Craft A Scene, Spring Flowers Tags

I think this has been the hardest of the briefs for me- not really a flowery person, at least not in stamping! I love my garden, and having flowers in the house, just didn’t find it easy to create scenes with them. I think its hard to get the scale & perspective to look right-anyway, here’s my final effort.

   I ended up with a pair of tags from my original scene- the  second isn’t really a scenic image, it was actually what was left   over after I cut out the first tag, but I thought it was too pretty to discard. 
The grasses, Black Cat and birds are all from Inkylicious. The Hedgerows are by Hobby Art, a set called ‘In The Country’.







It has hedgerows, fences, a bridge, couple of buildings etc.







The tall red flower on the second tag is from set by Chocolate Baroque,( formerly Graphicus/Elusive Images).The DL sized sheet is called ‘Autumn Hedgerow’, and has both outline & silhouette versions of the stamps.


I brayered a piece of card with a variety of blue & green Adirondack inks, and stamped the grasses along the bottom in Adirondack Meadow. The taller flowers and grasses were stamped as a second impression, just to make them a little lighter. I added colour to them with Tims new Distress markers. I also stamped a little flowers stamp, from Lavinia Stamps, in Fired Brick & Festive Berries Distress Inks,randomly in the grass.
The cat was stamped in Black Archival ink, and then I cut out the tag shape. I think he looks as though he is watching something crawling on or in the grass! The Hobby Art set is a clear polymer stamp, so I could bend the hedgerow stamp on my block to get a more natural shape, and I stamped it twice, to edge the field, then added a third one coming off that to create a second field. Looking at it, as the hedgerow is just lines & squiggles, you could adapt that by colouring in browns/greys and turn it into drystone walls, I think. Final touch was a couple of bird flock stamps from an Inkylicious birds set, called Take Flight. I punched a hole in the tag and added some green fibres, and used blue & red fibres in the second one.

Teenagers Birthday Card

    Not the easiest people to make Birthday cards for, male Teens!  This card was made for a friend at work who ordered it for his son, and I sort of know the lad, so had an idea of what would appeal.
I stuck to a simple but ‘full of impact’ black and white. Black base card, and the images are all stamped on white pearl card. The Guitar is from a set by Inkadinkado, 98693, Rock Star clear stamp set. This doesn't appear to be available over here anymore, but I found it on Amazon .com, and a lot of US places have it and will ship over here.

The Skull & Crossbones border, Winged Skull motif and ‘Rock Star’ phrase are also from the same set. The Winged Guitarist came with a free set of stamps with  Creative Stamping this month. I don’t often buy mags with free stamp sheets, as usually they are not my sort of style, but as you can see this one does have some really useful male images.


First off I stamped the Guitar image in Archival black, and heat embossed it with clear detail powder. Whilst it was still hot, I added more powder to the main body of the guitar, heat set again, and repeated this a couple more times to give a raised image.  I treated the Winged Skull motif exactly the same way. When both were cold, I cut out around the Winged Skull image, and trimmed the Guitar to an oblong, and although you can’t tell from the picture, I matted it onto black glitter paper before positioning it onto the card front. To matt onto the glitter paper, I used dabs of silicone glue- it will stick to the glittery surface, when DST wont.
I used a stamp positioner to stamp the skull & crossbones border twice, and again heat embossed with clear powder. I trimmed this down and also matted onto black glitter paper, then added to the bottom of the card.
Next up I randomly stamped the Winged Guitarist,( from the free set), Rockstar phrase and the word ‘Rock’(from the Rockstar set) in black onto white pearl card and heat embossed the images with clear detail powder. To get the single word ‘Rock’ from the ‘You Rock’ phrase, I just put a bit of low tack tape over the word ‘You’, inked up the stamp and peeled off the tape before stamping. I used some number templates I have to draw the numbers on the back of the card- remember to flip the numbers if you do this so they come out the right way round-then cut them out with a scalpel.I edged them with a black Promarker, and mounted the ‘6’ with a single layer of foam pads, and the ‘1’ at an angle with a double layer to give it some depth. Finally I added the Winged Skull with a couple of dabs of silicone glue.

Spring Flowers - Craft A Scene for May

Mays challenge is Spring Flowers, not something I have an abundance of, I must be honest, so this is my take on the theme for my first project.
When building a scene, I like to lay out my scene first, using images I have stamped onto transparency film with Staz-on.

