WOYWW #538- The Bit of Enabling Edition

Indeed, as all has been quiet on the enabling front lately, and I have a reputation to uphold, there have been a few purchases this week. First off, an 8"x8" Tim Holtz pad, called 'Abandoned'. Loving the colours in this one.
 Next we went to Webbs garden centre on Saturday, and they have a Hobbycrafts on site. Not a huge fan of them, to be honest, but occasionally they have some bargains.

Like these packs of Glitter cardstock, 20 A5 sheets, half price at £2 each. So, two shades of gold, a silver & a white. They have lots of colours besides these too.








   While we're on the subject of glitter, I came across some Glitter Fun Foam, and I'm thinking these will be great for a number of things- sentiments, for one, and die cut shapes for Christmas cards for another. I think they were 90p each.

Julias revenge, lol. The enabler was enabled. You may recall Julia was using moulds & air drying clay last week, which reminded me I have a tub full of unused moulds.
 Spotted these in there, the one at the bottom says Superlight, and it really is. Feels like a packet of air! ( Mind you, I haven't opened it yet, they might BE bags of air, lol).They were a pound a pack.
 The one above is heavier.

Got distracted from the Christmas cards to join in a swap in a FB group for Samhain/Halloween. Samhain being the old Celtic name for All Hallows Eve, and the Celtic New Year.
Made another set before this, but got carried away with the stamping, and decided they were far to crowded with images, so they went in the bin. There's only so much you can rescue! Linking as always on Wednesday over at Julias place, The Stamping Ground, where she will attempt to keep order.

 On the Chemo front, this time round has been much better, and having seen the Oncologist on Monday, they'll continue at the 80%, as I seem to have tolerated that much better. Good news is, it's clearly working, as the blood test I had two weeks ago- before the treatment and after the 6 week break- showed my cancer markers have dropped from 235 to 175, so it's looking good.

Saw Annies mention last week of the 2020 Crop, it's in the diary! Looks like June will be a busy month, as the following weekend will be Download, and having seen the Headliners announced on Monday- Kiss, Iron Maiden and System of a Down, plus so far, 10 other bands we always go to see on tours - we are most definitely booking.



 Which brings us round to.....And Finally......

 Love this Terry Pratchett quote from one of the Discworld books.

WOYWW #537- The Still Sparkly Edition!

Mainly because, despite the whole house being vacuumed, I seem to have shed a light coating of glitter- or Fairy Dust as I'm now referring to it-everywhere.
This is the result so far though- a whole stack of glittered images. I'll show you some in close up in a bit. They're now all dry, and trimmed down. In most cases, what I'll be doing is stamping the image again onto cardstock, and heat embossing in Gold or Silver, before adding the glittered piece with silicone glue.

Some images, like this assortment of Poinsettias,Christmas Roses, Holly & Mistletoe, have a script background to them, which has been cut away. All these stamps are from Chocolate Baroque, and are quite a few years old now, but are still available.







You can buy them singly, or as a set of four. The sets are DL size.

These are some other really old stamps, I bought them dunno how many years ago now, from The Stamp Man, they were part of their own range, Aspects of Design, and were discontinued after one Christmas. I think one size of this is available as a Woodware Clear stamp, from back last year.

I trimmed away the words from the glittered ones, and again I'll stamp & heat emboss.

This 3 Wise men stamp is another oldie, so old it's discontinued. It was from Elusive Images, which eventually became Chocolate Baroque.


The one thing I may do is stamp some more snowmen, I only have a few, and they are so sweet.

And that brings this weeks desk to a close, except for linking up at Julias place, The Stamping Ground, and popping round to visit everyone.
 So far, so good on the chemo. Definitely more tired, but not breathless like before, so it's looking like this might be ok.
 Which just brings us round to .........And Finally........
This really made me laugh when someone posted it to FB yesterday!

WOYWW #536- The Sparkly Edition

 Yep, sparkly because there has been glitter involved this week, quite by accident, although normally glitter and accident are not words you want to see in the same sentence😱. It all came about when I was putting the felt away till I'm ready to use it, and found a plastic wallet in the box full of complete or half complete glittered images.

 I also found a bunch of stamped images I hadn't started yet, so as I'm way behind with my Christmas cards, these are going to be really useful.








 Glasses, more stamped images and an assortment of glue bottles.

 
Glitter in all sorts of colours, mostly bought cheaply either from E-Bay, or loose at Hobbycrafts shows.





 Speaking of which, although it's not called Hobbycrafts any longer, its called The Creative Craft Show, we've booked tickets for that on 2nd November at the NEC. I'm not booking for Happy Stampers this year, as that's 5th October, and as I'll still be having chemo then, I'm avoiding crowded places, in the hopes of not picking up any infections! As long as there's no further breaks, I'll be finished before November. So it'll be interesting to see what this show is like, and if the Exhibitor numbers are improving.





