Long time no post

Well it has been a long time since I posted anything. I won't make excuses but I thought I might share some birthday cards from this year. As you know I decide on a type of card at the beginning of the year and make variations of that for everyone. This year I feel in love with the pop up box card and I have been having wonderful making them.
The first card is Judith's birthday card and as you can see she likes dogs and this was a chance to use my Echo Park dog stamps and matching dies.

I collect dog patterned paper so I always have some to use and it can be right out of date.

The next is Wendy's birthday card and as you can tell is a steampunk girl. I had fun with Graphic 45 paper and Spellbinders cog dies.

 The last I have to share is for Rose K's birthday and this time I made a wide box card so I could do a flight of butterflies. I had lots of fun using all my butterfly dies to cut with and then to create the flight across the top of the card.

Thanks for looking and I hope you enjoyed the cards and I definitely won't be so long posting next time.

Happy Financial New Year

I really don't know where time goes, the weeks slip by me without noticing and here we are in a New Financial Year. A quick catch up before I share some cards. I had a very exciting June with a trip to Melbourne to attend a Tim Holtz workshop. You can imagine it was so very exciting. Kaszazz organised workshops with Tim and I qualified to attend, thanks to all my customers for supporting me. I have lots of photos but I will save them for the next post as I have to get them organised.

I managed to lose the camera for several weeks so I missed taking photos of some birthday cards. I will have to go visiting and ask to see them so I can photograph them.

Here is Kaylene's birthday card and as she is a red girl I had fun working with these papers. Lots of Glossy Accents all over the card and the metal flowers are the new ones from Kaszazz.

I love this star card and the fun you can have with matching papers. Got to love the paper pads for matching colours and patterns. I do have to explain to most people how to open and close the car though.

I started this month with our regular crafting group in Tathra which had a lot of show and tell as Helen and Wendy had gone to Stamp-it's Tim  Holtz workshop in Sydney. Can we ever get enough of Tim???

We are having a tag swap at our get togethers at the moment and this month's theme was Oriental. My tag was put together really quickly, the background is a serviette stuck to cardstock. This was from my very big pile of  serviettes. I  make a point now of having at least one day a month to stick down all the serviettes I have gotten. I brought several packets of serviettes and tissues while in Melbourne, can't help myself and we share with everyone in our  group so you get lots of different ones. It is handy to have them ready to work with rather than wait for the glue to dry and I rather work with glue to stick them down. I coloured some of the flowers with Distress markers to match in the colours I used in the image. I also added some glitter colour to the red areas but you can't see this in the photo. The image was stamped on gloss card with Stazon and I coloured in with Distress Markers. I did several to experiment with as you can't blend on the gloss with water but you can build up the colour with layers. I cut out the image and mounted after dry brushing a green halo effect where she was to sit, this helps her from disappearing into the background.  Added a charm and some ribbon.

Well better go and make the cards for this month's workshop. Christmas in July, it is never too early to start thinking Christmas and ideas are flying around my head for Christmas ornaments and gift containers. I better get them out of my head and into reality.

Thanks for visiting and happy creating
Andrea

Happy Easter

Well here I am back after a lovely Easter. We had friends to lunch on Sunday and I created this Easter topiary for the centerpiece of the table. It was an idea I had pinned on Pinterest. I didn't realize how heavy all those chocolate eggs would be and the florist foam in the bottom wouldn't hold it up so I had to mix up some plaster of paris. It is never going to fall over now. And even better I can remove the styrofoam ball from the top and replace it with what ever I need. I can see flowers for birthdays and Christmas will be fun.

However we barely made a dent in the Easter eggs (there are 5 packets of eggs stuck in), I may have to take it to my new job tomorrow. I certainly don't need to eat all the chocolate: I am only 300 gms from my first 5 kgs lost this year.
Another Easter project I made this year was inspired by Roni  from Ink Stains with Roni blog. Roni used recycled packaging to make a vintage collage. Here is Roni's Vintage Easter 3d Collage with her step by step instructions, you will have to scroll down to see her finished piece. I didn't think I would get the chance to do this as I rarely get eggs in plastic packaging. However I brought an egg timer and was looking at the packaging to see what I could do with it and off went the light bulb.

I followed Roni's steps to prepare the surface and covered it with torn book pages. I then sprayed with some Distress Ink spray, Broken China for the sky and Peeled paint for the ground. I used an Ezy Press die to make the grass. The chocolate bunny is a an image that I found on the net last year. The flowers are from an old sticker set, they blended in just perfectly. I added the brown German Scrap to finish the edge and dyed the white ribbon with Wild Honey stain to match. I am very happy with how he turned out and i still have the other half off the packaging to play with.

More Birthday Cards

Hopefully the next lot of birthday cards for All Things Tim group have arrived so here are some pictures I would like to share with you. This card was for one of the February ladies and I had fun cutting frames with my new Ezy Press label dies using Tim's Shabby paper. I also made the butterfly's and flourishes using the Alteration dies.

 

This another of the February cards again using Tim's paper and some metal leaves. I love how you can mix and match his papers. Lots of blending around the edges as well, it really does help frame the image.

I haven't done Tim's Wrinkle Free Distress technique for a while so started playing with my inks at the beginning of March. I used a couple of pieces here to make this card, I really love this butterfly stamp it is so easy to cut out. I stamp the image on the card and then mount the cut out butterfly over the top. A little piece of adhesive foam under each wing pops them off the card.

