Over at the Passion for ProMarkers challenge blog this week is the theme of ‘three of something’. I had a rummage through my stamps and found all manner of fours, fives and sixes. Eventually, I found an often used, but not recently, Michael Powell stamp of three beach huts. I love his style and when I was making cards, used several of his other stamp designs.
I’ve been away from the Studio for a few days. Not far away, in front of the TV in fact so that I can listen to daytime telly drivel while I have been beavering away. I’ve been making a baby blanket ready for a new arrival later this year.
This week at Passion for ProMarkers, the challenge is to use a photo as inspiration for your artwork.
As it happens, I knew I had a stamp featuring roses and peonies, so used that and some of the colours from the photo for my palette. I cropped the stamped image to fit the card size… I’m not sure that worked out well, but a simple mount using the same lavender colour I think helped.
My second goodie box from Trimcraft is a box of double knit Spiin yarn. Twenty 100g balls of it! The rainbow colours are impressive and with it being 100% acrylic, project will be washable. The 8ply construction means the yarn is relatively soft and in use resists splitting more than other yarns I have used. There is a downloadable project pattern book, which I will get to after I have finished my first project, a baby blanket.
Over at the Less is More challenge blog, the theme is ‘tiny and few’. This leaves a lot of white space and is quite daring. Very quick though! It took a little time to find suitable stamps for this thank you card. I used an ombre ink effect on the arrow for a little added interest.
Back when I was a Craftwork Cards design team member, I came up with a dress form for a papier-mâché torso and it sort of became my trademark make. When thinking of a final project to finish off my decoupage papers, it came to mind to make another, and what better design to use than the Modern Floral?
The dress follows the template available for purchase here. Unfortunately, the torso I use is no longer available from Creativ Company, but may be available elsewhere. I recommend using patterned paper rather than decoupage paper which was a little fragile for all the proper folding.
First Edition Deco Maché Modern Floral decoupage paper is available from Craft Stash.
It’s time to come clean… I don’t like making fancy cards. This week’s challenge at Passion for ProMarkers is to use ‘fancy folds’. Thus this is outside of my comfort zone, so I decided I would do the most basic fancy fold, an easel card. I wanted to keep the border on the background paper, so mitred the squares. I carried that principle through to the sentiment, but doing it again I would have embossed it in white.
I’ve not got much decoupage paper left from my goodie box from Trimcraft. I was rooting around in my altered art drawer, full of bits and bobs that I think I can upcycle, and found a stash of scrapbooks-in-a-tin from Woodware. I thought one would work well as a mini-album so decoupaged the tin lid and the included concertina pages. Matched up with some Bazzill paper for matting, I created this:
It seemed only sensible to create a full papier-mâché object – after all decoupage is just one last layer of the process. I chose to make a coin tray using the Modern Floral decoupage paper. The matt adhesive says on the bottle that it will stick to almost any surface… I can attest to that as even cling film was grabbed firmly making one of the usual steps in moulding the papier-mâché a little tricky. Again, I rushed the process (which I have corrected in the list below) which probably made things more difficult for myself. Drying overnight has left the tray very rigid and I’m sure it will hold up in use. Having used the glue, I think it would probably stick firmly enough to the microwave meal tray itself if you didn’t want to do papier-mâché.
The makes continue… I’ve finished off my pack of Rose Gold Geometric decoupage paper making this mobile/dreamcatcher. Two layers of the decoupage paper are surprisingly resilient whilst still being semi-translucent, making this a good suncatcher as well. I tried taking a pic against a window, but it didn’t turn out well… so you have it against a white background instead.
