Vintage - It's the old brand new!

It is easily overlooked that what is now called vintage was once brand new. - Tony Visconti

I love vintage clothing!  I am particularly fond of fifties style dresses and as soon as I find an occasion to wear one I will sooooo be in one!  I love the sticky out skirts and the starched stiffness and the net skirts which go underneath.  I also like the necklines, halter necks and wraps, enhancing the décolletage which give a really sexy look but without revealing too much and retaining that important air of demure.  I was thrilled to find that Michelle Perkett Studios are running a 'Vintage' theme to their challenge this time round and was even more pleased with the stamp they had on offer as a freebie.  This dress just rocks!  I seriously want to wear it!

I have coloured the main image with promarkers in vanilla, rose and baby pink to match a piece of backing paper I had in mind for the card.  I cut it to an oval shape then cut a slightly bigger oval from some Coredination paper which I ran thru my Sizzix with a polka dot embossing plate and then attacked with some sandpaper to bring out the dots.  The rest of the backgrounds I have made myself using a combination of a background stamp and a brayer to apply adirondack caramel ink.  The very back of the card is made using just the run-off ink left over from inking the stamp.  Brayers are fab for applying ink to that sort of stamp and always have plenty of ink left to make some paper.  Nothing is wasted!  Regular visits to my blog will know I love making my own backgrounds.  I have lots of designer papers but nothing is quite as much fun as making your own.  I am forever on the lookout for new ideas of things to do like that.  The DP I have used on this one is designer unknown... I have a habit of picking up papers just because I like them and think I could use them and sometimes pick up odd sheets here and there so I end up with loads that I haven't got a clue what they are or where they came from...

The paper ribbon behind the main image is a strip I had left over from another project, it's made using adirondack inks sploshed around and then stamped over with my favourite olde worlde wordy stamp.  I keyed the colours in a little by rubbing over with the caramel ink pad I used for the background.  I used some lace ribbon at the bottom to further add to the vintage theme (it's pretty old!) and added 3 amber coloured gemstone brads for that all important bit of bling!  The sentiment comes from an Anna Griffin set of stamps - stamped then embossed with gold.

I have used the sketch supplied by PaperWorks Co.  Creative Stamp Friends challenged us to make our own background so that's what I did!  Digi Design House wanted to see 2 patterned papers, a ribbon and 3 brads.

A Summer Daydream

It's summertime, apparently.  The weather most of the time would suggest otherwise!  Apart from the odd couple of days of sun here and there, we seem to have been cursed with grey skies and miserable weather on the whole.  6 weeks of 4 bored kids who I can't even take to the park to run off some energy because you can never be quite sure what the weather is going to do next... My elder son has ADHD and to coin a term of his Grandma 'is like Tigger on speed!' and I think if I haven't gone completely grey by the end of the year it will be a wonder.  He's off to big school in September and it will be a break for us all, especially my youngest who is 2seriously attention starved as his big brother hogs it all.  The poor baby is a boy of very few words, mainly because big bro says it all for him - he never gets a chance to get a word in edgeways!  Still, he has words for his favourite things, like juice, banana, kitchen (where the food comes from!) and perfect.  He learnt 'perfect' a couple of nights ago as he was looking at the word on his vest and I said what it was and he started repeating it. I was thrilled!  So now, when I get him ready for bed he waits for me to give him a new word.  Tonight's was 'maiden', which has pleased his Daddy no end as he is a big Iron Maiden fan!

Summertime when I was child was my favourite time of year as it meant a long time off school, always off out with my friends playing out somewhere and getting into scrapes.  I will have to put on my rose-tinted glasses for while and remember the sights and smells of summer - I just remember that there was always lots of flowers around.  I don't think a lot of people seem to have time for their gardens anymore - I know I don't get much chance with looking after the children but there is nothing nicer than a garden in bloom.  My daughter seems to be quite happy to stay indoors drawing or on her laptop which just seems really alien to me as when I was her age, I was never in the house.  She's probably saving up all her energy for going on holiday next year with my sister.  They are going on a cruise now she is finally in possession of a passport :-)

