Three times three times three

Hello all!  I'm delighted to be here today to share a project created for a Guest Designer spot at the Funkie Junkie Boutique Blog.  I was honoured that my journalling page for the wonderful Time challenge was chosen as their winner, and I'm honoured to be guest designing for them today.  The current theme is one that made my heart sing when I heard about it... Triple the Heat - not for the heat, but for the tripling!  I love working in threes and trios and triptyches, so here's what I came up with...

The host, Suzz, is using the number three as the inspiration (you can read all about it over at the Funkie Junkie Boutique Blog), and I've got lots and lots of threes going on here, not just the three ATCs themselves.

There are three different insects, courtesy of the Tim Holtz Collage Paper glued on to the ATC backgrounds (and lightly gessoed over to soften the look).

There are three different mediums involved in making these... texture crackle paste, paint and ink.  Soft washes of PaperArtsy Fresco Finish chalk paints in soft purple (Wisteria, Forget-me-not and Lavender) and vibrant green (Lawn) bring colour.

There are splatters of the paint colours as well as washes.  The Ranger Opaque Crackle Texture Paste obviously brings the texture.

And DecoArt Quinacridone Gold mixed with Payne's Grey to create one of Andy Skinner's "dirty washes" soak down into the crackles, followed by a quick burnishing with Sepia Archival ink for an extra rusty look.

The most obvious of the "three of a kind" elements are the lavender stems, one to each ATC.  I picked them from the garden, but since they were already going over, I used the same Fresco paints to give them a fresher look.

And each lavender stem is accompanied by two inky/painty green stems, cut with one of Tim Holtz's Wildflower Thinlits dies, so that makes a total of three stems per ATC.

There are also three additional decorative elements on each ATC... a strip of Design Tape, a strip of lace, and a postmark label, stamped in Leaf Green Archival (from the TH Field Notes stamp set) and cut out.

Finally, and for me just as important as all the rest, we have the words.

The phrases are each three words long (but of course!), chosen from the Tiny Text stamp set.

They're stamped again in Leaf Green Archival to coordinate with everything else going on.

So, that's about that.  Many, many threesomes all built in to a trio of ATCs.  I like each of them individually, but best of all for me is how they work as a set, with the composition shifting slightly as the eye moves from tiny artwork to tiny artwork.

I hope that gives you some additional inspiration for the Triple the Heat challenge theme.  The design team have, of course, offered up glorious projects for you too, and you can see them all, read the challenge details and join in over at the Funkie Junkie Boutique Challenge Blog.

Thanks so much to the team for inviting me to guest design with them this time around, and thanks to all of you for stopping by today.  I hope you're having a relaxing and enjoyable August.  Stay safe, and happy crafting all!

Three things cannot long be hidden - the sun, the moon, and the truth.
Confucius

Merry Christmas!

I'm late for the 24th and the 25th in wishing all of you a very peaceful, joyous, merry - and above all safe - Christmas, but we celebrate for the whole 12 Days of Christmas, right through to January 6th, so as far as that goes, I'm still pretty early in proceedings!

I haven't made it to the craft table at all in the last ten days or so... I'm hoping time/inspiration for creativity will kick back in either with this festive break or with the energy of the New Year.  In the meantime, love and thanks to you all for your company over this last, strange, rollercoaster year, and here's hoping 2021 will be a better one for all of us.

Stay safe, stay well, stay creative.

Christmas is doing a little something extra for someone.
Charles M. Schulz

A Festive Farewell

Hello all - it's a bitter-sweet day... we've a lovely new challenge theme for you at A Vintage Journey, but sadly it's the very final challenge.   Reluctantly, we've all agreed that it's time to bring the journey to an end.  The wonderful Brenda, who was the originator of A Vintage Journey, has written about all the reasons why in a lovely post over at the challenge blog, so I won't repeat it all here.  But we're going out in style, with a double helping of tiny delights.  

Each of the Creative Guides has created a pair of ATCs for the Merry Little Christmas theme, and also a Farewell ATC.  You can create ATCs of your own following either prompt - festive or farewell - and we'd love it if you would join us on this final leg of the journey to celebrate the years of inspiration and creativity we've all shared together, both the team and all the participants.

