Close to My Heart

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

 

Where’s the creative time?

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

I got to golf today and it wasn’t raining.  This in of itself is unusual for July.  In addition to that, I actually felt pretty good about my playing (other than a couple of shots, I was pleased with my ball striking.)

Next I came home, packed the kids up and we heading to the Sault for some errands.  We had lots of success and they should be ready to head to Grandma’s on Friday.  Sunscreen, new swimsuits, new shoes, a sundress for the girl and snacks.  I also picked up some necessities for the house.  With the 95+ temps and HIGH humidity, it was all I could do to bring the bags in and put the few cold items away.  Dinner still needed to be fixed and as I didn’t have a kitchen sink I needed to tackle that too.

So, now dinner is over, still missing a kitchen sink, but I decided it was creative time.  I’ve learned that crafting makes me happy and I’m much nicer to be around when I’m happy!  I highly recommend finding some creative time each day.  It doesn’t have to be long, but if I set a timer for 30 minutes I tend to stay focus and get something done!  I have some cards that were cut out for a May scrapbooking weekend, but just haven’t had time to assemble/stamp/embellish them.  This was a perfect place for me to start.

I’m making 4 (or 5 sometimes) of each of the cards, so I can just repeat what I did for the first one and wah-lah I have 4 cards ready in no time.

Here is the card. and some instructions.

avonlea  I cut a 4×12″ base (that way you can get three from one 12×12) out of juniper CS and top folded it.  I then cut a
mat that was 3.5 x 5.5 out of black CS.   Using the Cricut Artist cartridge and my gypsy (You can do the same on
Cricut craft room), I modified the image on p60 to be a rectangle rather than a square.  I also cut 3 of the
lacy circles for the bottom, both out of black CS.    I used a 3.25×5.25 piece of paper from the Avonlea paper pack . I used Colonial White CS for my sentiments and centers of my lacy circles.  I stamped a circle flourish with juniper ink in the circles.  I punched a butterfly using a neighbors punch.  You could cut one from the Cricut Cartridge Art Philosophy too.  Added rickrack Colonial White ribbon and using the distressing tool roughed up all the edges of the base papers.  The flowers are  wooden flowers from trinkets wooden shapes.

I’m including the same card using Buzz and Bumble paper, so you can see that too. The base is Sorbet CS.buzznbumble

Another Card from Club Night & Art Philosophy Cricut Cartridge

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

The sun is still shining so I am outside makin’ hay. Literally in my case.
Thought I would share another one of the cards we did at our last club night.  I really like this one, and as it uses cut outs from the CTMH Cricut Art Philosophy cartridge, it was easy to prep for everyone!

birdhouse cardI used the bird  and wing from p51  and cut them out of Chocolate CS.  I used the sanding block to “ruffle” the birds feathers and also used the end of the rub on tool to break some of the fibers in the body of the bird so it would “puff out” a little.  Once it was puffed I attached it to the card using foam tape.

The Branches are from p35 in 2 sizes (don’t recall the size, sorry) and the leaves were cut off the branch with leaves on p43.  I then creased the leaves down the center to give them more appeal.

The bird house in used on this card was from a free set I picked up at a craft show, but for club night I used a solid arrow(p64) pointed up, trimmed the shaft of the arrow and added a strip along the bottom for a base.  You can trim the points of the arrows to really make it look like a real bird house.

I sponged “clouds” with sky ink (what else)  to make the words look like they were in the clouds.

Have a great day!

 

Yes, It’s Definitely July

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

Well, as I spent my morning doing computer/house work, and my afternoon on a tractor being hot and sweating while bailing hay, I would say it must be July.

Once more no crafting was done, but the house is still fairing well thanks to my push to stay on top of things, and my daughter’s motivation to get paid for babysitting her brother.  She really has done well keeping things better than she normally would with few complaints.

Looks like I’ll be able to go to the all day crop on Thursday as the weather forecast is for thunder storms. Maybe I should try and use the alcohol markers to color in the July Stamp of the Month images as that is going to be use on our project in August.  Hmmm.  Perhaps I will.  I’ll put a sneak peak up tomorrow if I do manage to keep my eyes open.

So today I’ll show off one the cards we did in June at club night!  I used the Art Philosophy cartridge for both ovals and the sentiment piece on the bottom of the card.

Lighthouse CTMH

Birthday Card

lighthouseinside

Happy Crafting!

 

← Older posts
Newer posts →