Christmas Magic vintage style

It's the new challenge for December at Country View Challenges and we end the year with the season that many of us love best - "Christmas". Well I do anyway. The Brown household celebrates in style with family gatherings Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing day, we just love the family atmosphere of being together at this special time of year. 

To get us started on the challenge I have made a mosaic easel card with a special person in mind to receive it, but I'm not gonna spoil the surprise by saying who it is.

I made one of these for Tim's June remix tag - which you can fine here and did this design as a project for a workshop recently. I didn't get mine finished and used a few different embellishments by the time I came to complete it but I love how it turned out.

Using Tim's mosaic die and his techniques this came together quite quickly.

All the little pieces are from my Christmas craft tub except for the pen nib which was just the perfect size for the recess I added it to.

I used this card for a workshop last week, the ladies had great fun making it up and using their embellishments to decorate it. I always love it at the end when you see the similarities and differences in their designs. Choosing different colours and stamps can create very different designs.

I hope you will be joining us at Country View Challenges for the last challenge of the year and with the title Christmas I'm sure you're all good to go.

The first Sunday of advent was last weekend, we were celebrating the start of our Christmas celebrations at Center Parcs Winter Wonderland, it was a very happy, magical time.

 It is now the time for the preparations to begin and I have already been buying presents, decorations and cards but it is also a time for reflection remembering the year past and not forgetting the real meaning of Christmas. A time for for love, a time to help others and a time to share what we have and feel blessed.

“At this Christmas when Christ comes, will He find a warm heart? Mark the season of Advent by loving and serving the others with God's own love and concern.” 

― Mother Teresa,

take care

hugs Brenda xxx

Ministry of Mixology round up 1 The projects

Well I promised I would be back with photos and info from the Ministry of Mixology retreat weekend in Coventry.

All I can say is it was a blast, I had the most amazing time amongst 80+ incredible people who were all excited and happy to be there, who were extremely kind, helpful and positive about the projects and experience and we had FUN.

I have quite a few photos so I thought I would share them in batches and today I start with my frame that I called -

Inspire Me Vintage

This is my one

I loved designing the frame and deciding on the techniques and feel so blessed with all the amazing comments I received from the delegates at the retreat.

These are just a few of some of the delegates ones I managed to capture at the end of the Sunday session although there have been quite a few more shared on face Book.

As you can see quite a few people brought photos of their own to use which made their frames so much more personal to themselves.

If you scroll back again and look for the photo of the single male gentleman, does he look familiar???

I had great fun using a new app on my ipad and merging the faces of one of my cabinet cards with the face of a rather well known person at Mixology - yes none other than Andy himself. I gave him this version to keep.

Thanks for stopping by, I will share some more of the fun ones and the media boards made at my Make and Take session soon.

Have a wonderful weekend whatever you have planned.

hugs Brenda xxx

Artsy Christmas card

I really wanted to create a textured background over patterned paper and although this didn't finish quite how I imagined it would I still like the finished result.

I began with some Christmas patterned craft paper (bought from Hobby Craft) .....

.... and began altering it by dipping and drying it using watery gesso.

Next I added white texture paste through Tim's Holiday Script stencil and let dry.

Next I scraped white gesso over the stencilling and watched the letters and words appear, still leaving some interest in the background.

(When the background was fully dry I was intending to lay down some watery washes, let them drip and merge a little and then splatter with titanium white media acrylic paint. But I loved it just like this so decided to leave it alone - that's unusual for me!!!!)

I had found some bought and ready made Christmas ornaments which are ultra glittery, in fact too glittery for what I wanted so I finger washed over a very thin layer of watery gesso which now gives them a chalky bloom, much more in keeping with what was in my head. You can see the difference between them on the two sets below.

I die cut some holiday greens in white card and inked them with ground espresso, stamped and cut out the sentiment using both coffee and black archival ink and gathered some winter berries  to add to the mix.

A mount, a star and bows finished off the layering nicely.

Again I made two of my design, I need to get a lot more finished and in the box before I need to send them out..

Well it's Monday, this is a scheduled post and Mixology will be over. I'll be back soon to let you know how it went.

Have a great week.

hugs Brenda xxx

DecoArt products

DecoArt Mixed Media - White Gesso DecoArt white modeling paste DecoArt Mixed Media Fluid Acrylic 1oz - Titanium White - See more at: http://www.countryviewcrafts.c

InLinkz.com

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas

Here's a canvas board with a snowy Christmas theme. However the background was made months ago and just left in a box, so I've hauled it out to use as a Christmas easel card.

I think the process steps to re-create this backgroud are something like -

- I began with some gesso scraped and dabbed on, dried and then texture paste added through a stencil.

- I probably dipped and dried layers of distress inks and the colours look like snowy sky, tea dye, pumice stone and vintage photo.

I stamped the image from Tim's new Scribble Woodlands set using three archival ink pads, olive green, watering can and coffee and cut round it. The clock was cut from gold card, daubed with sand paste, dried and watery washes of paynes gray, raw umber and quinacridone gold added to it. I also died some seam binding with stormy sky, stamped the sentiment and found the skate charm to dangle from the ribbon.

I watercoloured the stamped image with some of the distress inks before adding it to the card with foam pads to lift it a bit.

I wanted this to be a real winter wonderland so I added loads of DecoArt snow-tex to get the effects I wanted. It scraped beautifully over the textured clock.

I even added some to the skate after I had painted it with burnt umber media fluid acrylic paint and ribbed some silver spark metallic lustre over the blade.

Even the ribbon got a dusting of it too.

Here you can see the easel which allows it stand.

With the background already made this only took me a couple of hours ... that's amazing for me lol.

I really would love it to be a white Christmas, but there's very little chance of that here in the south of the UK - so I carry on 'dreaming'.

Thanks for stopping by and if you are at Mixology this weekend, see you this evening or tomorrow. I shall be driving up this morning so that I can help get it all ready.

Enjoy your weekend whatever you have planned.

hugs Brenda xxx

'Tis the Season

Here's a design using the Scribble Woodland set of stamps and the beautiful deer head as the focal image.

The details of how I made them are over at Country View Crafts Project Blog today with a few more photos as well.

I have yet to get stuck in to getting my Christmas cards made but these have given me a bit of a start which is why I made two of them.

Off shopping today to get the last bits I need for the Mixology workshop this coming weekend.

Have a great week.

hugs Brenda xxx

Steps copied over from CVC

I had found a piece of left over infusions drenched paper and cut it in half so I could create two of the same cards (my box needs so many more cards before the beginning of December!!)

I took the scribbly woodland stamps and olive, watering can, coffee and black archival inks and stamped over the scribbly twig and snowflakes.

I love using my Tim waterbrush and took stormy sky, vintage photo and ground espresso distress inks to colour in part of the snowflakes.

You can probably make out that although these two deer heads were coloured with the waterbrush and brown distress inks, I actually stamped them in different colours to begin with. The on stamped in black on the right looks very striking but the one on the left was originally stamped in coffee which made this gorgeous creature look quite insipid, so I took a black posca pen and did my own scribbles over the top to create a more stronger looking deer head.

The sentiment was stamped onto left over card from another project and I was ready to put the card together.

I found some paper string and small holly die-cuts ...... 

 .... and put the cards .........

..... together.

These are gorgeous scribbly images and I can see me using them alot for Christmas cards this year.

Have a great week.

hugs Brenda xxx