Darcy inspired Coaster

Over on Paper Artsy blog this week it's Darcy's turn to inspire us.  for her first project she made cork coasters.............

I found some nasty solid plastic ones hanging around - as you do!  I gesso'd the underside as the top has a raised lip.  I then used Cheesecake, Guacamole and Pansy fresco finish paint to do the drag with a credit card technique, well this was epic fail number one: the three old loyalty cards I had squirrelled upstairs - vanished! I then found a small keyfob one, well that wasn't big enough and I may have used too much paint so it muddied a bit, ok, a lot! I then decided to speed up the drying by heating it, this gave the beginnings of a crackle finish, so I used a couple of dobs of Cheesecake and Pansy to re introduce those colours.  I then heat dried this layer.

Next followed disasters two and three!!  I used ripe persimmon distress stain through a Crafters workshop stencil, Sam says she has the same luck I do when using stencils and sprtitzers, so I thought this would be a safer option. ~WRONG~ it all went bleurgh.  I wiped it off with a wet baby wipe.  Tried again witht he same colour in distress ink on a sponge.  Looking good, heat dried it, went to go over with with thin layer of zesty zing and it all smudged again.  Washed off with baby wipe .  If you look closely you can still see some ghosting of the stencil but not much.  At this point I gave in and used a couple of Hot Picks for the florals and the grasses.

my entry for Paper Artsy

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Carol Quance inspired hanger (sort of)

This weeks guest designer over on PaperArtsy blog is Carol Quance and she did a hanger, well I don't have any so made my own out of two identical sized pieces of grey board glued together.  I then painted it with Gucamole, fresco finish paint.  I then stamped the longer image on place LPC003 onto some tissue paper in Archival ink - I don't have a huge array of inkpads either.  I then painted on the reverse of the image with Cheesecake, Concrete and bora bora fresco paints.

I added some pumpkin soup to a smooth modelling paste and used this thru the harlequin stencil, and once dried I stuck the image onto the board/hanger with glossy accents.  I then dry brushed the whole thing with Aquamarine Treasure Gold and added my beaded and feathered trim.

this is for PaperArtsy play along


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Canvas - because I could

Here are the pics of my second only ever canvas.

I used a combination of Paperartsy stamps and paints and Darkroom door stamps along with paint and embellishments from stash.  I used Coarse Medium gel through the Harlequin stencil and Maimeri through the  flourish.

I would like to enter this into : Allsorts Challenge - Blue

Crafting Musketeers - Anything Goes

Yumi and Fumi - anything but a card

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Traumatised by a spool, but fixing an oven no problem

For those of you that don't follow me on twitter this title will make no sense, so I'll start with the oven repair job, basically the element blew on it as I was making tea last night, so I had to rush out in the monsoon to get a replacement and with the "assistance" of OH fit it.  Job - including half hour journey each way to shop took about 3 hours.

Now to the trauma, over on PaperArtsy this week the guest designer France Papillon made an altered spool. Not too difficult, you have to be kidding, after almost removing teeth with pliers on jump rings a number of times, and almost killing myself with a poky tool shoving the ribbons through, it was complete.  France said hers took about 45 mins, she used three coats of paint and other tricky things, I shortcutted and use distress ink to age the spool and still took 2 flaming hours.  However, I did get two (yes 2) shrink plastic charms in there tho.  I used paperartsy eclectic 4 and ID09EZ for the images and words.

And before anyone says a thing - Yes!!! I have nets up at my bedroom window.

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Emergency Crafters DT Piece - Weddings and Romance

For this card I started with a simple decoupage design, I mounted this onto a spellbinders matt, Adorning squares I think, I backed an A5 card blank with pearlescent embossed card, and used a Scrapbook sticker for the sentiment.

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#3UP #PATwits and be careful how you use a hashtag!

Those of you who have known me for more than half an hour will know that I like to muck about a bit.  On this occasion mucking about along with a number of other twitter loonies got me, and them, roped into a secret challenge.  The best of it is, none of us knew that the evil Leandra of PaperArtsy fame had an ingenious and cunning plan.

For the few days prior to Ally Pally we were all using #PATwits as a number of the said PA twits were going to tweet up there.  I wasn't because of various reasons, not being sure if I was gonna be in paid employment after the end of March being a big one!

Said tweet up duly took place, and following it another hashtag appeared from nowhere #3UP, none of us knew why, but we played along.  Later that week, those that had used the hashtag were contacted coovertly and offered the chance to participate in a secret challenge.  Crafting's version of mission impossible if you will.  Well obviously, a dare is a dare, so I said yes, as you do.

A few days later a Frame, some Idealogy numbers and 3 butterflies arrived.  This is what they looked like 5 hours later.

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My attempt at doing a Sue Wilson

I have loved watching Sue Wilson do amazing things with Spellbinders and always thought I was too big a numpty to do things like what she does.

Well I decided to bite the bullet and went for it.  I had been sent a set of Borderabilities Bracket Borders 1 to use for DT work for CraftSite who I've been designing for since last summer (youwill find full instructions and materials list on their blog).  I really wanted to do a Sue and the bracket borders were a fab die to try with as they are interchangeable anyway and allow flexibility to start with, so turning them 90 degrees for all four sides couldn't be that hard could it?  Well, as it turned out, just a little tricky lining up the pattern on the ends of the fancy one. To really do it justice you have to over lap the smaller patterned area and this went ok for three corners, it gives a whole new shape, but one corner wasn't quite lined up right, but that left a space for a bow.

I used the KanBan backing card working on the theory that if it worked it would be an ace frame and colour combo for a wedding card, if it didn't work I could gut it and still use the card as a matt later.

I hope you like the finished article as I am very pleased that I managed to do a Sue.  Try it, it does wonders for your confidence, even if it doesn't work, you've had the courage to try, and the worst that can happen is you lose a piece of card.

The Overall Card

Closer on the Matt

The Matt as it turned out works really well

Go on, give it a go, you know you want to.


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