Silhouette garden bird card for AVJ

Here we are in August and it's another new challenge over at A Vintage Journey and this month the lovely Anne has chosen 'Things with Wings' so what better than to take Tim's new bird die and use it to make Ken's birthday card. (He loved it by the way).

I die-cut the silhouette bird from a piece of distressed card left over from another project - you know the pieces that sit in a box because you don't want to throw anything away lol. Then grabbed all the brown distress inks plus antique linen and hickory smoke and went around it blending in the colours. I actually really liked him just like this. 

BUT I wanted to make him just a little bit more realistic so I took out Tim's micro glaze which I'd not used before and rubbed a little over the whole bird, buffed it off with a dry towel. I wanted to add some 'painting' so I used all the colours gathered above and with a water brush begin painting with distress inks .....

 ..... but the surface is now water resistant so the inks gathered in little droplets - as I kept painting I could see definition appear as well as texture and in fact I think it is the perfect addition to give me some realism without overdoing it. Hey presto the garden bird was born.

For the background I cut a piece of card and applied some antique linen distress paint through Tim's doily stencil and made sure it was fully dried.

Next I blended scattered straw over and misted with water then heat dried.

The next step was to use the blossom stencil and randomly add some of the image using dried marigold.

Next I used another stencil and my own blended mister of evergreen bough and stormy sky re-inkers, misting through in the top half and turning the stencil over and laying the wet side on the lower half to transfer the ink and obtain the negative pattern.

I stencilled the word 'wonderful' using the Christmas stencil and used some other stencils to add more interest.....

...... blended barn door round the edges and tea dye over the whole background ....

.... and finished with walnut stain edges and some flicks of water to distress it.

I die-cut birthday in brown card using the celebrate thinlits ....

 .... and added some mini branches.

I kept the embellishing very simple just some twine and a word charm smooshed over with alcohol inks.

Ken's birthday was last week, the day before we went up to London to meet with some of the lovely people attending the Wendy Vecchi workshop, we also had a gathering at home on the Friday night with family and friends.

I hope you will be able to come and join us at A Vintage Journey with a project this month and it's always well worth a visit for all the inspiration provided by my amazing teamies, they have so many ideas and ways to use the products and materials you probably already have on the shelves in your craft room.

Have a great August and I hope the sun is shining wherever you are.

Enjoy your creative endeavours. 

hugs Brenda xxx

A Visual Journey #31

I am on another of my inspiration visits today off to another blog and wonderfully creative journal pages I found and pinned on Pinterest. This time it's to Living the Creative Life with Shelley R Chavis and a Documented Life project she did. I do urge you to pop over to Shelley's blog to see hers and how she made the pages and you will see what I took as inspiration to make my own. This is my version.

I began by spraying vibrant turquoise dylusions spray through a mask, turning it over to use the ink on the back as well on my pages and not wasting it. I painted in some random areas of lime green acrylic paint and stamped my bees using watering can archival ink.

I took a piece of left over card that has some mottled green inks on it and sprayed through two stencils using ocean pie and lemon zest dylusions inks, then cut them up and added to the pages.

I shadowed the coloured strips with a black inktense pencil and waterbrushed round and punched some circles and an oval to add more interest. I also used the inktense pencils to colour in the bees. I took Shelley's advice and did some doodle sewing around the edges using the sewing machine, it is definitely something I need to practice more.

Next I made a flower petal and butterfly for each page by running some card through an embossing folder, layering on oil pastels and dabbing over with festive berries/peacock feathers distress stains and spritzing them with water before heat blasting them. I ran my hickory smoke distress ink pad around the edges - I do love this new colour.

It was just a question of  gathering a few other bits to add to the pages, printing out a quote that I found, assembling the pages together  .....

... and adding them into my journal.

So there we have my pages made taking inspiration from Shelley - her pages are very different and beautiful so please pop over to see what she did and check out all her process steps. Thank you Shelley for inspiring me to get some bright colours out and challenging me to make something of my own but I can still see the Shelley influences. I love what I created, these pages are so different for me.

This post and the next few are scheduled as I am off to Lanzarote today with the family. I hope you are enjoying some quality time with people you love and also getting in some wonderful creative time too.

Take care and enjoy your own crafty endeavours.

hugs Brenda xxx

Summertime 2 for CVCC

Sea and Sand

With thoughts turning to summertime at CVCC it has to be the beach for me, I love nothing better than a stroll across the sands looking for shells, taking in the sea air and watching the waves come in and out and this prompted my card today.

I began with two A4 sheets of card and the wet in wet technique - Vivian Keh has a great video tutorial here for you to try out if you like the look of the effects.

I used broken china, salty ocean, faded jeans and weathered wood distress sprays for the sea sheet and then antique linen, tattered rose and tea dye for the sand sheet.

As I was gathering the blueprint stamps and some dies together that would fit the theme I thought about having a weathered frame as part of the design so I made another sheet using coffee shop glimmer mist with vintage photo, gathered twigs and rusty hinge distress sprays.

