Dragonfly Card

Hello to you all Wishing all of you a very Happy New year!

I hope you all had a very good Christmas and are 

looking forward to a very crafty 2015.

I was very lucky my son's bought me the distress stains for Christmas 

and this is my first play with them.

For my first post of 2015 I have created a card made from the Artistic Stamper's

 fabulous Neil Walker stamps and the dragonfly from the insects &

butterfly plate and lots of lovely embossing.

1. Distress inks in the following colours:- iced spruce, vintage photo, wild honey, fired brick & walnut stain.
2. Distress stains spray in the following colours:- wild honey, fired brick, iced spruce & tarnished brass.
3. The following Artistic Stamper Stamps:- Neil Walkers alphabet soup & boarder set + the dragonfly off the insects and butterflies. 
4. Gold & clear embossing powder. 
5. Small coloured beads and home made beads for the centre body please see my blog.
6. Ranger distress stickles in the following colours:- aqua & copper.
7. Versamark.
8. Deco art liquid glass.
9. Gold ink pad.
10. Viva Ferro, ledger stencil.

Firstly I coloured a piece of white card with distress inks blending off a craft mat.

I used wild honey, vintage photo, iced spruce and fired brick.

I sprayed water onto my fingers the flicked it across the card and mopped up with tissue

& repeated it until I was happy with the result. I then used my distress stained iced spruce 

and lightly spritzed it. I inked the Neil walker alphabet soup stamp in gold

and stamped the bottom and top right.

You can just see it faintly, next I inked up the boarder stamp with

Walnut stain distress ink and gently put gold embossing

 powder so it didn't cover the entire stamped image,

then heat set.

I cut out a square and from the piece of coloured card I then cut 

another piece off and a third and arranged it 

out on the original cut square.

I then inked up the boarder stamp with walnut stain. Without 

putting it on a block I just placed the stamp where I wanted it

 on the third piece and then covered it in clear embossing 

powder and heat set. Ferro paste was put through the date 

on the ledger stencil on the bottom left hand side.

The edges were run along the versa mark ink pad then swiped 

through gold embossing powder to finish the square off. 

For the dragonfly I inked it up with walnut stain stamped it 

onto distress coloured card which was clear embossed.

I sprayed the wings with tarnished gold, wild honey 

and fired brick spray stains. Decoart liquid glass was 

applied to the wings and allowed to dry.

.

The main body of the dragon fly is made up with a bead I made 

please see my blog. The head is again beads made up 

from sequins and from my stash also copper stickles. small seed beads

were glued around and then I a dot of aqua stickles to finish.

Wire and a bead were used for the antennae. Finally mounted onto 

black card and attached onto a white card. Well that's it for today

 I hope you have all enjoyed this post please feel free to

 leave a comment or two.

Cheers Dee x

Let it Snow...

Hello everyone, Astrid here with my second project for November.

I seem to have fallen in love with the colours blue and brown, not exactly traditional for Christmas projects, but for some reason I can't seem to get away from them.....
For my second project this month  I decided to make a piece of Christmas wall art.
I used the following stamps for my project:
Mini Christmas 1
Christmas Greetings 1 and
Music# 011
I started by taking a piece of 5.5 by 4" smooth white card and coloured it by putting some Distress Stains in Tarnished Brass, Bundles Sage and Picket Fence on my craft sheet and swiping my card stock through it several times. I then coloured it further  with some  Distress Inks in Chipped Sapphire, Vintage Photo and Scattered Straw. I  crumpled it all up, roughly flattened it again and then dried it with my heatgun. I then ran it through an embossing folder from my stash and darkened the embossed bits some more.

The next step was to colour a small canvas board with Pains Grey acrylic paint, it's called grey but is actually blue. I'm pretty sure you would get a very similar effect with Sapphire Blue Distress Stains, but I don't have that one. Before it had dried I dabbed it with a piece of kitchen towel to get a textured effect and when it was dry I  stamped some of the little snowflakes from the Christmas Greetings 1 plate in white by using the Picket Fence Distress Marker. Love how they slowly start to appear against the dark background. I embellished the background with a strip of canvas tape, stamped with the music stamp and some lace.

The final steps were to stamp some of the Christmas stamps from the two plates I used on smooth card, cutting them out and colouring them with the same colours of Distress Inks. Next I cut theTim Holtz Decorative Snowflake Rosette Die, slightly inked and glittered with some Diamond Stickles. I ran the topper through a little snowflake embossing folder in my stash to give it some more texture and then I put it all together as you can see on the photo.

Thank you for dropping by, - I hope you liked my project and feel inspired to use some of the wonderful Artistic Stamper Christmas stamps for your own Christmas projects.