Black doesn't have to be boring

It was my Mum's birthday at the weekend and I always try and make her a special card using new techniques. The card this year was made trying out a new technique for the first time and luckily it went alright.

I purchased some angelina fibres, also known as fusible fibres, several months ago as part of the Clarity Stamping in the Classroom with Barbara Grey workshop. I made along with the project that she demonstrated but I never tried anything else after that.

One of the techniques that you can do with angelina fibres is the one I've used in the butterfly on the left hand side.

They work with heat and fuse together when heat is applied - normally by using an iron.

For the butterfly, I cut six pieces of the film and stamped the butterfly onto 3 of them using stayzon ink. I then sandwiched the fibres in between the two pieces of film - one stamped and one plain piece, covered it with baking parchment and ironed over the top using the coldest setting.

Once ironed, the harden as well and I cut out the whole butterfly from one piece, the top part of the butterfly (including the body) from another piece and from the last piece I cut the bottom part of the butterfly (including the body). I then stuck the two halves onto the main butterfly using double sided tape on the body only. This gives the butterfly the 3D look.

For the background, I again used the angelina fibres but without sandwiching them. I took a variety of colours and laid them over a sheet of baking paper. I muddled them up a bit so they were quite random and then laid another sheet of baking paper over the top and ironed. They fused together creating a sheet which I stuck to a black piece of card using pritt stick as the background to the card.

The third part of the pack that I bought were some different petal stamps. There are many different designs in the pack but I chose one which had an intricate flower design within the petal:

I used 2 different coloured heat embossing powders on black card to create the flower. I stuck them round in a flower shape and then stuck a piece of card candy as the centre of the flower.

For the sentiment I again used black card, cut out using a spellbinders die, but covered it with perfect pearls as I have tried before when I was experimenting with inchies. Find out how I created this by clicking here.

The card was finished with some pink gems and a peel off butterfly stuck to acetate and the wings bent up to give it dimension.

Although the majority of the card used black card, with the techniques outlines above, black certainly doesn't need to be boring and can be made to sparkle as well as white card. Don't dismiss using black card next time you go to make a card!

Experimenting with Inchies

Back in July I bought some of the Darkroom Door Garden Inchie stamps and up until last weekend I had only made bookmarks with them.

Inchies are exactly what they say they are - stamps which measure 1 inch square and can have any design in them. This particular set has 24 different stamps which feature butterflies, birds, plants and flowers.

The bookmarks I made are below and are really simple to make:

I took a piece of white card and a craft brush (an old fashioned shaving brush can be used for this as well). I took some co-ordinating distress inks and using the brush, swiped the colour over the card, starting with the lightest colour first.

Then I took the stamp I wanted and inked it up well with a black memento ink pad, making sure the stamp is well covered with the ink. Then stamp onto the coloured card and cut out the image. They were then mounted onto coloured, then black, then coloured card, with a piece of ribbon added under the black card.

There are so many co-ordinating designs in this set that the combinations are endless.

Then, last weekend I realised I hadn't done much with these stamps so had some inspiration to make some cards with them. The first one I made is below, which builds on the bookmark idea:

First of all, I took a piece of white card and swiped over pine needles, broken china and dusty concord distress stains, starting with the broken china as the base. I then spritzed the card with water and dried it. Then, on one half of the card I swiped over picket fence distress stain to lighten the colour. Then I spritzed with water again and dried it with the heat tool.

I chose 9 stamps that went well together and stamped them as above with the memento ink onto the side that hadn't been lightened. I then cut them out and arranged them onto a piece of purple card. I then mounted this onto a piece of black card.

Before sticking to the coloured card I used gold perfect pearls and painted a thin border round the edge of the card. This could also be done with a gold gel pen, but I didn't have one so used the next best thing!

I cut a piece of black card to cover a 6x6 card blank and stuck the whole piece onto it. I stamped the sentiment onto some spare coloured card and mounted it onto black and again edged it with the gold.

Perfect pearls are one of my favourite mediums to use in crafting but I normally use them wet as a paint, so I thought I would experiment with using them dry on the next card:

Again, I cut a piece of black card to fit a 6x6 card blank. I took some bubble wrap, cut it to size and stuck it onto an acrylic block with pritt stick. I then covered the bubble wrap with versamark embossing ink and stamped it onto the black card.