The frame was diecut from the above sheet, inked with walnut stain and tea dye inks, splattered with water and then dipped in hickory smoke stain and and finished with a dip in tarnished bronze stain. This sounds like a fast process but I did heat dry in between each layer of inks.

The background was cut from the blue sheet and run through the dot matrix texture fade with the oval diffuser on it so it only textured the outside edge. I then painted some of the dots with various blues and white distress paint before stamping some small script in the centre. I roughened the edges and inked with walnut stain.

The large conch shell is from Tim's nautical blueprint set, stamped and cut from the sand sheet and watercoloured using various distress markers and a waterbrush. The smaller shells were cut from some offcuts of distressed card and glossy accents added over the top and the small starfish cut from hessian using the small sand dollar movers and shapers die.

Here we have some cheesecloth sprayed with antique linen and frayed burlap and scrunched up, the movers and shapers seahorse and some greenery cut from the festive greens strip die.

Having cut the seahorse from the sea sheet I painted on rock candy crackle paint and when it was dry blended over and around some walnut stain DI. I think he's one of the nicest seahorses I have ever made.

Finally the work block cut from the adventure thinlits set in coredinations paper, adhered to a piece of the sand card, sanded and inked.

I layered and overlapped the pieces as this fits onto a 10 1/2 x 14 1/2 cm card.

I hope you have time to explore a beach or somewhere out in the open whilst the warmer days are with us - enjoy........

..... I will soon when we will start our family holiday travelling to Lanzarote, it's fabulous taking the girls down to the beach late afternoon as the day begins to cool and the sand doesn't burn your feet. We'll take some bread and feed the fish too.

I hope you can join us at CVC Summertime challenge.

hugs Brenda xxx

A simple life is good with me. I don't need a whole lot. For me, a T-shirt, a pair of shorts, barefoot on a beach and I'm happy.

Yanni

Wendy Vecchi Workshop in London

What a fabulous weekend it was both Saturday and Sunday, meeting up with crafting and blogging friends to have a meal together (I lost count how many of us there were in the end but we started with 15) and to attend Wendy Vecchi's Make Art workshop, we had such an amazing time. Wendy created a fabulous box and some tags for us to make using her signature products and we learnt some of her new techniques first hand and got lots of new ideas, tips and tricks.

Wendy has a great style for teaching and demonstrates and explains her techniques so well ........ and of course blending with archival ink rather than just distress inks was a revelation in itself. No really it was only because I always reach for the DIs and never think to use anything else.

She wanted to show us how in such a short time and using the same products our boxes were becoming so unique and individually personalised to our own preferences.

Here's mine.

I loved making this box using Wendy's embossing paste in a new and different way, it is such a cool shaped box and looks fabulous with the metal trim....

.. and label.

You can see the flower and button on the lid from this angle.

In the afternoon we made technique tags and here are mine featuring the gold texture paste, clearly for art, wendy's coloured archival inks and matching embossing powders, stencils, stamps and art parts.

One tip Wendy shared was that she always cuts down her tags she prefers to work on a 5 1/2 inch long tag rather than the standard 6 1/4 inch and I have to say I also like the dimensions as a more compact surface to work with.

 Tag 1

I wasn't going to buy this cup and saucer die but I can see all sorts of ways it can be used now.

Just look at the gorgeous teaspoon Wendy found us to use.

Tag 2

We used clearly for art and Wendy's stamp it - stencil it rose. It's so easy to use this range to get exact colouring in. 

I loved creating the 3D rose and vase and using Wendy's fabulous stamps and stencils.

Tag 3

More stencilling, stamp and art parts ......

... and the star is one of her own embellishments.

Tag 4

Wendy had very kindly stamped and embossed on some of the tags for us leaving us more time to create the backgrounds and get the pieces all assembled on the card.

This last tag was right at the end of the afternoon and a long but amazing day - I admit to not looking to change anything on this one and just get as much of it done before we took some photos and left for home.

Wendy also very kindly had some souvenir buttons made up for us.

And these were the tags she had made.

Here are just a few more of the photos from the day, I am hoping I will get some from some of those who attended as I missed out on getting any with Jenny and Sue - so girls if you are reading this do you have any I can have please?

Myself with wendy ....

.... Lesley, Cathryn Nikki (AVJ)

.... Tracy ....

.... Toni ....

.... Jane and Julie (AVJ) .....

.... Suz and Jane ....

.... Annie (AVJ) ....

.... and Anne (AVJ).

Thanks for staying with me through all the photos, but I really wanted to record the fullness of the day. A huge thank you to Wendy and her husband Rick for all the hard work they put into making everything run so smoothly and to all my crafting friends both above and those I didn't get photos with. It is certainly a day that will remain in the memories that stand out in my life.

I hope you have had a good start to the week and will be able to fit in some personal creative time today or soon.

Take care.

hugs Brenda xxx