Artwork

October Cropping Weekend

by CraftyAmanda in Artwork, Close to My Heart, Cricut, CTMH, Stamping | Leave a comment

Today I’ve been finalizing my contract for our upcoming cropping weekend.  It’s got me thinking about menus, projects and guessing who is going to be able to join us this year.  cropwkn3We’ve grown so much and I know if we had everyone that has ever come we would be maxed out of our space.

It’s a smaller weekend (35 max attendees), and I love it that way.  Each weekend we do a card project, a scrapbook project and a home décor or alterable item project.  Here is our home décor project we did a couple of years ago.

In preparation for the weekend I asked everyone to provide me with their favorite 3 CTMH paper packs, keeping in mind the project would most likely be in their home.  Happily I was able to provide everyone with their first paper choice and we made these family blessing boards.

I cut the sir names for everyone and pre-printed the verses on vellum.  They then got to decorate it however they liked.

cropwkn2

Apparently my “quilt” look was a hit as everyone did a similar layout.  We used the heavy chipboard coasters from the Memory cubes (retired) to hold our verses above our backgrounds.  Everyone decorated theirs a bit differently.

One gal learned a new technique, to her, and created some leaves with a circle punch and a dry embossing stylus.

cropwkn1bAnother regular at my workshops pulled out the Cricut and using Art Philosophy cut out some sweet leaf CS branches and leaves.  She too used her embossing stylus and brought the leaves to life before placing them on her board.

I found these “wine chalkboards” at OTC in their clearance sections.  I love creating thing from garage sale and clearance bin finds!

Not sure what all three of our projects are going to be this year.  I’m sure they will be fun!  If you have any great ideas, please share.  I’m always looking for inspiration.

Happy Crafting!

 

August Club Night Project

by CraftyAmanda in Artwork, Cards, Close to My Heart, Cricut, CTMH | 2 Comments

 

JulySOTMcardoutsideYes, I have the project for next club night all figured out!  phew.  Now that CTMH and their supplier of our alcohol markers have achieved full manufacturing of them I am ready to teach a class on marker coloring.  Alcohol markers are very different from ink markers, and thus require a different approach.  I’m not going to go into details today as a tractor is warming up for me, but I promise to publish something later.  I hope to have a hand out for club night, so I’m sure I can link something on here once I get the write-up instructions done.

Now, on to the assembly of this wonderful card.  I used a piece of patterned paper from the new Sarita papers.  I cut it 4.25 x 5.5 then cut a .25 frame and flipped the inside rectangle over to create a matted effect.  I used the zip-strip from the top of the paper and cut a 4.25″ piece.  I put this over the patterned paper. Using the new Artbooking cartridge I cut the lattice out of chocolate cardstock. (I lent my cartridge to another consultant, so I can’t tell you the page number right now.)  I lightly sanded the lattice letting the white show through.  Using a 2×2 white daisy cardstock square I stamped the cherries using our black pigmet ink.  While I waited for the ink to dry (pigment ink takes longer, sigh), I cut seven 1/2″ flowers from the Art Philosophy cartridge p50.JulySOTMcardinside I also cut a branch with leaves on it p43 out of pear cardstock.  I removed the leaves from the stem and folded them to give them character, then put dots with a ruby marker in the centers of the flowers.  I use the rub on tool to cup the flowers, then turn each cupped flower over and again using the rub on tool rub only the center of the flower to make it have dimension.   (I’ll try and get a better photo of that for you.) By now the pigment ink had dried and I colored in my leaves, branch and cherries with pear, ruby, blush, and the blending markers.  (more on the technique later.)  I sponged the edges of my 2×2 square with sky ink and pop dotted it on the lower right corner of the card.  The inside of the card used one of the sentiments from the July Stamp of the Month along with part of the apple stamp.  (The card isn’t really bent, but I couldn’t get it to stand up for the photo.)

Hello Tweety

by CraftyAmanda in Artwork, Cards, Close to My Heart, Cricut, CTMH, Stamping | 2 Comments

tweetcard

Can you tell I need birthday cards?  I’ve been making them almost exclusively lately!

