Think Pink - Simon Says Stamp Guest Designer

Hello all - I'm thrilled to be back in the Designer Spotlight over on the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge for October, and we're starting the month with Think Pink.

It's always a huge honour to be invited to be part of the fun over on Simon Says Stamp (though I probably need to look at my calendar more carefully next time before saying yes... it's a busy month ahead!).

As always, you'll find oodles of inspiration from the amazing Design Team over on the Monday Challenge blog, and there's the usual generous prize on offer from Simon Says Stamp. 

This week's theme of Think Pink is in honour of Breast Cancer Awareness month.

Pink used to be a rare colour here at Words and Pictures, but lately it's been getting more common.  It started with a lot of wintry sunrises and sunsets in my work last winter, but lately it's definitely happening because of some of the floral stamps I've created for PaperArtsy in recent months.  So when I was asked to "Think Pink", my thoughts went immediately to my PaperArtsy EAB49 Coneflowers.  

I thought they'd look great with Tim Holtz's lovely daisy from the French Garden set, so I stamped lots of blooms in Olive Archival Ink onto some watercolour paper.

I used a combination of PaperArtsy Mattints and Dylusions sprays to tint my flowers.  Dylusions are the featured product this week.  I don't have many of the sprays - as you'll know, I have tended to prefer my colour palettes muted rather than in the vivid, vibrant Dylusions tones - but I have a few browns and greens and blues in most mediums (to try out), and Dylusions are no exception.

I put dots of Mattint and tiny spritzes of the sprays onto my craft mat to use as a palette, and layered them together to create fabulous variations and depth of colour.  As you can see from the photos, I used Mattints in Glow, Ladybug Squeezed and The Pink, and Dylusions Chopped Pesto, Dirty Martini and Melted Chocolate.  A touch of PaperArtsy Fresco Finish Chalk Acrylic in Snowflake allowed me to create more opaque layers and pastels.  Any white acrylic will do for that.  I'm very happy with how they turned out... the Dylusions might be coming out more often from now on!  

I altered a cheap and simple wooden frame with a coat of white chalk paint and some Distress Opaque Crackle Paste.

And for my background, I used one of the wood effect Tim Holtz 3D Texture Fades.  I think this particular one has been discontinued now, but there are plenty of others to choose from, including the amazing new large size versions.

Once the crackle had done its thing, I grunged it up with some Pumice Stone Distress Crayon and Pumice Stone Distress Spray Stain, brushed on to highlight those fabulous cracks and crevices.

I chose one of the fabulous Idea-ology Photobooth snapshots to go at the heart of my garden of dancing flowers.  I love the energy and joy emanating from this woman.

And then it was simply a question of arranging the flowers around the edge of the frame and gluing them into position.

A few of my much-loved Curator Snippets labels add extra detailing, and it wouldn't be a Words and Pictures project without some words.

These are from the Coneflowers plate - the large word is one of three, especially selected by me to suit the mood of the stamp set, and the phrase is a poetry fragment from a poem by Lope de Vega.

If that isn't enough to inspire you to Think Pink this week, then do head over to the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge for lots more glorious pink creativity from the Design Team there.

The team will be selecting projects to spotlight at the end of the week, and one lucky randomly-drawn winner will be going on a shopping spree at Simon Says Stamp.  

So dig out all your pink materials and have a play.  If I can go pink, you definitely can!!

Thanks so much for stopping by, and happy crafting all!

Pink is the colour of strength, a colour of conviction, a colour of decision making.
Angad Bedi

In a world that often lacks compassion, pink stands as a reminder to be kind.
Matthew Green

Encore - Doodly Twosome

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 away.

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!

Hello all from a lovely sunny Czech Republic.  I'm busy with all sorts of stuff here (not dollshouses, though... don't get your expectations up), so I'm just popping in with a quick Encore Post to keep things ticking over.  But watch out for a very exciting post this weekend!

This tag duo was created for The Artistic Stamper Creative Team back in July 2014, using some of the fabulous stamps from The Artistic Stamper (some of which were new at the time).  Here's what I wrote back then...

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Hello all!  Alison (butterfly) here again, this time with a pair of tags which are not quite in my usual vein - though they are in some of my favourite colours!

I used the new Alphabet Soup by Neil Walker as my starting point.  I clear embossed the background onto a tag.

Then I sprayed lots of lovely Dylusions colour onto it, and dried it with a heat tool.  I love the squiggly doodly lettering.

The next step was to cut Umbrella Man with the Sizzix die. (Did I dream it, or did I read that he's been discontinued?)

I hadn't really planned on making two tags, but as soon as I'd cut him, I realised I had the makings of a 'positive' and a 'negative' version.

For the backgrounds, I just blended on various Distress Ink colours from grass to sky and gave both tags a good old spritz and flick with some water.

The words are all from the fabulous Journalling Words #5 set.  I stamped them onto another inky tag I had lying around on the desk, in a combination of Mowed Lawn and Peacock Feathers, and clear embossed the result.

I cut them and inked the edges and mounted them on padded tape for a little pop of dimension.

I altered a couple of Muse Tokens with Distress Paint, then sanded back to the metal underneath.

As soon as I saw the silvery detailing, I wanted to echo it on the rest of the tags.

So I used some silver gilding wax to edge the words and the tags themselves.

I ended up adding quite a lot of silvery sheen to the embossed Alphabet Soup too because I really liked the look of it.