I bought my pack of film from Staples, as you can see, they also do one for inkjet printers, which is slightly ribbed on one side to hold the ink. Either works fine for this, and you can use it for so many other things too- making stencils & masks with die cuts for instance.
So to begin, I punched out the windows in a piece of white card(4 1/4x5 3/4”) using a 1 3/8 punch. I only cut the top two, and the right hand two, stamped my Bluebell image( Chocolate Baroque) in Black Versafine, then heat embossed with clear detail powder.  I used one of the punched out squares to draw around for the final two windows, and cut out around the bluebell with a scalpel.The image was coloured with Promarkers .
Next I started playing with a choice of images:



You can see how it gives you the opportunity to move things around, and I could also place my Window on top, and see what the finished picture would look like. I chose to go with the last image, with the Oak Branch, and no mountains.
Now I get all my stuff together:

Stamp Positioner……………. Stampscapes Stamps and ………Espresso inkpad, Pine Needles Distress inkpads & pen.
I didn’t want to use the Black inkpad in the end, and decided I would colour directly onto the stamps as much as possible, and add some more colour at the end.
I used the Espresso inkpad for the church, then used Pine Needles Distress pad for the trees. I went in with the pen to get the trees coloured right up to the chapel,and as you can see from the image above, I tried a few inkpad combos first. This was stamped in the middle of a piece of white card.

I used the stamp positioner to place the winding path, Oak Branch and Two trees images after, following my layout.
 
This is the finished picture cut down to size. I sponged in Green Adirondack inks to the grass,and  a mix of Cloudy Blue & Sailboat blue for the sky.I added a sprinkling of wild flowers to the grass, using a couple of stamps that come on  U/M Nature Sheet #4. They are the two little stamps you can see at the top of the Stamps picture.  For this I used Sunshine Yellow, Sunset Orange and Red Pepper. I used the same two stamps to add the pink blossom to the Oak Branch, but this time I used Pink Sugar Distress pad, then went in again with Worn Lipstick. I added a little Espresso to the Church with a waterbrush.
By stamping the Oak Branch at the top, it helps to create a feeling of perspective in the scene, and I matted the image behind the window using a double layer of foam pads, to add to the depth.
On my Stampscapes page I go into this method in a bit more depth, and show how to make scenes that look very different from each other, even using the same stamps.

WOYWW #152- Shapeabilities Spiral Blossoms

  This is whats on my desk today- actually for the last few days as I have tried to get to grips with the blasted things,lol. For the life of me I could not figure out HOW I was going to get something that looked like a flower out of this:

After much trial and error, mainly error, I might add, someone pointed me to a You Tube vid,which gave me the answer. I had already tried there, but didn’t get a lot from what I could find. I am really surprised that there is nothing on the Spellbinders site as to exactly how you do these. Maybe its just me being dumb? I could find plenty on the usual Die-cut flowers, but not these Spiral ones. Anyway, I found one showing these dies, and discovered that A) you start rolling from the thinnest end( I had tried both), and B) it won’t look anything like a flower till its completely finished!
The dies, by the way, are Spiral Blossom 1 on the right, and Spiral Blossom 3 on the left.


                                                                    So you start rolling them really tightly….   keep rolling….
                     I’m not left handed, by the way, I had the camera in my right hand     ……. 
keeping it tightly rolled till you get to the end…











Now you let the flower go…… and it unfolds a little….Add some glue( I used a hot glue gun) to the large end piece, which is actually the base the flower sits on……..and hold it together for a few seconds.

Your flowers can be adjusted for how tight they are before you press it into the glue.








This is Spiral Blossom 1,( on the left) which is quite Rose-like.I think  Number 3 (the black one) looks more like a Water lily.
You can ink the edges of the petals first, and fold them a little for a pretty effect.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I will say these are VERY dimensional,( about 1”, or 2.5cm high) so you would need to make a presentation box for a card. 
So thats it for me. Pop over to the Amazing Julia Dunnits, at The Stamping Ground, for this weeks Worldwide Workdesk Wander- let us all come see what you’ve been up to.
I don’t know how this post is going to look to everyone, so if its not appearing very well, please let me know in your comments. I’ve been having loads of trouble with Blogger- it just won’t let me add any images to my posts. I’m pretty sure its a Firefox update thats caused it, but for now I am trying Livewriter, from Microsofts Essentials, so it will be interesting to see if this works. I can post in Internet Explorer, but I don’t like having to use that!