloured the main image with Inktense pencils and blended the colours with a waterbrush. When the image was dry, I added extra details with darker colours. I used a clear Wink of Stella pen over the dragonfly wings.

Thanks for stopping by, take care and stay safe, xx

Just Useful Collages (by Judith)

Hello everyone, I have a couple of projects to share with you today. I posted one of the projects a few weeks ago on social media to help promote last month's One Day special on Hochanda, so some of you may have seen this card already. To create the card, I stamped the paint splash onto a piece of drawing cartridge several times using Versafine Clair Ink in three different colours. I chose bold colours for lots of impact. I stamped the dragonfly image from the Fragile Wings stamp set onto the background, and added the slim script  and splatters from the Just Useful stamp set to extend the collage. I also added circles from the Make Your Mark stamp set.

I stamped and embossed the dragonflies onto some patterned paper, and cut them out. I then attached them to the background. The sentiment comes from the Fragile Wings stamp set as before.

                             

I created an acrylic tag as my second project, I really enjoy making these, they are really fun to create. I chose a piece of A5 Double Sided Designer Paper, and using Archival Ink, added lots of detail. I used elements from the Just Useful stamp set to create a collage, showing that you do not need a hero image to create a real focal piece of artwork. You could add this to a card, or give it as a special gift to someone, hang up as a stand alone piece of artwork, or include it on a larger piece of mixed media. The stamps I have used are all great for incorporating in backgrounds and building up your collage pieces. I have some real favourites amongst them already, some real go to stamps. As you experiment and play with them, I hope that you will find yourself reaching for these stamps too.

I will be back later in the month with some more projects to share with you, thanks for stopping by. Take care and stay safe, xx

Just Useful Backgrounds

Hello everyone, I hope that you are all keeping well. I have some cards to share with you that showcase stamps from last month's TV shows from Hochanda. I have used two collage style stamps as the focal point for my cards with the Just Useful stamp set to build the backgrounds. These stamps were really fun to work with, and I hope you enjoy the projects that I share with you this month.

 My first card was created by stamping the beautiful Alium Collage stamp onto fabric using Plum Archival Ink. I coloured the image with Inktense pencils, and used a waterbrush to fix the colours permanently. I created the background by stamping and embossing the numbers from Just Useful using white embossing powder onto a piece of Drawing Cartridge. I then blended Distress Oxide Ink over the background, and added a splatter stamp using the same colour of Archival Ink as before.

I stamped the sentiment onto a scrap piece of card and crumpled it slightly before attaching it to the card with some twine and double sided tape.

My second card was created by stamping the large Ace Card image onto a die cut piece of Drawing Cartridge with Versafine Clair Ink. I coloured the image with pencils. I coloured a piece of glossy card with more Versafine Clair Ink and a roller, polishing the card with a piece of tissue once I had covered the card. I stamped several images from the Just Useful stamp set over the top with Archival Ink to create a collage effect.

These stamps are just great for creating a whole range of backgrounds really quickly, and you can achieve lots of different effects as you can see by the two backgrounds that I have made here.

Stay safe and take care, xx