WOYWW #590- The Finished Cards Edition

And another Wednesday rolls round- more like flies round!- so time to link up again over at Julias place, The Stamping Ground, for our weekly desk shennanigans.

Continuing on from last weeks cards, the one thing that I dislike about Distress Oxides, is trying to stamp over the top of them. I think the fresh wet ink must activate something in them, and you get some of the Oxides design showing through. So I decided to do a few more, this time using my trusty Adirondacks. Clear case of full set syndrome here, lol. But I do love them, they apply easily, blend nicely, and so many colours, from palest barely there, to dark shades.

 

These were the half dozen I did with them, I forgot to take a pic till after I'd stamped the first one. My pad by the side with the stencil name & ink colours used can be seen to the right.

The stamped one is a Visible Image stamp, as are three in the next picture. The Buddha stamp is from Inkylicious.

These were some of the Oxides ones, now stamped up, and I'll warn those of a nervous disposition to look away, as the Visible Image word stamp I used on the Indigo Blu motorcycle card wouldn't fit, so I took my scissors to it and separated the three phrases. The words were too close together for masking with tape, so scissors it was.

It was so perfect for the motorcycle card, I had to use it.

Back to a touch of enabling, another new stencil from Sweet Poppy, Abstract Backplate.

On the subject of this new Blogger, I discovered today that if you click on your photo, you get the little squares appear that let you adjust the size of the image by pulling at the sides or corners. I'm probably late to the party, but thought I'd mention it. I've also discovered I can get my pictures where I want them by using the 'indent' icons, so I'm getting happier with the new stuff!

Now, some help from everyone please, for one of my visitors/commenters, Magic Maggie. Maggie doesn't blog, but she visits me, and last week in her comment she asked for recommendations on a reliable white pen. Now, I've tested out the ones I have, and will give my results in a minute. I've tried all sorts of storage- lay flat, point down, I've tried writing on my hand to get them started, and most of the well known brands fail miserably. Maybe if you are using them every day, they're ok, but I always find they fail within a few days if I haven't used them. So here are the ones I have, and how they worked.

 Top of the fail list are the Inkessentials pens- don't ask how many I've bought- they all fail. A Signo white pen, also fail. I have a Pentel Hybrid, which also wouldn't work, and finally my Dylusions White paint pen also is dead.

Now for the goodies. First off- and I wasn't overly surprised, as I've seen lots of good comments about these on the various Lavinia pages on Facebook- is a POSCA Paint Pen. Wrote perfectly straight away. They come in a variety of nib sizes I believe, and the one I have is a fineliner, 0.7mm. This would definitely be my top recommendation. Next, a Sakura Gelly Roll  Med white pen, again, worked straight away no problem. I *think* it says #50 on the barrel- white writing on a clear, white filled tube isn't the best idea, lol. But definitely another I'd recommend. I have a Pilot white pen- the sort with a nib you have to pump first- works fine, but is a bit of a broad line drawn with it. And finally one called Artline Multi pen, probably picked up at a local art shop. Rather like the Pilot pen, works fine, but a bit of a broad line. All of these pens have been unused for the same length of time and all stored the same. 

If anyone has any preferences for white pens, any advice on getting them to work again, or any other helpful advice for Maggie, could you leave it in your comment, where Maggie will be able to find it? Thanks folks.

Which just leaves......And Finally..........

Craft a Scene- A Winters Tag

Well, this is my second post for the DT challenge this month.
 I remembered seeing an interesting piece on Kevins Stampscapes site a while ago, so I went and had another look at it, and I thought it would work well for this challenge.

You can see Kevins original tutorial here, called 'Winter Flurry'.








What Kevin did was to use a piece of pearlescent card as his base card, and streaked on colour using a stylus tool. He used Marvy inks, which I don't have, and I have not really got a good technique yet with the stylus  tool, so I streaked ink direct from my inkpads onto an A5 sheet of pale blue pearlescent card.
    First colour was an Ancient Page inkpad called Flannel- a mid grey colour. I dragged this across the cardstock in a few places, lightly.
 I followed this with Stonewashed & Denim Adirondack ink, and then Weathered Wood Distress ink. You can see that I haven't bothered about completely covering the cardstock, and because its a pale blue, you get a lovely shimmer to the rocks & snow.
Next I watered down a little White Acrylic paint, and used an old toothbrush to flick this across the inked cardstock. 
 I used only one stamp, Pines & Rocks, 195G, which I stamped in Versafine Onyx Black, varying the height of the image, and also using a 'second imprint' sometimes, for depth.
 Once the image was dry, I used a white gel pen to add snow detail to the trees and some of the rocks.
A while ago I made myself a tag template out of acetate, and I used this to select the area of the image I wanted for my tag.
  Once it was cut out, I punched a hole in the top and threaded some fibres through, in colours to blend with the tag. Two silver star brads finished it off. As you can see from the second picture, you could get at least three tags from an A5 sheet- perfect for multiple cards!
 By the way, for my fibres I use fancy knitting wool- you can find balls of this really cheaply, in all sorts of colours and types, and one ball will probably last a lifetime! Great idea is to share with friends- they buy one colour & you buy another, then split them.
  Thanks to everyone who commented on my first piece, I am glad so many of you liked it.
   I hope this one shows that you can get really cool results with the minimum of stamps & ink, and that you can always substitute what you already have for what someone else has used, and still get a good result.
 Quick recap then:
Pale blue pearlescent card (white would work too)
Mid grey dye ink
 3 shades of blue ink.
Black Versafine, Memento or Archival ink.
White acrylic paint.
Cheap toothbrush.
Stamp (195G Rocks & Pines)
Fibres & Brads.