I then brushed over the perfect pearl powder so it stuck to the ink. I did this randomly to create the rainbow effect. I removed any excess powder by rubbing the image with a tissue and sprayed it with hairspray.

Yes you heard right - hairspray acts as a very thin glue covering which stops the powder being rubbed off. Just spray it lightly over the image and leave to dry.

I then took this one step further and swiped the versamark to cover a piece of black card. I then brushed the pearl powder over the stamped area. I did this diagonally, again to create a rainbow.

Using Stayzon ink this time, I stamped 3 of the inchie images over the dusted card. Before cutting out, I sprayed with the hairspray again. This technique is quiet effective because the pearl sheen of the powders shows through the black ink so the whole image shines.

I painted round the edge of the images with the gold perfect pearls, mounted them onto a black card strip and painted round this as well.

For the sentiment, I stamped it onto the brushed card and die cut the shape round it and painted the edge again. This card took a bit longer to make as it was more fiddly but it is worth the extra effort because the effect looks brilliant after it's finished.

I decided I was a bit bored of black by now so the next card is much more colourful and again, fairly simple to make:

I chose 4 co-ordinating distress inks: broken china, tattered rose, victorian velvet and milled lavender. I then chose 8 different inchie stamps and stamped them round in a pattern on a white piece of card, varying the colours. I then cut them out and arranged them round a 6x6 card blank. I made sure that no same design or colour was next to each other.

The butterfly and the sentiment in the middle were stamped using blue pearlescent ink.

I am quite pleased with the three cards and now plan to use the inchie stamps to create some co-ordinating notebooks. The stamps are very versatile and can be used for a large variety of crafting projects.

Handmade Calendars

After making the calendar from my Mum I realised that I had at least 8 calendar tabs left that would shortly be redundant after today so I thought I would make my friends and family calendars as well. These came mainly in one design with several different variations and were inspired by a new technique I picked up.

This was colouring in on black card with Ranger's Perfect Pearls powder. I'd had these jars of powder for a few months and found that they were quite hard to see on white and it hadn't crossed my mind to try them on black - so I did and I loved the result.

Here is the calendar I made. The stamp was bought from Hobby Arts and it has been heat embossed in white onto the black to give a good solid outline. I then coloured it in with the paints. The design of the butterfly allows it to be coloured differently every time as different patterns can be picked out from it.


Once finished, I cut a piece of mount board and painted it with pearl effect acrylic paint. Two holes were punched at the top and neatened off with eyelets and ribbon threaded through and tied. The calendar tab was mounted onto black card and stuck onto the mount board.

The feedback was that everybody loved them!

There was just one problem - I didn't think my brother would appreciated one of these calendars so I had to think of something else for him. He is very into his music, especially guitars, so I found a cross stitch pattern online and stitched the guitar:

The same approach to making the calendar was used -  this time I painted the mount board in a metallic bronze which looked amazing. He loved the calendar too so great gift ideas all round this year.

Personalised Calendar 2012

I decided this year that I would make my Mum a calendar that features pictures of me and my brother and sister from when we were younger.

I started making the calendar in August and had it finished just in time for Christmas. I thought I would share with you some of my favourite pages. The picture above is from the front page and has an embossed flourish across the middle of the page, with embossed chipboard letters and some adhesive card numbers.

I tried to theme each page to the month as much as I could. Here is the January page with a lovely snowy picture from when we were young. I took some chipboard letters and glittered them by covering them with glue and sprinkling loose glitter over them. It kind of worked - some of the glitter fell off, but I am pleased with the result as it looks good on the January page.

My next favourite is the June page. Again, I glittered the chipboard letters with sea green glitter. To make the blue background, I brayered a royal blue ink, which gave it the watery look. The waves were cut out of some backing paper I had and the calendar tab was mounted onto a piece of blue core'dinations card with a light blue inside.

I love the picture on this one - my brother looks so excited for his first day at school. I used core'dinations card again for the background, in colours that were our school uniform - purple and green. I found some stickers with a school theme which I added which finish the page off perfectly.

And the December page which had to have a Christmas theme. The picture is of my Grandma's Christmas tree and I used a festive themed backing paper with some baubles. The bauble on the left was embossed with silver powder onto vellum and coloured on the back. The bauble on the right was embossed onto black card with white powder and painted with perfect pearls. The greeting in the middle was embossed with green glitter embossing powder.