 Finally finished off the house cards!
And so, time once again for leaving our link at Julias place, The Stamping Ground, and visiting desks of all sizes, shapes and state of chaos.


  So tomorrow is the restart of Chemo, and I think I forgot to say last week it will be at 80% of the original dosage, in the hopes that it's more acceptable to my immune system and body in general.





Which just leaves us with.....And Finally.........

Never a truer word spoken!

New Home cards with Chocolate Baroque stamps

Been a while since I did a blog post with makes, and these have finally been finished. I picked cardstock to matt them with that matched the colours used in the houses.It's from a Papermania cardstock pack called Assorted Colossal Colours, Textured Cardstock, comes in A5, A4 and 12x12" packs.
 
All the colour to the houses was done with the pencil set I bought recently from Amazon,  a set by Zenacolor, 160 pencils for £27.97. I found they blended fine, and produced good colour.
 






 The stamps I used are from two different Chocolate Baroque sets, Townhouses, and  English Cottages.


  I used some masking to allow me to stamp trees and bushes, either behind or in front of the houses.













For this I used Eclipse masking paper roll, again from Amazon. It's a great product, the whole of the sheet has a tacky glue like Post its on the back, and you can reuse each mask many times. It.s also 10 metres long, so will last for ages. I've stuck the masks onto some plastic from packaging, and dropped that into a page protector and stored with the stamps.

Once I'd finished colouring the houses, I wanted to just lightly add some grass & sky to them.

  For this I used two shades of green and blue Distress ink, and the Professional Make Up brushes. They are great for a very light application of colour, although you can easily deepen it by adding more ink if that's the look you want.

Again, I replaced the masks so I kept the colour around the images. I also added some paths to the door on some them, one or two with a Cobblestone path by Lavinia stamps, others just with a black fineliner. The Lavinia stamp is available in two sizes, large & small,I have the large, but I think the small would work better for this.

The sentiment was also cut from a shade of the matting layer.
 The right hand sentiment was bought from The Range,in  their £1 boxes, and the one on the left comes from a Phill Martin set of dies, called Scribbled Collection, that includes this one, plus the words Job,Baby Boy & Baby Girl.

 A really useful die set, the 'A New' part is a separate die, so can be combined with any of the other words. I particularly liked the inclusion of Job, as it's rare to see a die with that.

WOYWW #535- The Got Distracted Edition.

I did, I was tidying the desk behind the desk, putting stuff away, and came across a folder with Embossing Folder samples in it. I recall now I thought if I could flick through samples, I'd make more use of them. Shows how well it worked, not only have I failed to keep it up to date, I actually forgot it was even there.
 So, I'd cleared away one mess to give me room to make another. As you do. That's actually a tidy version of the mess.





So I used a couple of sizes of tag die to cut from the samples I already had, then die cut some blanks and embossed them with the ones I hadn't added. Divided up into rings roughly equating with the section they're stored under in the box, and now they'll go hang up next to my stencils.

The box is tidy, and almost full, so I need to avoid embossing folders, lol.

 So this is the desk behind the desk, finally cleared and cleaned.

Crop Bear looks like he's chilling out, sat on the storage tins.

I did eventually get round to adding some colour to the houses, just need a few tweaks, as I added paths to some, and one now has an extra tree- bottom right- as I forgot what I was doing, and added an inky brush straight to the middle of the pic!

I just used two shades of blue & green DI, and those 'professional make up brushes'. They work great, especially if you only want a light patch of colour, although you can deepen it by adding more layers, and darker colours.

 A feeble attempt at enabling this week I'm afraid. I got a £5 birthday voucher code from Hobbycrafts, and as I didn't want to get Doug to take us over there, I used it online. I wanted some fancy felt- I have an idea for some Christmas cards- so got the three you can see with the snowflakes on, a while glittery one and a couple of sheets of plain white. All A4 size. What annoyed me when they arrived- they were folded in half, and the bundle, a total of 6 sheets could have fit into an A4 envelope, easily. But no, it comes in a box around 12" long,6" deep and
  wide! As I say, they were folded in half,and the rest of the box full of those blasted plastic air filled pillows. An e-mail was sent, lol. Not that I expect any notice to be taken.
 In other news, saw my Oncologist on Monday, and we'll be restarting the chemo next Thursday (12th), he did say Friday, but I got a call saying they had a free space on Thursday, if I wanted it. I wonder if they have a problem with superstitious people?
OK, I'm all done,leave your link at Julias place, The Stamping Ground, and I'll be round to visit later.
Which just leaves.....And Finally.......