A couple of twirls of metal wire finish off the tags at the top.  It's just some more of the rescued wires from some spiral bound notebooks that were being thrown away... 'waste not, want not', as they say!

And that's pretty much that... I hope you like my doodly tags.

Thanks so much for stopping by - I always love to hear what you think.

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So, that's your Doodly Twosome for today.  I hope they brought back happy memories for you.  I find these trips back in time to my earlier crafting days remind me of all sorts of techniques I haven't used for ages, not to mention products which I have hiding in the stash, yearning to be brought out to play again.  More time, more time... that's what we all really need!

Thanks for dropping in today and, as I say, keep your eyes peeled for lots of excitement here at Words and Pictures on Saturday.  I hope to see you then.

The mind is like an umbrella. Its most useful when open.
Walter Gropius

When butterfly met Papillon

Hello all!  I'm dredging up some fairly Ancient History again.  Recently I shared the altered book made during a fabulous weekend workshop with the amazing France Papillon back in November 2014, and in that post I mentioned that we'd done lots of other things with her too and that I'd try to track them down.

Well, by chance, the art journal I grabbed to bring with me to Columbus, Ohio, as part of my travelling stash is the one we got at that workshop and did some experimenting in.  It's the Ranger/Dylusions small journal, 8x5 inches.

While I was playing in it today, I thought I might as well grab some photos of some of the exploring we did over that weekend, so this post has more of what happened when butterfly met Papillon (which is French for butterfly, in case you didn't realise!).  I like some results better than others...






France explained how she often uses her journals just to find out how products will work together, so the early pages were our chance to mess around with some of the sprays and pastes and other toys she'd brought for us to play with.

(The trouble with sharing this now, of course, is that it's making me crave access to the many and varied products I have at home, whereas I've got to make do with my limited Ohio craft kit!)











There's more shimmer around than I'm used to working with, but it made such sense to play in this way - trying out some of my favourite colour combinations but in three different colour mediums over one page spread, and with different finishes.










Whilst I like the mysterious look of some of that shimmer over black gesso, especially with the added texture, it doesn't feel very me.

I'm an occasional user of black gesso, for sure, but in limited amounts, and it usually vanishes under layers and layers of other stuff.






This page spread feels a bit more like a butterfly one - from grass to sky, texture, crackle and text...

This was a chance to create with the products or effects we'd enjoyed the most so far, and I leapt at my often-favoured blue/greens (second only to the blue/browns here at Words and Pictures).






I enjoyed "messing up" the clean edges of the harlequin crackle texture - I think I was going off-piste with that, as is my wont in classes.














I really love the script stencil - might have to track that down and put it on the Christmas wishlist, I think.  And the spattery water droplets in the background do make me very happy.














I find myself quite taken with the level of shimmer here - as you know I love things that catch the light... I'm just not used to so much mica.  

I was in two minds about whether to share this next page - it took me a long way out of my comfort zone and I remain pretty ambivalent about the results.












France set up the process deliberately to take away our control.  On each table of crafters, we had to take it in turns to say what would be the next element added to the page, whether that was to use a specific colour, technique, or even a particular stamp.












As I've just mentioned, I really don't go for black in my crafting very much (it's even rare for me to stamp in black), so I was very resistant when somebody required the addition of the black stencilling.  I do like the spatter though.










We happened to have the lovely Magda Polakow at our table and this little Nina figure had just been released by Stampotique as part of her range of stamp designs.

It's not an image I would usually go for and again I was aware of a crunch of resistance in my spine, but what's a workshop for if not to try new things?  And I do now think she's pretty cute - if still not very me!











Orange is, if anything, even rarer than black here, and I nearly went nuts when I was only allowed to add my fabric texture to one side of the spread, which upsets my sense of balance.  So overall, this page feels a long way off from conventional "butterfly" creativity.  I don't know... what do you think?

Actually the quote on this page is very apt because, in being made to do this, I learned a lot about myself as a crafter.  My heart spoke loudly throughout, and I took good note of its protests for future reference!!









For the next page, France herself called out the stages.  She kept it much vaguer - add texture, add colour with sprays, add some stamping - so it was possible to be both out of control of the process but also make it feel like one's own work.












Given I'm known also as butterfly, and given the workshop was being run by France Papillon, it seemed only right that they should be my featured theme on these pages.














Lots of my other usual suspects are here too - lots of texture, as well as lots of text...












...tissue wrap, lovely inky blues and greens...

(I love these Stampotique hearts, which I do actually own, but they're only rarely inked up - time to change that when I get home eventually.)












... some metal and some book page scraps...

Definitely a good sentiment for the weekend!












And the tiny bright red heart is a deliberate homage to France's own work - she very often uses one as an accent in her beautiful journalling.

Sadly my train home was booked at a time which meant I had to leave before the very last exercise of the day, in which France was making the group create to classical music without any chatting at all - something I'd have loved to do... though, of course, to be honest, it's how I create almost all the time, so it would hardly have been new to me!!









It was an absolute joy to meet France Papillon in person.  She's been a huge inspiration to me online, and the chance to take part in a whole weekend of playing with her was fantastic.

There are some (as yet unfinished) ATCs hanging around somewhere in my craft room from the same workshop.  If I ever get them done, I'll share those too!




Thanks so much for stopping by today.  I'll be back in a few days with the new page spread I've just been working on in this same art journal, and then at some point I hope to catch you up with some more of my real-life travels.  Shanghai (from back in February this year - I'm a long way behind!) should be our next port of call for that, so I'll hope to see you again soon.

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.
Kahlil Gibran