I'll start with my festive pair, and a rare sighting of the colour red here at Words and Pictures.  I was lucky enough to win a wonderful prize package from Tim Holtz recently, and it included the lovely Sketch Greenery stamp set in action in the background here as well as the ephemera collaged over the top.

The smooshing in the background is a combination of Distress Inks and Oxides in the new Rustic Wilderness colour and some Speckled Egg too.

The fir branches are stamped in Rustic Wilderness Ink and clear-embossed to sparkle in the light.

I adore this deer - a lovely element in the ephemera pack... and you can still see plenty of the background between his legs!

I needed another delicate image to balance him, and this wreath worked perfectly - again, you can see the background through the middle.

And for once in a while I can even deal with having that little festive touch of red involved.  It's a rare occurrence round here!

The words are also from the Sketch Greenery stamp set.  They're stamped in Walnut Stain on some card smooshed in a few droplets of Pumice Stone Distress Ink to soften its whiteness.

A touch of inking around the edges and a little bit of snow splatter and we're all done...

So now it's time to say goodbye (well, not quite - we'll be back for one final post at the end of this month to announce the Pinworthies) so here's my farewell ATC.  

I'm so grateful for the friendships forged ever more deeply within the Vintage Journey team - it's been a delight and an honour to have served right from the very beginning.  But rather than look back, my ATC is looking forward.

I'm celebrating the joy of the journey with my favourite colours - blue and brown (specifically mainly Stormy Sky and Walnut Stain)...

... some lovely white embossing and a touch of metal and, of course, a butterfly...

... some background text stamping... 

... so many of my favourite things to commemorate one of my favourite ever teams to work with.

And the words (Idea-ology stickers) are looking ahead to whatever comes next with a grateful heart and positive outlook.

I hope you'll hop over to A Vintage Journey to hear from Brenda about our decision and to see the glorious inspiration from my fellow Creative Guides, and I very much hope that you'll find time to join us somewhere down the road this month for one final time to celebrate a Merry Little Christmas and/or a very fond farewell.  It would be lovely to go out with a bang.

Stay safe, stay well all, and I'll see you again soon.

How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.
Winnie the Pooh

Life is...

Hello all!  I'm here with a trio of altered money envelopes today.  They were made as samples for one of my latest stamp sets, launched last month by PaperArtsy.  All the quotes on these come from EAB19 Life & Living.

They ended up needing to be a trio because each of them starts with the phrase "Life is..." (or in one case "Life isn't..." but it then goes on to tell you what "Life is..." in the second half!).

The cash envelopes are actually just slightly larger than ATC sized, especially when you leave the top flap open, as I have, to receive possible gift vouchers or cash as a gift.

I won't keep you long, as these were really pretty simple to make, but just in case you want to know how, keep reading.













I started by smearing gesso onto the envelopes with a palette knife.  It's really not important to be neat or precise with this bit.








Next, I added watery washes from the chosen palette - a green-turquoise-blue-purple spectrum.








Once that was all dry, I stamped some of Courtney's fabulous leaves from ECF06, combining Leaf Green and Olive Archival directly on the stamp.

Some of the postmarks from the same set are stamped around the place in French Ultramarine Archival.














The French Ultramarine is actually a soft purply pale blue, so fitted perfectly with the paint palette.













I stamped the quotes on separate pieces of card, and embossed them in Wow Earthtone Pepper. 















I love this speckled grey, especially when it catches the light... it makes me very happy.














And I did want to have the authors' names somewhere in the mix.  Obviously, you can just cut them off and discard them, but sometimes I like to have them around.














Rather than have them conventionally attached somewhere as a footnote, I used them as little balancing accents in opposite upper corners.














Okay, Helen Keller made it to footnote sort of place in the bottom corner, but only because that was the position needed to get a balanced composition.















The cotton thread adds movement and dimension.














I love how the spontaneous coils and swirls bring everything to life.  And of course there's plenty of splatter, which I find has a similar effect.














If I'm using the method of stamping on a separate piece of paper and then cutting the quotes up, rather than stamping straight on a project, the positioning of the words is worth some attention.

For instance, with this Einstein quote, you can create the pause needed for the comic timing of the quote by leaving visual space between the words.

