Nature and Walnut stain

I have just discovered walnut stain distress ink from Tim Holtz and I love IT! Wow it is just fab to use to distress papers. So having a play with the walnut stain I did this card with the fab sketch from Stamp Something (just got it done in time for the challenge - again) using the Nature theme from Arty Girlz. Thanks guys for the great inspiration.


Do you like the inches? Well truth be told they are slightly bigger than inches but just by a touch. The little butterflies and ladybird are stamped and cut from patterned paper and I've used some paper piercing for the butterfly trails. The paper used was from Basic Grey (edged with walnut stain of course!) and the main stamp is a Crafty Individuals stamp.

Thanks for sampling my card Arty Girlz :)

Using Acetate

Wanted to try making a card using acetate rather than card stock for a change. Thought it might be interesting. The layout comes from Friday Sketchers challenge blog and I thought I would put it up on the Tanda Stamps circle and flowers challenge.

Making my own background papers

I love all the wonderful background papers that you can buy. There are some beautiful works of art in paper that I often find them hard to cut up, I'm sure you know what I mean? But I also love making my own background paper. This was one of those 'I wonder what would happen if I....' occasions and I was really pleased with the result and plan to use it again to make some more.


Found it quite hard to get a good piccy of it though, as a number of the pictures I took did not capture the gold shimmer.

So the background starts by cutting out photocopied snippets from my large Oxford Dictionary of quotations and layering them onto a piece of white A4 paper at different angles, holding in place with a dab of glue stick. The next stage is to photocopy this collage of words and quotes onto ordinary white A4 paper. I cut the background into the shape I wanted and then started to colour with distress ink pads brayered onto a craft mat, sprayed with water and then brayered onto the paper, keeping the darker inks to the edges. Allow this to dry a bit before spraying with a gold glimmer/mica spray. Allow to dry and then flatten under some books (or all your craft magazines).

Thought I might enter this for the challenge on the 'Lots to do Challenges blog' using Crafty Individual stamps.