This is a straight forward card as far as techniques go, but packs a punch with it’s design.  A fellow consultant and friend,  Erica, designed this card for us to create.  She used the Hello Tweety stamp set with Colonial White ink on a kraft cardstock strip.  We used our cricuts and the border from p65 of Art Philoshopy to create the white daisy edges.  Our card base was lagoon cardstock (4×6).  By varying where we started stamping our birds on the wire, we were able to create many different arrangements of the birds together.  I used sorbet string left over from an old sorbet mini medley pack, but bakers twine would work well there too.   Keeping with the theme of using up left overs, the flowers were from a grab bag I received at a crop.

We each created 4 of these cards, but varied the card color for the bases.  It was great getting four more birthday cards to add to my stash.  I really seem to be going through them now.

Hope you have a crafty day!

 

Home and Crafting again – Masking Technique

by CraftyAmanda in About Me, Artwork, Cards, Close to My Heart, CTMH, Stamping, Technique | 4 Comments

Well, I made it back from leaving the kid’s at my Mom’s house.  Her root canal got postponed a day, but I’m sure everyone will be just fine.  The kids loved going to VBS today, and were already looking forward to going tomorrow.

As the house is quiet, I decided to continue the assembly of the card sets from my May weekend.  (I’m getting closer to being caught up with my UFOs, unfinished objects.)

So, here it is.bearswithmasking

I used a retired stamp set, one of my favorites, called raccoon and friends. To get the bears to be in front of the mountains, I used a technique called masking.  I will try and explain what I did.  First I stamped the bears on a scrap piece of paper and trimmed closely around the image.   After I trimmed the image I used the two way glue and applied it to the back of the cut out piece.  I then stamp the bears in Chocolate ink on my project.  Making sure the two way glue had dried and was not repositionable, I covered the stamped image of the bears on my project.  This allowed me to ink up the mountains in outdoor denim and stamp them on my project.  Using the same masking technique as the bears, I masked the first (darker) mountain range and without re-inking the stamp stamped the mountains again.  This made them lighter in color (2nd generation stamping) and once again pushed them behind the first mountains.  I removed the masks from the mountains and the bears and proceeded to stamp the grass.  I used sponges to create the colorful sky.

sunsetsponging

Here is another example using the same sized pieces, but arranged vertically.  I used masking in a different way on this card.  I punched a 1/2″ circle out of CS and after swirling some honey ink, I placed the circle on the honey ink then used sponges to create the sky background.  After I was done and removed the circle mask,  I got a sun behind my silhouetted flowers.

I am squeezing in my crafting time right now, but soon I will start taking photos of the process (and use stamps that are available to order, sorry).

Have a crafty day.

 

 

Third Thursday = All day crop and club night

by CraftyAmanda in About Me, Artwork, Close to My Heart | Leave a comment

Well it’s the third Thursday of the month, so today is a crafting with my friends day.  Yay!

I was trying to update my cricut gypsy last night so I could add the new artbooking cartridge, but it didn’t want to cooperate.  This morning when the storms woke me, I do love a good lighting show, I got up to try again. Still no luck.  I think I’ll need to reboot my computer and give it one more try!

While the computer and gypsy were not communicating well last night I started gathering my goodies that I need to take today.  As I am not providing the project for tonight, a first, I should be able to travel rather light!  I still have several cards to put together from the May weekend and I might grab one of the new paper packs and start my workshop on the go sample pages.

First some coffee, then I am going to have a chat with my computer and gypsy and see if I can mediate their problem!

Have a great day.

Update:  So far the reboot of the computer and gypsy have allowed them to start talking once again.  It’s uploaded all the support updates (12) and now is on to the image content.  I guess I can finish packing up my projects and make some breakfast.  I’ll post a photo of what I got accomplished later today or tomorrow.

lemonsignHers it is.  This was our project for the evening.  First time ever we did a non Close to my Heart project.  It was a lot of fun.  Shelly let us pre-order our vinyl sayings then she brought the boards, paints and sayings so we could create our boards.  It was so much fun many of us made more than one board.  I made four!  We go through a lot of homemade lemonade in our house, and I thought this would be a great addition to one of our kitchen walls.

I didn’t get a photo of the fourth sign as I took it to my Mom’s the next morning when LiveSimpsignI took the kids to her house, but here are the other two signs I made.  The green one is for my office/studio space and the other might be a gift so don’t tell anyone.  <grin> Todaysmemsign

 

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