Festive Trees

Hello everyone, I hope that you are keeping well. I have a couple of Christmas projects to share with you today. These projects feature stamps that aired on our November TV shows on The Craft Store.

My first project was created on kraft card.  I stamped the large heart from Artist Trading Heart, and masked the outside. I added trees from Trees a Crowd, and some scenery lines with a fineliner pen, using torn paper. Keeping the paper in place, I added some shading with white ink and a stencil brush. I used a white gel pen to add some highlights to the trees and dots in the sky for snowflakes.

I added a sentiment from Let's Get Festive to finish.

My second project consists of two little CAS cards stamped straight on 4" x 4" cards. I used two colours of ink and stamped straight onto the card blanks. These were really quick cards to make. I chose images from Frosty Trees for both the sentiments and main images. The teal and purple colour scheme is not traditional, but would suit someone with a modern home decor. You could choose any colour palette; black and gold, red and green, blue and silver, whatever combination you like, and use black card if you opt for metallic colours for even more drama. I added a little bit of glitter glue on the tree, you can click on the photo for a close up look.

I will be back later in the month with some more projects to share with you, thanks for stopping by,xx

Christmas Old and New

Hello everyone, I am sharing some Christmas projects with you today that were featured on last month's TV shows on Hochanda.

For my first project,  I created a background, using soft blues and pinks to represent a Winter sky. I added some deeper blue hills using torn paper masks, and stamped the tree from the Frosty Trees stamp set and the sentiment from the Let's Get Festive stamp set, using Cobalt Archival Ink. Ensuring that the background was completely dry, I added some snowflakes using white embossing powder, and then used some flat-backed gems for added sparkle.

Using another tree from the same stamp set, I created an icy background using metallic paints, and on a smaller scrap of the same card, I stamped and embossed the tree panel using Versafine Onyx Black Ink and clear embossing powder, for a crisp image. I matted the layers onto black card, and added some small black gems. The sentiment comes from the Let's Get Festive stamp set once again.

 I wanted to create a piece of home decor especially for Christmas using my favourite sentiment from the new stamp set. I painted a chipboard heart in soft blue chalk paint, adding some crackle medium here and there, and then added a vintage white paint over the top. I then stamped the sentiment in Red Geranium Archival Ink before adding the fabulous pine cones from the New England Winter stamp set around the edges. I used Distress Markers to colour the stamps, allowing me to add colour exactly where I wanted. A red ribbon completes the project.

This next card is an adaptation of an old card that I first made several years ago, using the Winter Birds stamp set, but I have made it in a different size. These days, I like to make 8" x 8" cards, and so the card does look slightly different from the original. I have added one of the new sentiments this time around as well.

Finally two golden oldies for you, which I hope you will forgive seeing again. I remade the first one, which was originally given as a Birthday card to someone. It just goes to show that these beautiful stamps can be used at other times of the year, not just at Christmas, with a change of colour. I have used the large image from the Reindeer Landscape stamp set, embossed with copper embossing powder, and coloured with Distress Inks and a water brush. The background was also created with Wild Honey and Seedless Preserves Distress Inks, and I have then stamped leaves from the Sunny Sunflowers stamp set, and coloured them with Polychromos pencils. The sentiment, which is my all time favourite Chocolate Baroque sentiment,  comes from the Nature's Peace stamp set.

Finally a luminary, also using the large image from the Reindeer Landscape stamp set. I die cut an aperture from four large printed tags. The images were stamped and embossed onto parchment using white embossing powder, and coloured from behind. I used metal tape to join the tags, which I embossed, and aged with a little bit of black paint.

I hope that my projects have given you some ideas using these fabulous stamps. Thanks for stopping by, xx

Colourful Christmas Cards

Hello everyone, it's time for another weekly post on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog, and I am helping to provide part of the inspiration this week in the form of a tutorial.

I have created a set of Christmas notelets, along the same lines of my earlier floral cards for a previous colour challenge:

You can adapt the instructions to use any colours or stamps that you like, making the cards really versatile. If you check back to my previous post, you will see that I used Brushos rather than Distress Inks, so try using different water based mediums for these cards, and experiment with the effects that you can achieve for the backgrounds, but most of all, have fun and enjoy yourselves.

Materials:

Distress Inkpads: Squeezed Lemonade, Ripe Persimmon, Wilted Violet
Archival Plum inkpad
Versafine Onyx Black inkpad
Smooth Watercolour paper
Cream linen card
Selection of Christmas stamps and sentiments


Instructions:

Cut six strips of watercolour paper 5.5cms wide and 10.5cms long.
Colour each strip with a mixture of the three colours of Distress Ink, blending them where they meet. Spritz the panels with water if desired and dry with a heat gun.
Stamp the images using Plum Archival ink, and add the sentiments using Versafine Onyx Black ink.
To make the cards, cut two pieces of A4 linen card into three, approxinately 9.8 cms wide.
Fold the strips in half, at the 10.5cms point, scoring the fold to give a neat crease. Round the four corners of the card if desired.
Adhere the coloured panels to the linen cards.

For extra Christmas sparkle, you could choose to use gold embossing and add a bit of glitter to areas of the stamped images. These cards will be great for batch cards if you have lots of cards to make.

I used stamps from Christmas Flourish, Christmas Song, Fat Robin, Frosty Trees, and Stained Glass Christmas.

Thanks for stopping by, xx