 I was playing with my Distress stains as well and made this plaid background using Spiced Marmalade and Scattered Straw. It just begged to be made into a card.  The saying is a new stamp from Kaszazz, it is in a set with some great sayings. The leafy branch is another Kaszazz stamp I use a lot.

I love clocks and time pieces so of course I have Tim's Texture Fade Pocket Watches embossing folder. With a clock face cut out of his paper I went to town. The small clocks are rub-ons from Kaiser and I covered the clock face in Crackle Medium after it was all stuck down. Don't you just love the effect? I hope it made it to America okay.

The last birthday card for March is this dress form from Collections that I covered with more of Tim's paper and then inked up. The needle and tread and the cotton reels are another Kaszazz set of stamps. I had a lot of fun masking the cotton reels to get the overlapped effect.

That's the lot of birthday cards for now, I have been busy over the last 2 weeks doing Tim's Creative Chemistry 101. What a load of fun and I have learned quite a bit. I am still finishing of my tags and will slowly add them here. I have a couple of Easter projects that I have almost done and I will share them tomorrow with you.
Have a great and safe Easter weekend
Andrea

Some birthday cards

Hi folks,
It only took me two weeks this time to get organised enough to post again. I thought I would share some birthday cards that I have made for the All Things T!m Yahoo Group. I joined the Birthday Club swap, where we make cards for everyone for their birthdays and in return we get cards on our birthdays. Unfortunately I made not a good start by thinking I had posted off February's cards only to find them under a pile of  my stash on my desk. I have apologised to everyone and have been forgiven but I better get the cards out on time for now. March cards have been sent granted it was only last week so they may not get the the recipients on time but that just extends your birthday for longer. My 50th birthday last year went for almost 6 weeks. So much fun.
Enough talking here are the cards, not all of them as I haven't taken all the photos off the camera. A job for tomorrow. Because they are for T!m fans I have tried to use his products or techniques.

This card uses some of T!m's paper from Lost and Found Paper Stash and the flourish stamp is one of T!m's. I covered the center panel with Glossy Accents. Here is the open view and the greeting stamp is one of Kaszazz's.

This last card I used more of T!m's paper and the lovely lady in the heart frame is from his paper as well. The frame is one of the cheap shops, the colour worked really well with this card so I didn't have to take the alcohol inks to it. I used more of his stamps and some Lavash ribbon dyed with re-inker and a Philosophy tag.

Unfortunately I didn't record who got which card, something I must do from now on.
Have a good week and
happy creating
Andrea

Finally made it back

Well despite all the good intentions I just haven't posted anything for far too long but I am back. I will be posting every Tuesday at least. And of course today is Wednesday but it is the morning  so this will count.
I want to show you the cards I am teaching next week in February's Card Workshop. Yes I know it is March but February's class got postponed.
The first card is using one of the new Kaszazz Summer Blooms stamp with the new Kaszazz Scrapbooking paper.

The next card is for Rita's friend and is we will be masking the PSX Pansy. The Label dies will be used as well as an embossing folder to get that lovely textured background.

Some people may recognize this card from Hero Arts and it is a copy with the colours changed. Using Distress Inks with Kaszazz's small Sketch Flower  and Best Wishes stamps and Kaiser's colored rhinestones.

Last card is the regular male card. I love this Vintage Motorcycle stamp from Queen Kat's Stamps and it looks stunning in the monochromatic theme. We will be using Ranger's Enamel Accents.

The Card Workshop is on Tues 13th March at 1.30pm so if you would like to join us contact me.

I found Pinterest last year and became slightly obsessed but I have decided that if I keep pinning all these projects on my Have to Try This board I better start making some of them. So Pinterest Friday as been born where I will show the results of my Pinterest projects good or bad. Till Friday then.

Happy Creating
Andrea

Happy Birthday Pam

It was my friend Pam's birthday on Monday which also was our monthly get together at Helen's to make things. So we got to sing her happy birthday,  eat birthday cake with her and watch her open all the lovely cards she received. A great day was had by all. Below is the card I made her which isn't exactly her colours but luckily she loved it. This year everyone is getting Flip out cards, I generally stick to one type of card and tailor it to them. She loves Tim Holtz so I grabbed a book of papers and went from there.

Pam's Birthday Card

Pam's card open so you can see where the message goes.

I used papers from the Crowded Attic paper stash and cut out the biggest moth. I lightly inked with Old Paper Distress Ink and dusted with Perfect Pearls to give a sheen. I then traced the moth onto another paper from the stash a brown this time and cut it out and ran it through the Cuttlebug in an embossing folder. Unfortunately my attempts to photograph this layering on the card didn't work. In the open picture you can see the different layers. I layered the pieces together using foam tape to get dimension. I will do a step by step tutorial on making this Flip Out Card next week. They are reasonably easy and lots of fun to make.
The paper on the front panel are from the sheet of ink pad images, very appropriate for a stamper and the inside paper is a 6" x 6" piece with perfume and chocolate ads on it. All were edged with Old Paper DI and I made up a mixture of re-inker and Perfect Pearls and used that to colour Tim Holtz's Trimmings flower strip. I did alternate flowers and used a Walnut Stain mix to the the other flowers. After they were dried with a little help from my heat tool, I mean who can wait for them to dry naturally, I added green adhesive pearls to the centres and adhered them to the card. I added some white paint to the WISH word stick to bring out the letters and put a long fasteners through the top. Two butterflies from the Crowded Attic Salvage Stickers finished off the card. And the cardstock was from the Ranger Coordination cardstock pad, so almost Tim from top to toe.

Thanks for looking and happy creating

Andrea