Flowers are very popular in the world of craft too.  The digital stamp I have used for this project is one by Michelle Perkett and is called Daydream Fantasy.  I have had it in my collection for a while and to be honest, I have never used it as I thought it looked too complicated, but today I decided to be brave and give it a go.  I don't have the fancy new fine-tips for my promarkers yet so I just had to be very light and gentle adding the finer detail of the flowers.  I've used carmine and magenta for the pinks and olive and pear green, plus a little saffron and yellow for the hair.  I've used stickles and cosmic sparkles to add a bit of shimmer to the wings and the leaves, in fact I added shimmer to it all!  What you are looking at is actually the front cover of a notebook.  I will be demonstrating how these are done in my next blog post as this is actually the fifth one I have done.  I added a few more flowers to give more of a summery feel in pink and purple.

Just added this extra shot to show the sparkle a bit more :)

And also added this to show that it is a notebook :)

I'd like to enter this for the Craft Your Passion Challenge for Anything but a card.  Make My Monday want to see a Fairies or Angels.

Sparkle and snowflakes and just a touch of red

Just been having a root through my blog and found this which I hadn't posted!

This time of year always amuses me.  How do you do Christmas when you're not religious?  You may notice from my recent bloggings, I just don't do Christmas at all!  I think I have done fairly well so far to produce a few Christmas card which are neither religious or traditional and don't actually mentions the C word at all.  I'm not a descendant of Scrooge, honest, I just loathe all the commercialism that surrounds it all.  So, given the choice, I will choose wintery themes, snowflakes and sparkle, only this time I decided to go for something a bit different.

I am obsessed with red.  Well actually I'm not as obsessed as I used to be, but that is probably because now I have a full house and lots of kids running about, there isn't as much opportunity for all the little knick-knacks I used to favour.  You should see the state of my lovely red candle set after they got toddlerified lol  So every so often I decide to indulge myself and do some crafting in red, and this time of year gives the perfect excuse.  I can do festive if not Festive right?

The image I have chosen for my card is Sweet Pea ching-chou kuik's Fluttering-butterflies.  It's a really pretty stamp and I have had some stamped images on paper sitting around for a while, just waiting for me to decide what to do with them and I was flicking thru the stack and spotted this and just knew she would look stunning in red and green.  I coloured the dress and wings in a combination of poppy and forest green promarkers and the moon and lantern with buttercup and vanilla and touches of gold.  The background is coloured with indigo blue, and the skin with almond and dusky pink. Hair I coloured with cinamon and gold and I think it looks like her hair has captured the moonlight.  For a bit of added sparkle I have used my trusty gelly roll pens - always good for a bit of bling.

I am rather fond of my nesties, would love to be able to buy more but they are soooo expensive, definitely worth it but still!  I trimmed the main image using the biggest in the deckled rectangle set and had a bit of an accident where it wasn't lined up properly so I shifted the image up a bit and cut it again and hoped for the best and luckily it cut straight so I got away with it, phew!  I love my starburst stains and had made a sheet of red card which I used as the background  then I used some red glitter paper from my stash to trim the edge and cut again using the largest die out of an offcut of the starburst background, but I didn't think it stood out well enough, so I dipped the edges in glue and then in ultrafine red glitter to make it really sparkle.  Coloured a few flowers with poppy and dipped their edges in glitter too, and the coloured a peace of lace ribbon using poppy again.  This I placed along the side of the glitter paper and offset the red card and the image and put that on and added the glittered flowers.  I used a few red gems to add an extra bit of sparkle.  I knew the card needed a bit more, but I couldn't think what.


When I visited The Stampman a few weeks ago, Vix was demoing triple embossing and although I tried it as soon as I got home, I couldn't quite get the hang of it, but I had to have a go again for this card.  I was lucky enough to get some Christmas shape chipboard a while ago and in there I had some stars in different sizes.  I used moonglow angel wings ruby and layered it up using my heatgun and then stamped into it with a snowflake stamp... and it worked this time!  I attached the stars to a a thin piece of ribbon and punched a hole in the card, added a yellow star (which I coloured up a little with pink promarker so it wasn't so yellow and attached the stars so they hang freely like a tree decoration.