A few cards

Here are a couple of cards I've made recently for family and friends. They are fairly experimental so I hope their recipients liked them. 

First 1: brayered fresco finish paints, stencilled grunge paste and stitched layers. Stitching seems to be making its way onto almost everything I do now I've finally got the hang of threading my sewing machine (it didn't stop me doing making the stupid mistake of sewing the front and back of the card together though, oops!).

Second one: music paper, stamped and distressed, stencilled fabric and a stamped and stitched teabag.

Sorry for the poor quality photos - my mobile actually takes better pictures than my camera, but neither are fantastic.

 

Thanks for looking, hope you are having a good week,

Sarah x

New Year, New Project!

A slightly belated Happy New Year to all! Hopefully it will be a good one.

For the start of the 2012 I thought I needed to give myself a bit of a challenge, a crafty project I've fancied trying for a while:

It's a real vintage printers tray, purchased off Ebay and it arrived yesterday - I was a little overexcited :0)

It needs a bit of cleaning and I'm debating over removing some of the dividers to create larger sections, but it has some lovely brass details which will look gorgeous polished up.

I might have mentioned in a previous post that hubby and I are hopefully buying a house, so I guess I got the printers tray with the idea of it being a nice interesting bit of decor for the new house. However, things with the house aren't progressing quite as well as we hoped, so like the weather, I'm feeling a bit bleak about it today (seriously spooky stormy light outside at the moment!). Going to keep my fingers tightly crossed because I really don't want to have to start the house hunt all over again.

Anyway, at least I've got my crafty project to keep my mind off the house for now. The only question is: 95 sections - where the heck do I start?

xx

Mirror number 4

I hope everyone had a really lovely Christmas, we certainly did. It's been a busy few days visiting family and friends and, although It's been very enjoyable, I have to admit it's nice to be home.

So, I've now got a chance to show you the mirror I made for hubby for christmas. We're in the process of buying a house (fingers crossed, if nothing goes wrong, we should be moving in the next couple of months). We're planning to turn the second bedroom into a spare room, come study, come craft room so that I can stop using the dining table for crafting and hubby doesn't feel like he's relegated to the box room to use his computer. Anyway, getting to the point, we're thinking of decorating this room with a bit of a vintage travel theme, so I made this vaguely steampunk mirror with a travel theme too.

The background map is one from an ancient maps calendar we had kept with the intention of framing the individual pages. I used similar techniques to the first mirror I made, and added various clips and memo pins to make it useful for holding notes or other bits and bobs. The image of the man was cut from Graphic 45 Steampunk paper.

I used various stamps, including a Tim Holtz clock and this cute steampunk birdy from Graphic 45.

Got to finish there as I keep getting whiffs of wonderful tandoori chicken smells from the kitchen and my stomach is growling too much to type :0)

xx

A Decorated Diary

Another of my Christmas related crafty projects was to decorate a diary for my Mum. Every year I buy her a diary as part of her christmas pressie and I try to find one that is a bit unusual - paperblanks ones most often. This year I couldn't find a nice one so hubby suggested I just got a cheap one and give it a new look. Its quite simple, but hopefully she'll like it.

Now I have one more craft project to do before christmas, but I'm keeping that one under wraps for now (i haven't even started it yet anyway!)

An experiment in vintage colours

I recently came across the work of Polish scrapbooker/artist Anna Dabrowska from the Prima design team (see her work here). I absolutely love the sense of colour and texture in her work - it's seriously gorgeous stuff!

Her work inspired me to try making a card using muted vintagey colours and layers of different textures.

The background was coloured with distress stains / inks (antique linen, vintage photo and victorian velvet) and then I built up a few layers of:

• vellum - coloured with antique linen, stamped with the Tim Holtz Papillon background in a brown archival ink, torn into strips and edged with victorian velvet
• Lace - stained with antique linen and swiped through a bit of victorian velvet on the craft sheet
• Lace effect cream paper ribbon edged with victorian velvet

I swiped a few brush fulls of rock candy crackle paint over parts of the whole thing for extra texture.

The butterflies were cut out of fabric using a Tim Holtz movers and shapers die. The fabric I used was some little squares (perfect size for the dies) that were actually samples of suede sofa fabric I kept from ages ago when we were choosing a new sofa (I new they'd come in handy eventually) - I love the feel of them :0)

I mounted the panel onto a book page distressed with vintage photo distress ink, and then onto a card blank. Finally, I stamped Happy Birthday onto some left over scraps of the book page, painted with a little cream acrylic paint first to lighten the text in the background.

It's a different style than other things I've done and about half way through I thought it was a disaster, but I persevered and now I hope you'll agree it's not actually turned out half bad  :0)

Thanks for stopping by.
xx

Beautiful butterflies

I've set myself the challenge of entering some challenges, so on Sunday afternoon I sat down with the aim of making something to enter into the Tim Holtz challenge on the Stamp Man challenge blog, and also the copper, ginger or rust challenge on the Gingersnap creations blog. I was planning to use the gorgeous new Crowded Attic papers from Tim Holtz which the postie delivered on Friday from Oyster Stamps - the butterfly and moth page is stunning.

But... I couldn't decide what to do with them and without a clear idea I just couldn't bring myself to start cutting.
Instead I found a little set of vintage images I'd forgotten I had and started playing around.

So, a few distress inks and Tim Holtz stamps later I came up with this tag. To be honest it's a bit more pretty and girly than I usually like, but I actually like it more than I expected to. It  might make a nice mothers day card for my mum.

I don't think I'll enter it in a challenge, but it has given me an idea of what to do with the Crowded Attic papers :0)

Simple pleasures

"I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex",  Oscar Wilde.

I just wanted to share a little frame thingie I made at the weekend. The cardboard frame was something I bought on impulse ages ago and never got round to doing anything with. That is until a fantastic article on altered books in this months Craft Stamper magazine inspired me. They created a frame from an old book covered with tissue paper stamped with script to give a really beautiful shabby chic effect.

Here I used some decorative tissue paper  (packaging from an online clothing purchase!) to cover the frame. The embellishments and central image are from the gorgeous Graphic 45 steampunk debutante range of papers. I finished it off with an 'Adore' stamp and wrote the Oscar Wilde quote above on the back - very fitting I think.

I'm quite pleased with the way its turned out, although I did make a bit of a mess of the stamping - enthusiasm winning over care and attention! Now I've got a little box frame that I think would work very well done in a similar way. Just got to find the time!

Weekly wishlist: Lets get anatomical!

In my day job I'm a psychologist working on the neuroscience of visual perception. I guess it's no surprise then that I find myself fascinated by images of eyes and brains and anything psychological, especially old textbook illustrations and diagrams which can be incredibly beautiful.  So... I thought I'd share a few cool crafty bits I've found on this theme.

First up on my wishlist is the oddities stamp set from Tim Holtz (and, while not strictly eye or brain related, the fab skeleton in the Haunted Mansion set must get a mention)

Etsy looks like it's a fantastic source for all sorts of anatomy related crafty ephemera:
Vision stamp from stampers anonymous - I love this one!
brain stamp
Blossom stamps has a few anatomical stamps including eyes and brains

Searching for phrenology also came up with some fab stuff, especially this amazing collage sheet

I could spend a fortune on digital collage sheets. There are so many wonderful vintage images available. Including these ones below from the magicpug and orangeclipart shops:

Thats enough for now. Remember your brain is beautiful! xx