The Great Big Stitched Postcard Swap update

 A little while ago I made a felted image for a postcard as part of the Great Big Stitched Postcard Swap. I was very excited to receive the postcard above from my swapee (is that a real word?) Eleanor Reilly. 

She has put in so many lovely details (according to her blog, the red headed lady is inspired by me).

The theme is "Celebration"and Eleanor has cleverly included a whole miniature book of quotes about celebrating.

I love the texture elements she included.

Thank you Eleanor. It looks lovely pinned up on my inspiration board in my craft space xx

(P.S. I just wanted to add that Eleanor posted this on time for the swap and it's just me who's late adding it to my blog)

 

Washi tape feathers

Feathers are trendy on scrapbooking pages at the moment and have been for a little while and so I wanted to have a go at making my own feather embellishments using washi tape. It was really simple.

I  placed a length of wire in the centre of a strip of washi tape and then stuck another strip over the top.

I cut the tape into a feather shape...

...and then snipped into the tape with scissors to create the feather.

For wider feathers I laid strips of tape horizontally on the work surface so they created a sheet of tape. I then placed in the wire and stuck down more strips over the top, before cutting out the feather.

I played around with different patterns of tape for different effects.

Come back tomorrow to see where they ended up on a scrapbook page.

Crafting Sun-rays

We've had some lovely days of winter sunshine recently with clear blue skies and frosty ground. It seems like a great time of year for some sunny yellow crafting. Julie Kirk is running a month of yellow inspiration over on her fabulous "notes on paper" blog. Julie has lots of suggestions for yellow scrapbooking, cardmaking and wearing yellow too.

I've joined in with a bit of yellow card making this week. I have recently finished two Maisy Mouse cot quilts for friends who have had baby girls and I wanted to send some cards with the quilts. The top card uses the lovely bright colours from Cosmo Cricket's Delovely collection.

The card below uses more Cosmo Cricket papers from the Togetherness collection with some Material Girl stickers. This card is for a family who have a little boy and now have a baby girl, so I think the birds work really well.


Here's one of the Maisy Mouse quilts which was inspired by a pattern on the Moda Bake Shop blog. It's a great place for fantastic free quilt patterns. I'm particularly excited by this one here and I hope to be attempting it later in the year.

More yellow on the back of the quilt...

I've made another quilt similar to this one before, but I still love it.

A Father Christmas card

I've started having a a little look at Pinterest and I can see how time can slip away looking at all the great ideas that are shared on there. I saw the idea for this card on there and thought it was so great that we had to have a go. The original link is here. My girls made some for their teachers and for their grandparents. They are so effective.

An artsy ornament

I signed up a while ago to an online class called "12 Artsy Ornaments for Christmas". It's hosted by Christy Tomlinson and has a selection of artists contributing projects, including two of my favourites - Donna Downey and Alisa Burke.

This was my version of Alisa's project and I've made a few for friends. I love how they turned out. When my six year old said she wanted to give presents to some of her school friends, I showed her the tutorial video and she had a go too. She made some very pretty hearts.

Doodle stitching

I made a card for a friend's birthday this week and I used my free motion stitching again. I stuck down the book paper and then stitched the flowers freehand over the top, which I coloured in with pencil crayons. This was my second attempt as I forget to open up the first one before stitching it, creating the amazing non-opening card!

Deep Peace

I've been working on a piece of art for a friend's house and it's been a great excuse to play with some of the techniques I've been learning recently. The words are an ancient Celtic blessing.

I started with gesso on some 12 x 12 card. I wanted to add texture and I knew the colour of the background would be quite flat, so I made my gesso swirly...

I stamped some stars and fishes using StazOn ink and then added colour with my NeocolourII watersoluble crayons. I found that with a little extra water I could lift off the colour over the stamped images.

I built up the layers using stencils. Here's my bird stencil again. This time I used Distress Inks and I was worried that it was going to wipe off from the gesso background so I went around it with a pen.

My favourite part of the piece are my shining stars, some machine stitching swirls with some hand stitching sparkle on the top.

Plans

Today's sketchbook page was an idea floating around in my head for a while. I used pages from an ancient A-Z to make the background which I coloured using distress inks. The ink didn't take where the gel medium had transferred onto the top of the papers when I was gluing it down, but I really like the effect.

I continued with the distress inks to stencil and stamp the rest of the details with StazOn ink for the title as I wanted it to be bold.

The bird stencil comes from a book, "Stencil 101". It has some fantastic , bold, modern stencils in a great size.

Dance in the rain

This is a quote I saw as a print in a catalogue recently and I really like it. I watched a couple more videos from the "3 hearts" workshop and had a play...

The background was made with acrylic paint, then a mist then alcohol inks. You can see how wet it was.

I used Claudine Hellmuth's layered stamps to add the images to the page.

I used a foam stamp set to add the words but they weren't standing out enough and were getting a bit lost in the background. I went around each letter with a black pen but that didn't do much, so I went around them again with my new white Sharpie pen. I attempted to colour gel medium with acrylic paint and use a raindrop stencil I'd made to make some dimensional raindrops. It looked awful! I wiped them off and doodled over the marks.

Look at the birds

Yesterday I got a Facebook invite from my friend Robyn to join in with the "30 day sketchbook challenge" . The idea is that it takes 30 days to create a new habit. I bought a new sketchbook last week as I have lots of ideas for images in my head that I wanted to get down on paper. I had been putting off starting the new book so this seemed like the perfect platform to make myself go for it.

Our church have just moved out of our building for the next year as we are undergoing a major refurbishment of the building. We are all really excited about new things. I feel like my work is moving towards church banners, in a modern, exciting multi media, stitchy, painty sort of way. I bought my new sketchbook to get some ideas down on paper. The book is A3, which is the size I felt happiest working in when I was an art student. This is new first new A3 book for years and I'm loving it!

I have learnt so many new techniques in Christy Tomlinson's "Three Hearts" workshop and I'm kind of amazed at what I achieved in my book in quite a short space of time. I couldn't have produced this page a month ago.

I started the background with some acrylic paint brayered on.

I put much too much paint on and so I lifted some off with kitchen towel. Look at this fab texture it created...

I had words in my head from Christy and from Donna Downey about adding depth and texture as I put the page together, so I added some white bubble wrap print to the background too. The tree is some corrugated card, painted. The birds are a gel medium image transfer using pictures from an old kids picture book.

I added some white Prima flowers with some paint centres too.