But maybe that's just me... I know I do have a strange and particular brain as far as words are concerned!




So there you go - another batch of samples from the new stamp sets.  I hope you like them.  My favourites are still to come.  That's going to be a more complicated blogpost to write.  





Hopefully now I'm safely settled in the Czech Republic (for a few weeks at least - all a bit up in the air, depending on building work) I'll have more time to play with.  I've got most of the unpacking done, and the travelling craft stash organised... there's quite a lot, though the pile is smaller than on some occasions in the past - have a look here, third photo down!).











Three Tim Holtz stamp folders, plus assorted extra stamps; plenty of Distress Ink and Oxide pads in the TH Cargo Case; tools and brushes and powders in the little Wendy Vecchi bag; and a couple of cardboard boxes rammed full - here's a sample of the top layer of the little one.  Next time out I'll try to remember to show you a couple of pictures of my current set up.





I hope you're all thriving this week, or at least surviving.  Stay safe, stay well everyone, and happy crafting!

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them - that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.
Lao Tzu

Encore - Trailing Ivy

I'm squeezing in a quick Encore post (see the end of the post if you've not encountered these before) between all the leafy watercolouring.  Apart from those leaf studies, there's not a great deal going on at the craft table, and even less now that I'm getting ready to travel across Europe to the Czech Republic to check (czech?!) on the building work).  Yes, it's time to pack the travelling stash again.

In the meantime, here's an ATC I absolutely love, made back in January 2018 for A Vintage Journey.  (It seemed appropriate to post a Destination Inspiration travel bag given what I'm about to do!)  Here's what I wrote back then...

_________________________________________

Hello all, Alison here, arriving at Destination Inspiration with a travel bag of goodies to play with.  Let's take a look inside and see what we have:

Product: Sprays

Technique: Stamping

Colour: Blue & Brown

Substrate: Wood or Chipboard

It's a bag I might have packed all by myself!  And here's what I've created with some of my favourite things...

It was a lucky travel bag for me!

I hope I'll be allowed my slight variation on the substrate - it's actually an MDF ATC from Calico Craft Parts - so it's somewhere between Wood and Chipboard, I suppose.

I stuck down some book pages scraps and an ivy die-cut, added some DecoArt One-Step Crackle and lightly gesso'd over it all once the crackle was dry.  I then added a few spritzes of Distress Stain Sprays in blues and browns and sprayed with water to soften them.  Next, I took the spray nozzle out of the bottle and added some inky spray directly to the edges, softening again with water; and then flicked a few droplets of Ground Espresso from the end of the tube onto the ATC.

So that all that would stay in place as I added more layers, I covered it with a layer of DecoArt Ultra Matte Varnish before going any further.  The next step was a layer of Antiquing Cream in White, knocked back to give this lovely misty effect.

Of course it stays in the cracks though, which I love.

For my stamping, I used some tiny brambly branches - I think they may be by Penny Black - stamped in either Coffee or Potting Soil Archival.

(It's a long time since I made this, I'm afraid, so I'm not quite sure any longer.)

I wanted to make the ivy leaves stand out a little more so I gave them a coat of DecoArt Triple Thick Gloss Glaze.  I love the subtle gleam when it catches the light.

Some Clippings stickers provide the words...

... a good New Year thought to take me through the year ahead.

And of course there's plenty of white spatter...

It may be a tiny ATC, but I think it packs a punch.  I love all the layers, and the soft, smoky blues and browns.

_______________________________________

So here we are back in the present day.  This ATC really was a tiny experimental laboratory.  Lots of the techniques I used here have appeared in all sorts of projects since.  When it's an ATC, there's really no pressure.  You can try things out because, well, if things go wrong, it's a tiny thing to give up on.  I hope you enjoyed seeing this again.  And I'll be back again soon (probably with some more of this month's watercolouring).  Stay safe, stay well and happy crafting all.

Like ivy, we grow where there is room for us.
Miranda July

Encore Posts

Projects which made their first appearances elsewhere for Design Team duties or Guest Designer opportunities, but which only had a sneak peek here, are being gathered together in the pages of my virtual scrapbook while I'm busy.

As always, the Encore Posts are formatted differently from the regular ones, so that you can easily spot them.  Please don't feel that you have to comment all over again!