Who would have thought...

Hello everyone... I just want to say thank you so much for your visits and feedback over the last week or so of crazy full-on posting.  It makes a world of difference having you along for the ride.

I'm back with a tag today inspired by a new Nicecrane Designs release, Steampunk Girls.  The fabulous Buttons shared some brilliant cards recently using the same set of digital images, plus one other.  Do check them out - they are completely fantastic.

Buttons (a.k.a. Jenny, but she'll always be Buttons to me!) challenged us to work out what caption we would use with these great images.

Funnily enough, I'd already planned a caption for mine, inspired by a visit to another brilliant crafter's blog - Alie Hoogenboezem de Vries (and isn't that just a name to conjure with?!).

Amongst her amazing art she'd shared a badge she found on Pinterest with a sentiment I think most crafters will recognise.

I tried to find the post again, or even the original pin so that I could get the wording right and give the credit where it's due, but had no luck... so I've stamped it out as I remember it.

With this tag I'm back on the watercolouring with Distress Stains.  I did this for quite a lot of my PaperArtsy samples and, to be honest, I could've sat there all day colouring in those JOFY flowers...

For some reason I find it immensely relaxing: splodge some stain on the craft mat, pick it up with a water brush, and play!








The stains blend so beautifully, and it's so easy to blot away colour if you've used too much, or add water through the brush to dilute the tone.

Because I'd printed out these images they weren't on watercolour paper, so there was some getting used to the different response of the stains on the surface, but that's all part of the fun.

I loved playing with my favourite blues, greens and turquoises to create all the glass tubes, jars and implements.










I certainly would never have imagined a year ago that crafty stash would have taken over my life and my room quite so completely... so I fell in love with these images immediately.

There's a speculative look in her eye as she looks at all that exciting equipment that I absolutely recognise - it's how I feel when I'm looking at crafty stash online (or, even more dangerously, in real life), and the thought running through my head is: "Ooh, now just think what I could do with that!"













And then the absorbed look as she waits for some reaction to occur reminds me of how the hours just slip away from me as I play with crackle or embossing or all the other potions and techniques, exploring their possibilities.








Even though I love my new Hero Arts alphabet, I had to resort to my trusty £1 set for the punctuation marks... no punctuation in the Hero Arts set - they choose instead to give you a tiny flower and a tiny dragonfly - yeah, cute, but come on!

I used Distress Stains in Pumice Stone and Stormy Sky to dye some seam binding to go on the top of the tag, tying multiple bows in differently coloured bits of ribbon.












After all the "watercolouring" was done, I cut the images out using the mini-Baroque die (holding my breath, trying to position it so that I didn't chop off bits of the image).

And I cut a label to stamp the quote onto.  This and the embossed background of the tag were inked with Pumice Stone and Stormy Sky Distress Inks to tone in with the colours of the images themselves.

And that was pretty much that.

The images from Nicecrane are so fabulous, and so detailed, that I really wanted to let them speak for themselves.  If you'd like to have a play you'll find the set here.

There are three more great cartoons in the set, as well as a great new male steampunk set... 















And there are lots of other amazing images available, so do have a browse while you're there.







A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
All quotes by Marie Curie