Saturday 27 February 2010

journal cover and cute

Seeing journals on blogs reminded me that I had bought at least one sketchbook with good intentions last year............feeling guilty I rooted around and found one, still pristine and totally untouched. I felt that at least I ought to do something about the nice white cover, even if it never got any further - I felt that the colour scheme for PlayDate Cafe 18 was quite appropriate for something that would be quite likely to gather dust for some time before being touched again! I applied large quantities of black soot distress ink, then stamped the bird's tails around the edges - then attacked it with baby wipes to lighten everything up. The text from Tim Holtz was stamped with versafine onto white card, torn out and rubbed with more black soot DI - I went over two words with white gel pen, then added clear gloss to some of the words. The bird cage is from Elusive Images, as are the birds themselves. I had intended to use birds stamped on blue tissue paper, then stupidly stuck them down with the wrong glue - white glue shows through tissue paper! I hurriedly ripped them off, substituting birds on blue card - to hide some glue I couldn't get off, the larger bird had to go on a tag - black soot again, with another image from Elusive Images stamped in white stazon and then coloured with a promarker.

I don't normally do cute, but fell in love with some Whiff of Joy stamps at the Sincerely Yours Thetford show recently - felt that Iought not to buy them, having spent a small fortune on promarkers, but decided that if they were still on the stand after lunch, then they were mine! Needless to say, there they were .................I bought 2 of the city girls, and a sweet mother and baby. They were both stamped with versafine, coloured with my new promarkers - backing papers from Artylicious and flowers from rarely used stash. I went over the dress of the dancer with a clear sakura pen to give it a bit of glitter. The punched strip uses a Fiskars punch - saw a lady demoing MS punches at the show, and was very impressed with the results she got punching both sides of a strip- she was using a half-flower punch, and ended up with a strip of whole flowers, which looked great - the punches had sold out, so resorted to trying something similar with my one and only border punch - can't think why it never occurred to me to try this before! - result nothing like with the MS punches, so they are now on the wish list, although behind the new Elusive Images stamp plates of eastern grasses and keys...............