A circus double

I've been missing scrapbooking for the past week and finally found time to sit at my desk and get a double page done. It's been ages since I made a double. These photos have been sitting at the bottom of the box I take to crops and knew I had to get them on a page. My starting point was inspired by the quilt in my last post. The fabrics are from a collection from a while ago by Cosmo Cricket. I dug out all my old Cosmo Cricket papers and put this page together.

I have managed to use items from the following Cosmo Cricket collections...
Hello Sunshine and Storytime - Patterned papers
Pixie-Licious - Borders
Garden Variety - Patterned paper and borders
Jack's World - Stamps
Nutmeg - Ready Steady Chip alphabet
plus some Tiny Type stickers.

I used some more card Candi again as I thought it was perfect for this page - a bit like juggling balls.

A Snorkel quilt

A little while ago I found a pack of fat quarters from The Snorkel range by Cosmo Cricket. I love the Cosmo Cricket fabrics and I'm particularly pleased they are now working with Moda so the designs are much easier to get hold of. This was one of their older fabric ranges so I was really happy to find it. I knew they would be the perfect fabrics to make a quilt for my friends' new baby boy, who lives near the seaside.

I started with the background and picked out all the blue and fishy fabrics. I cut them into 3" strips and stitched them together.

I used bondaweb to stick down the fishy shapes, eyes and bubble circles. A zig zag stitch was used to go around each fish using navy thread to make the fish stand out.

Every time I make a quilt I try a new technique and this time it was my quilting. I'm trying to get a bit more inventive with my quilting as I usually just quilt in straight lines across the whole piece. I used my darning (free motion) foot and pinned card circles in various sizes onto the quilt as a stitching guide. I really like this quilting technique and I definitely think it adds to the finished look of the project. I used more navy thread and the darning foot to stitch around the bubbles and to add details to the fishes.

I've been trying to take better photos of my quilts, usually by taking them out into my garden. However I had to lay this one on the floor as I was going to see my friend and wanted to take the quilt but it has been raining  here for weeks - so outdoor photoshoots were out of the question.

My friends love the quilt and their little boy's bedroom already has a seaside theme - yay!

Dymo tape canvas

I have written an article in the current issue of Scrap365 about using Dymo tape on scrapbook pages and so I thought I'd share a canvas I recently made for a friend using more tape.

I was talking about church banners with my friend Kate and she came up with an idea for this Bible verse from Song of Songs to be written over a background of other verses about love. I took her idea and ran with it , using my embossed Dymo tape to write out the verses.
 

It took three evenings of clicking away with my Junior Dymo embossing label maker to complete enough tapes to cover the background (the finished canvas is a bit bigger than A4). I was able to use any colours of tape from my generous stash as I coated the whole thing with a couple of layers of gesso at the end.

I cut out a heart stencil from some scrap card and used my fingers to rub on the different paint colours. I then rubbed on some more paint around the edges of the canvas. Using my fingers to apply the paint meant that I had good control over where the paint was going and how it highlighted the embossed words.

I used matte multi medium to add pieces of tissue paper on the surface and I also used it to do an image transfer of some birds and book text. I added a few bits of microporous tape on the edge of the heart and printed with some bubble wrap too.

I wrote the verse with my large brush Pitt pen. That was the scary bit! I tired it out on some scrap paper first to check the size of my lettering and how it would fit in the heart and then I went for it. I was very relieved at the end to step back from the canvas and see no spelling mistakes!

Mini bowling

This is a page I started at the last crop I went to using bits and bobs from a Quirky Kit. It was one of those pages which slowly came together over a couple of weeks with pieces gradually being added. I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

The blue pattern behind the title was half of a transparency I had left from another project. I tucked it in behind the fabric and it worked perfectly.

The doily is a mini one from a pack by Kaisercraft which I painted with white acrylic for another layout and then decided not to use it. There are coloured dots in the photos (on the sign in the background and the bowling ball itself) and I wanted to mirror that on the page. I had a look through the box of random stuff in my crop bag and found an old packet of Card Candi which finished the page off just right.