The Fabulous Mad Madam M

I have been wanting to get my hands on this Stitchy Bear stamp ever since I first saw it in the banner at OSAAT.  This is my daughter.  Well it isn't actually my daughter, she's 12 and a touch more three dimensional than this picture lol  but this is my daughter's fashion sense!  Well I suppose I am probably to blame for that as I have never been known for my eye for fashion either, but DD loves her clothes and sometimes likes to wear as many different colours as she can, all at the same time!  Well nobody could ever accuse her of being dull.  Unfortunately she didn't come supplied with sunglasses for everyone who looks at her.  Don't think by reading this I am being mean by the way, she is sitting next to me whilst I type wearing a purple t-shirt, a platypus coloured cardigan (her description - I think it refers to her TY Patti the Platypus, but I can see what she means) and a knitted cream hat, complete with cat ears... her Havana cat is currently chewing my socked foot (he has a fetish for socked feet) and she has just had to run into the kitchen to get him to follow her.  It worked!  We have lots of random moments in this family I can tell you!

At Crafty Cardmakers this week, our challenge is Love The Lasting Kind.  I don't think there can be any better display of love than the love a mother shows to her child.  From the first moment they are placed in your arms after you have given birth to them, nothing ever compares to that.  The overwhelming emotions of holding this tiny little bundle (and believe me, my DD was tiny!) and knowing that they have been growing inside you for 9 months and they are finally here, out in the real world, small and vulnerable and needy of everything to survive.  I think those in the midwifery profession call it bonding, I call it pure, all-consuming Love.

Things haven't always run smoothly for my daughter and I.  She was only 6 and a half years old when I finally decided enough was enough and turned my back on her father, and left her to live with him as it seemed to be the best for her at that time.  I still maintain that it was the best then as I needed time to sort my own head out but it hurt me, and more sadly it hurt her.  I think she felt I had rejected her too, but I made it up to her, slowly but surely and as she grew older, she realised that the parent she really wanted to live with was me, someone who would be there for her all the time and not just pass her around relatives because they couldn't prioritise family over work commitments.

Whoa!  I am getting really sentimental here!  I am supposed to be talking about the card! Hehehe!

The stamp is a digi stamp from Stitchy Bear Stamps and I have coloured her with promarkers and added depth and definition with black polychromos pencil.  I ran round the edge of the image with cool grey 1 and cut her out to make the image pop out more from the background.  The many background papers I have chosen to co-ordinate with the main image - mainly because I have used so many garish colours on it, I had a great job finding just one which would do it, so I decided to layer it.  The 'flowery' part is drawn freehand onto sticky backed canvas with Derwent Inktense pencils to match the leggings on the main image, then edged with bright pink then torn to reveal orange.  The orange is torn to reveal hot pink leopard skin print - this is in homage to a similarly coloured pair of leggings that DD wore to death, until they finally didn't fit her.  I created this paper with an Anne Geddes stamp.  The lime green, final part of the topper is embossed with a stars embossing plate in my Sizzix.  I then backed the whole lot onto black paper and added the 'Fabulous' sentiment which is an embossed stamp from the same Anne Geddes stamp set, I have used orange, red and black then coloured the background with Inktense pencils and trimmed to size.

Whoa! This is a bit pink for me!

Wow, has it really been 2 weeks since I posted anything here?  Life has been busy busy busy for me lately, having 4 children in the house certainly doesn't leave much time for anything else.  I wouldn't have it any other way really!  Since I last blogged, my beautiful daughter has turned 12 and it amazes me everyday how lovely she is, so mature for her age, she certainly has got a good head on her shoulders, is doing brilliantly at school and I am sooooo proud of her!

Well this card is a bit pink innit? lol

Over at Dream Valley Challenges we are running a challenge 'Stamp Something'.  I love stamping!  I remember before I started making things that I always thought stamps were just something you used to decorate a card or other project, kiddie crafts almost.  How wrong was I? The lovely stamp I have used for this project is a Jasmine Beckett-Griffith one of the fabby stamps you can buy from Crafts and Me Stamps.  I fell in love with this lady's work a few years ago when I was in Lincoln with my darling OH and we wandered  into Salamander a truly awesome new age shop hidden away up a sidestreet.  They had just taken delivery of a selection of greetings cards designed by her and one of them really caught my eye as, to me, she was the spit of my daughter.  I was over the moon a few months ago when I learnt that I could now get stamps of her designs!  I have coloured the image with promarkers in shades of pink and added some sparkle to her wings with gelly roll pens.  I used my scalloped edge circle nesties to create the circle behind, which I used to cut out from some paper I had made previously with cosmic shimmer mists, then embossed it and sanded it to distress it a little.  The rectangle behind the ribbon is some more of the paper stamped with some inkadinkadoo stamps. Behind that is a selection of Anne Geddes papers which I acquired on one of my swoops at the QVC shop and some meshy ribbony type stuff which I think is lovely.  Oh and don't forget the bling, always have to have a bit of bling lol

Revenge - A Dish Best Served Cold

Don't you just love that phrase?  It's true isn't it?  Why rush in when someone wrongs you and give them the reaction they want, just leave it... don't forget about it... leave it until they think you have forgotten about it lol