Craft A Scene- A Winters Scene

Hi folks, this is my first post for the Craft A Scene  DT, and the brief was to create two pieces with a winters scene. The second one comes along on the 19th Feb.

       After a few flicks through my Stampscapes stamps, I picked out the ones I wanted to use, then had a long think about how to create a wintry look, without just adding a load of snow. ( Which just so happens to be falling outside right now!).
 I was still struggling with how to look wintry, but decided to get started on the stamping, and hope for inspiration. This image very, very almost went into the bin- I had a complete disaster part way through- and the funny thing is, it was in the rescuing that I got my winter look.
I have quite a stack of brayered backgrounds, from when I was practising to get the hang of it, so I selected one that I thought could end up with the right look. It is a piece of Matt card, from Lavinia Stamps, brayered from the bottom with Stonewashed, Sailboat Blue & Denim Adirondack dye inks, and from the top down with Cool Peri, Purple Twilight, and a little Eggplant right at the top. Before brayering I added a circle punched from a post-it note to the upper half of the cardstock.
I used Versafine Onyx Black to stamp the images. Most of the elements of this picture come from Nature Sheet #6. I started with the Lakeside Cabin (147F) on the right, then stamped Lakeside Island (from Nature Sheet #4, The Lost Scapes) next to it, using a Stamp Positioner to marry them up. I placed them about 2/3 of the way down the card,just where the blue started to fade out. In the foreground I stamped Ledge (054F) twice, varying the angle slightly, then added Reeds Lge (068D) randomly. I used Water Pattern sm (231C) in the water area.  Final stamp was  Spooky Branch (273G) stamped reaching in to the picture on the left and upright on the right. You can see on the design sheet that the Ledge stamp is much larger than in my scene- I just used a small portion of it to give me a river/ lake bank. Equally, you can layer & stack it to give you a larger rocky area.

            Having taken the design sheet out of my folder to scan & show you, I could see similarities in my scene to the image on the sheet.

   So all was well up till now,  when I decided I ought to have a reflected moon in the water. Considered a few options, and decided to try 'stamping' a moon shape in Brilliance Moonlight White, using a round foam brush. My instant reaction was that it looked awful- it didn't work at all. And that I had ruined what was a promising picture to boot.I tried wiping the white ink off- that smudged and looked even worse. Next I tried cleaning that area with a baby wipe- now I had a patch with a different colour ink to the rest of the image. So, as a last resort, and as I had given up any hope of this image being usable anymore, I wiped over the whole image with the baby wipe- I had black ink coming off the image, as well as the white! Panic!!!! So now, completely stressed by everything going wrong, I folded a piece of plain white copy paper in half, put the image between the two layers, put a book on top of it (oh yes, it was curling up too!), put it to one side and went to cook tea.
 When I went back to it the following evening, I had no expectations of it being any use, and fully expected to be throwing it away. However, as you can see, what the baby wipe did was take enough ink away to give me a misty, ghostly look- perfect for mist/fog falling over a lake in winter. Trust me folks, nobody was more surprised at this than me. I had gone from scrap to perfect by sheer fluke.

The Lost Scapes #4

 Which does go to show that you should never consider anything past retrieving- no matter how bad things seem! I must be mad, but I decided to push my luck a little further- I have never used a white gel pen on images like this before, but I have loved the effect when others have done it. I found out my White Gelly Roll pen, only to discover it had dried up from lack of use! I have since managed to get it working by dunking it it warm water, but I purchased a new one from Joanna Sheen- which only took a couple of days to arrive, and sat down to work. As you can see I outlined the edges of the islands and added some white to the fir trees. I did the same with the Spooky branches, Reeds and the Rocky Ledge.  I used an Orange & Yellow gel pen to add a little light to the cabin windows. Finally I added a few squiggly white lines to simulate the moon in the water- very nervously, I might add- then trimmed the image down and matted it onto black, then onto dark purple cardstock.
 For the base card, I folded an  A4 piece of Gold card in half. The embossed background was made with a Cuttlebug folder, Snowflake.  I cut two strips of white card the width of the folder, and almost twice as long, embossed the image once, then turned the white card around and embossed the other end. The two lengths were then joined together with sellotape on the back, and cut down to fit the front of the card. A strip of pale blue ribbon covers the join. Mounted the image to the front, and breathed a sigh of relief, lol.
              I suppose this could be a Christmas card, which means I have actually managed to start them in January- so I only broke my New Years Resolution by a half (I wanted to do two Christmas cards a month).

  I hope you will join us over at Craft a Scene, I am looking forward to seeing the other DT's take on the brief, and what you all come up with.