Going away pressie

Good news!!! Em sailed through her A's and has easily got her place at Falmouth University to study Graphic Design!  If only I could have my time again I would be going with her!!  So now it's a mad rush to get everything sorted for her to go away.....a couple of trips to Ikea have meant that we have most of the utensils she will need..still collecting though! 

Still trying to get the house sorted out...sewing machine went into the shop to get fixed yesterday...don't get it back for 3 weeks at the earliest and I need to get a blind made for the study before the 16th Sept....big family get together to send her off.  Also need to make the house Molly proof...another story! and just generally clear loads of rooms.

Anyway...Em's leaving..so "Mum can you make me a card for xyz...like by tomorrow?!" is going to be a bit difficult.   I thought that it might be a good idea to send her off with a few ready made cards....so this was my inspiration for a box of cards to take away.  I used the brilliant Gala Event stamps from "Creative Expressions" .  She loves them so that's good!

I decided to use up all of the scraps of dyed seam binding that were languishing in my ribbon draw...and as you might see if you have good eyesight...my sewing machine was dying!  Tension was all over the place!

Making 6 cards and a box in a short time was a prompt for following the CAS route.  Dresses are coloured using distress markers or cosmic shimmer water colours paints and then glossy accented.  I made the box to house them and used my favourite stamp from the set to decorate the box..  Having used ancient page ink to stamp the dresses, I outlined using a grey copic marker which drew some of the black ink out to give a dramatic base for the dresses and make them pop a bit more.

I would like to enter this into the following challenges:


"Top tip Tuesday - One Layer"
"Eurekastamps - Anything goes"
"Lexis creations - back to school or college" not toddler stuff but big girl stuff here!
"Make it Monday - anything goes"
"Simon says stamp and show - No rules!"
"The crazy challenge - anything goes"
"totallystampalicious - CAS"
"Craft your days away - anything goes"
"Hiding in my craft room - limited to 2 layers" kept it down to a minimum here.

More Art Sayings and something new....

Another week has flown by and so it's time to share another project using "Sam Poole's Umount Art Saying stamp set" , but before I share that with I want to just let you know that Creative Expressions have just started a new blog which you can find "here" it is a great way to see what's new at Creative Expressions and also it has links to the whole design team's blogs so you can see what we are all up to!

This month, the idea is that we combine the text with other stamps available from Creative Expressions.  This week I have combined my word stamp with the campion and bee stamps on the Eco Green Garden Chic set.  My tag was cut from a mountboard off cut that I was given by a picture framer.  I covered this with eco green paint and used PVA glue to get the crackle effect...I'm not sure I did it correctly as my crackle is barely visible, but it is there. Before stamping, I sprayed the tag with cosmic shimmer.

I coloured my stamps using distress markers and stamped the flowers across the bottom of the tag.  I used first and second impressions to get depth.  I used the green distress ink to distress the edges of the tag and the fine tip of the green distress maker was perfect to quickly draw in some grasses amongst the flowers.

I stamped the bee onto cream card and cut it out, this was mounted onto the main tag using some thick double sided tape to give it dimension.  I then cut out a small tag, just big enough to take the words.  The tag was sprayed in cosmic shimmers and the words stamped in the same ink as the bee.  I ran a line of gold Krylon pen around both tags.  I coated the be and three of the flower stems with glossy accents, again to add a bit more dimension.

While the glossy accents was drying I dyed some chalk white seam binding with Victorian Velvet Distress stain.  When everything was dry I finished the tag with seam binding top and bottom. I would like to enter my tag into the following challenges:
"The Cheerful stamp pad - in the garden"
"Craft your passion - anything goes"
"Love to create - Recycle something", I've recycled waste mountboard off cuts.
"Make it Monday - Always anything goes"
"Simon Says Stamp and Show - Anything goes"
"Emergency crafters - Anything with wings"
"Stamping for the weekend - bugs and butterflies"
"Totally Papercrafts - doodle on it"
"Inspire me Fridays - anything goes"