I have used a fab Tiddly Inks digi for this, she's called Pinky and if ever a stamp was more suitable for this phrase I have never found it.  I mean come on!  She's standing there with a skull on top of a cake!  I don't know who cheesed her off, but I don't think I would like to get on the wrong side of her, would you?  That girl has issues lol  I have used just 6 colours on this card, black, red. grey, purple, white and satin for the skintones.  Not that I have given her much skintone at all, she's as pale as me... in fact this could be an alter-ego of me!  The background is also from Tiddly Inks and is called Toasting Properly.  Goes perfectly with the image I think and the general feel of the card.  So with 6 colours, I added 6 paper roses, made using a diecut and a few scraps of coredination's paper as it is red on one side and black on the other and it gives such an impression of darkness to the petals.  And of course, 6 words too.  I used a ransom note style font which my lovely stepdaughter gave to me.  Sometimes it is so handy to live with a font geek!  So there we have it... 666... The number of the beast.  Scared yet?  You should be!  HDH Challenges, you've just gotta love 'em!  Mwahahahahahaha! ;-)

I'd also like to enter this in The Burtonesque Dolls zombie challenge.  I can just imagine a zombie serving up a skull cake.  I think it would be damn rude not to hit up the Tiddly Inks Anything Goes challenge with this one, I hope I have done it justice Christy!

Magical fairy wonderland

We call them faeries. We don't believe in them. Our loss. ~Charles de Lint


I was talking earlier today with my daughter, whom is now almost twelve about the fancy bedding we can get for kids these days.  I grew up in the times before duvets (sheets and blankets for me!) and children's character themed bedding, and whilst my son has Rubbadubbas, Thomas the Tank Engine and Bob the Builder and my daughter had Jellikins and Hello Kitty, I had none of these luxuries.  I said to her at least you have never had to suffer hideous wallpaper in your bedroom (her rooms have generally been painted - apart from when she was a baby and I decked her nursery out with Peter Rabbit borders etc - only to be told when she was old enough to speak that she hated Peter Rabbit - Meh!).  I described the wallpaper I had growing up in the 70's as a pink and lilac floral nightmare!  This was replaced around the age of 6 or 7 by green woodland fairies.  I was never particularly into fairies (I was into Adam and the Ants at the time!) but my Mum loved it and bought it and decorated my room with it and I still had it on my wall at about 13 years of age - albeit covered up with as many posters as possible!

I've been raiding Vix's stamps again lol

One of the stamp ranges which they sell over at Crafts and Me is a rather fabby artist called Hannah Lynn and I love them!  This one is called Bookworm Fairy and I decided she would look just lovely coloured with pink and turquoise shades of promarker and added some definition with a polychromos pencil.  I treated myself to some stickles a few days ago and have added some to the wings and the frondy bits of the butterfly and it does look very sparkly in real life, but my camera has managed to completely not capture it in this shot!   I also added some stickles to the lantern as they tend to reflect the colour of the bit underneath so it really looks like it is glowing.  Again you will have to take my word for it lol I trimmed the image and gave myself a near heart attack when I was cutting the frondy bits as I have a habit of cutting them off, but miraculously I managed to leave them attached - Go me! lol I have created the background using cosmic shimmer mists in a blend of greens into blues, (I've not tried a blend with the colours before), then stamped over the top with the frame from the Starburst Fairies stamp set from The Stampman.  I trimmed the frame leaving a narrow border and glued the image to it.  Doesn't it look like she is in a magical fantasy land?

I made the card into a twisted easel as I had more shimmery card left from earlier and stamped with some sentiments from the Starburst Faires set and added some gems for a bit of bling in pink and turquoise colours.

I followed a couple of challenge themes for this card, Stampalot have one running for Magical Worlds and I don't think you get much more magical than a fairy woodland scene.  I chose the colour scheme from The Corrosive Challenge for Turquoise and Pink.  Sweet Stampin' want you to try something new, and I tried a new technique with my shimmer mists - I usually just spray all over and hope for the best lol/

Steampunk fairy

Over at Crafty Cardmakers this week we have a spotlight on Steampunk or machines.  Well until I set to work on planning for this challenge, I had never really done anything at all like it.  From other things I have seen around the web, I knew cogs and modern type machines made in a Victorian style was the key and I was a bit wary of how to start.  Luckily I stumbled across some digi stamps from Delicious Doodles and bought a few to have a play around with and I think I can safely say I am a little hooked on darker things at the moment!  As I said in a previous post, I like gothic styles and the steampunk genre fits in quite nicely I think.

I started by colouring the image in with promarkers, aside from the skin tones I really limited myself on colours to red and greys and a touch of green for the rose leaves.  I wanted to keep her skin pale and interesting so have only lightly shaded it.  I have used a black polychromos pencil to add shadow and make it pop out a little more.  Directly behind the main image (which I trimmed) is a piece of core'dination paper, embossed and sanded gently to bring the red from out of the depths of the black.  I have a few embossing folders which I rarely use, but core'dination paper is fab for making use of them.  The panel behind is some black and white design paper from my stash.  I am not sure what make it is as it didn't have any labels, but I bought it from Carole's Crafts.  Behind that I simply used a scrap of black lacy material stretched over card and a broad piece of black satin ribbon to continue the black and white theme I seem to have going on here lol

So what's the steampunk feature?  The cogs of course!  I cut them out from a template and coated them with aged metallic Perfect Pearls powder, spritzed and battered away with the end of the powder brush whilst the powders were still damp to create a distressed aged metal effect.

I followed the sketch at Hanna and Friends for this card.