CCC Week 19...

 

Here we are at week 19 of the Compendium Challenge, this
week's technique is called Extreme Masking, get all the
details over at Studio L3.

This was a good week as I had no issues, no mistakes to cover
up, no starting again from scratch, yay! I even went with
colours that I do not usually use, I am more a blue and
green person, but I love how this all turned out in the end.

I used a little Wild Honey, Barn Door and Rusty Hinge for
the distress inks.

The mask is an old one of Heidi Swapp's and the added
butterfly is one from Jenni Bowlin. Most of the stamps
are from Tim Holtz, I have no idea where I got the little
saying from that I used at the top, just found it floating
around in my drawer of small acrylic stamps.

I need to get more storage for my cling mount and acrylic
stamps, but some of them like the one above are really
small so they ended up in a small drawer. What does
everyone else do with their smaller stamps that don't

really belong to any set, just odds and ends?

A couple more pages...

Well I seemed to have had a bit of inspiration for my
Sketchbook Project theme last week so thought I would
share a couple of pages. This page above I tried doing
lettering with some brush pens and coloured the
background with Prismacolor Pencils. I love the vision
stamp that I found in one of the dollar bins at Michaels
and have been waiting to find a page that I could use it on.

With this page I just got an idea and tried to find something
that would work for it. I remembered that I had bought some
paper that was kind of high tech looking and managed to find it.
The bottom half is the paper and then I used a really cute
deco tape and did some stamping at the top. 

I seemed to be on a roll for a while with ideas for my pages
but now I feel a little stuck again. I know that I am going to
incorporate a clock of some kind on each spread but now I
need to come up with some new inspiration, I am still open to suggestions...

CCC Week 18...

Well we are officially halfway through the Compendium of
Curiosities challenge. If you have just found my blog and
do not know what I am talking about please go to visit
Linda and you can see what it is all about and hopefully
can join in the fun.

Now I am sure some of you are looking at my entry for this
week and saying "that doesn't look right", I can assure you
I followed the steps on page 37 exactly. I tried it first with
white but my stamp (and I really wanted to use this stamp),
just did not show up and I ended up rubbing away the top
layer of the card stock!
So I started again and used black instead, still followed all
the steps but it does not have the exact same effect as it
would have with white. Sometimes you just get an idea of
the things you want to use and you have to make it work.
The stamps are all by Unity Stamp Co. and the little piece of
map in the corner is the fabulous new deco tape that I found
at Etsy. These tapes are becoming my new addiction, I have
quite a few now and I am trying to use them whenever I can
because they are just so cool :) 

I was trying to find a deco tape that was of the London
Underground and found the Manhattan subway instead, so if
there is anyone out there that has seen a London
Underground tape please let me know. I would love to
have one, in case you don't know England is my home country.

CCC Week 17...

Here is my entry for week 17 of the challenge, for all the
details please go and visit the lovely Linda.

I almost did not do this week's challenge as I have been away
with my family to "The Happiest Place on Earth" and just got
home last night. Also I never seem to do well with charms
and thought maybe I would just wait for the new challenge
on Monday.

In the end I decided that I have kept up so far so really
should do it. I won't go into all the details but had a few
errors along the way and spent most of my time trying
to fix them. I even decided to start from scratch but had
an issue with not lining up the paper on my die correctly
so it did not cut out the whole note card, aarghh!
This was when I decided I had to fix the mess I had
made on the first one, so this is it!
Now I am looking forward to seeing the next challenge on Monday.

The Sketchbook Project...

A    A couple of months ago I found out about The Sketchbook
      Project, the idea really intrigued me but I wasn't really sure
      about it - I am not a sketcher and I can only draw lines and
th   they aren't usually straight! Anyway on my All Things Tim
Y    Yahoo group a couple of people were talking about it and
I     I got caught up in the excitement of it all so I went ahead
      and signed up.
I     I was so excited to do it and be part of a project like this but
o    once I received my sketchbook it was a different story. I felt
p    panic! a total brain freeze on how I was going to illustrate
m   my theme. Anyway after asking around for help, and some
p    people did help me, I just decided the best thing to do was
st   start it and see what direction it took me in. Above is the first
2    2 page spread in the book, although I did it after the pages
b    below.

The 2 page spread above is actually the first set of pages I did,
they were really a learning experience. The pages of the
sketchbook are incredibly thin, I had to glue the pages
together in sets of 2 to make them a little more substantial.
Although it wasn't enough for the use of Adirondack Color
wash spray which I used on the clock page. It wrinkled and
buckled so now I know to not use anything like that, it was
only a very light spray but the paper is just too thin for it.

In case you haven't realised the theme of my sketchbook is

"In 5 minutes..", it really had me puzzled as to how to tackle
it and even now I am not all that sure what I will do next.
I am still open to suggestions.....

CCC Week 16...

  

Over at Studio L3 this week we are up to Week 16 of the
Compendium of Curiosities challenge. This week's technique
is a lot of fun as it really seems to come out different than
planned. I used the Distress Ink colours of Crushed Olive,
Chipped Sapphire and Brushed Corduroy for my background.

I also got to use the new Rosette die, which if you haven't
tried it yet, is just so much fun to do. I used a Wendy Vecchi
stamp for the middle of the rosette, just love that eye!
I added a strip of some really cool clear deco tape and
stamped some random circles, attached my saying with

my favourite tool - the tiny attacher :) - if you do not own
this you need to, it is the best stapler ever!

Now back to that Rosette Die from Sizzix. I have seen quite a
few people using it and even though I barely use flowers on
anything I could see the possibilities of this die. It is hard to
find and there is nowhere local to me that has it, I found it
on e-bay, it shipped pretty quickly and arrived on my
doorstep this Saturday. I was so excited to try it out and once
I opened it I realised that you need to have an extended
platform and cutting plates to run it through the Big Kick,
argghh! so disappointed.
I tried to do it just using the regular ones and moving it along
after cutting half of it, well it really did not work that well.
After quite a few attempts at it I knew I would have to get
the extended plates, the next day I was able to find them

at my local Jo-Anns. Well it worked so much better and now
I can make rosettes in one run through the machine and no fudging them!!

Bird revamp...

So some of you may remember a few months ago that I was

doing a project that gave me lots of grief. No real reason for
it, it just was not going how I had envisioned it. I left it for a
while and finally went back and finished it, that was in May.
I still really wasn't happy with it but I left it alone as I just
did not want to deal with it any more.

This week I had an idea to change the "bird" to a completely
different theme. I got the shadowbox on my desk and
completely dismantled it, totally destroyed the whole thing
apart from the box and the bird. I used an embossing folder
with the spider web and used some coredinations black magic
card stock. After running it through my Sizzix I sanded off
the top layer to reveal the orange colour underneath. I
applied some gesso to my bird and re-painted it. I re-covered
the inside of the box and added a cute little dimensional spider
to the middle of the spider web.

Trying to keep in a similar colour scheme I used some alcohol
inks to re-colour the metal corners on the outside of the box.
I kept this much simpler and added a couple of mirrors on
the inside which makes this very hard to photograph.

Having a glass panel on the front is bad enough but adding
the mirrors to the inside made it almost impossible so I know
these pictures aren't the best but hopefully you can see
enough of it to see the difference.

I am much happier with this version and hopefully can say
that it is done and I will not be re-doing it again!!