Boardwalk Beach Hut

Hello everyone, so lovely to be here today.  Busy schedules over the last week or so have left me feeling a bit cut off from Craftyblogland - but I'm back to share another of my creations with the fantastic new Artistic Outpost stamp set Boardwalk, and to catch up with some visiting to see what you've all been up to as well.


This little beach hut was already sitting on my craft table before I knew anything about the new stamps.  In fact it was on the UK craft table all by itself all the time I was away in the Czech Republic. 



And when I saw these Boardwalk images (online whilst still in CZ) I knew that the beach hut would really come into its own as soon as I could get home and marry it with the stamps - which were also by that point waiting for me in the UK.... complicated, I know - welcome to my itinerant world.



(Crafting is really not a very good hobby to have if you're going to be mobile.  People have expressed surprise at how much stash I seem to travel with.  Well, here it all is a couple of weeks ago - packed up to come home to the UK again. 

 
Fortunately we travel by car, so I can be fairly generous with my supplies, but of course it's also important to get your packing priorities right...

Most of this is stash - um, yup, that's two big black boxes piled on top of each other, plus many orange boxes collected from the market and rammed full of stuff, various shoe-boxes, bags and tins, plus the Tim Holtz cargo case - while the small red suitcase contains my clothes for ten weeks!)

The beach hut itself is from Calico Crafts, as are the DecoArt paints I used on it, but I brought in some PaperArtsy crackle glaze to get my weatherbeaten paint look.














I also used one of the Generation Redux stamps - the bubbles - for some additional texture; and inked with Pumice Stone and Walnut Stain for added distressing.















The stamping is done in Cobalt Archival or Memento Teal Zeal, or sometimes both together blended on the stamp.

The trio of bathing beauties is such a fabulous image - I love it!

And this glamorous woman under her sun umbrella is a delight too...

The trio of seashells take their place on the front door, and there's a cute little hook on the back of the hut should you wish to hang it up for display.








Thanks so much for stopping by today.  Don't forget that, until June 8th, there's 15% off all rubber stamps at Artistic Outpost, and if you've got at least one AO image on your project, you can enter it for the prize draw in the Monthly Referral Programme on the blog.

And in honour of my four Bathing Beauties, I've a favourite poem to share.  It's by e.e.cummings again - he of the no punctuation, strange spacing and no capital letters style - just let it run free!

maggie and milly and molly and may 
went down to the beach(to play one day) 

and maggie discovered a shell that sang 
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star 
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing 
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone 
as small as a world and as large as alone. 

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me) 
it's always ourselves we find in the sea
e.e.cummings

I'd like to enter this in the following:
At Artful Times they're looking for Vintage makes
As it's a wooden beach hut, a cheeky entry for Into the Woods at Simon Says Stamp and Show
Anything Goes is the challenge at Simon Says Stamp this week

Flutter by, butterfly

Hello all!  Amidst all the exciting announcements, I've got an actual project to share with you!  


(If you've missed any of the news bulletins, the Our Creative Corner one is here and the Artistic Stamper one is here.)


The stamps for this are all from Artistic Outpost... the sentiment from the Typography plate, and the tiny hedgerow flowers (yup, you heard me - hedgerow flowers) from the Generation Redux plate.
















I started with a little papier-mâché hanging board (the small size: just over 5 x 2 inches and half an inch deep), Fresco paints, and a stencil from Magenta, and let it grow from there.











The Magenta stencil is adorable, with these tiny butterflies dancing all the way up.  I applied some Wendy Vecchi embossing paste through it onto the front of the board, and added a few more fluttering onto the edge of the board.












Once it was dry, I started to blend on my paints with a sponge.  Snowflake first, then some Ice Blue and Sky (appropriately, given that's what I wanted it to look like).










The final bit of colour blending was done with Peeled Paint Distress Ink, just to add definition to the edges.













It also gives a bit more of a grassy feel, especially at the foot of the hanging.

I used some tissue paper stampings of the sentiment to decide where and what colour it should be.

In the end I went for a blending of inks onto the stamp, Ranger Cobalt Archival, Memento Teal Zeal and Olive Archival shading across the words from side to side.

And once I'd worked out the position, I took the plunge and stamped it straight onto the board.










The flowers are stamped in Olive Archival; stamping repeatedly from one inking gives you the impression of plants in the foreground and in the distance.









Then it was out with the Distress Markers.  I coloured the butterflies with the brush end, and then added some fine detailing using the firm tip.

I almost think I liked it better before the antennae and dots were there - but there's no picture of that stage, so I'm afraid I can't ask for your input on it!













A simple little hanging then, but one that gives me pleasure... I hope it's done the same for you.

You've still got just a couple of days to join in with the April Referral Programme at Artistic Outpost: just one AO image, and your project will qualify for the prize draw - so come and play!

Thank you so much for stopping by today.  I hope your Sunday has been restful, restorative and has set you up for a wonderful week to come.  See you out there!

Flowers and butterflies drift in colour, illuminating spring.
Author Unknown

The green grass and the happy skies
court the fluttering butterflies.
Terri Guillemets





I'm entering this in the following:
Simon Says Stamp and Show are looking for Colour - from any medium - I've got paint, ink and markers
Country View Crafts have a theme of Butterflies this month
The Inspiration Journal have a couple of days left playing with Marvellous Masks and Spectacular Stencils
And I'd like to hook up to Hels Sheridan's Sunday Stampers, where all you need to do is use Blue

Beer Mat Art?

Hello all...  Lovely to have your company for a while here at Words and Pictures (especially if this is your second trip today!  If you're looking for the new Fun With ATCs challenge, you'll find it here.)


I'm here with another design piece for eclectic Paperie, and it's one of the projects I've been mentioning which uses the new Donna Downey hedgerow stamps from Unity.


You may already have seen the first tag I made with them, and now I'm back with something a bit more substantial.








As usual with an eP post, you'll find links at the foot of the page to take you to all the ingredients I've used.


I created this mini-album out of beer mats (or coasters, if you prefer), some paint and some stamps, simple as that really!


I love the projects where you go from a few unassuming ingredients to having a whole book, or whatever it is, in your hands - it delights me to create something out of nothing.



I've got an insanely busy and exciting week coming up (watch this space!!) so I'll try really hard to keep this fairly brief... though there are, of course, plenty of photos.










I gave each mat a rough coat of Ice Blue Fresco paint (though any acrylic would do) leaving plenty of the white surface showing at the edges for a slightly rustic look.











I added some of the Tim Holtz tissue tape from the Hobgoblin set for texture.  Snap'em up - they're in the eP Clearance section at half price!  Click the picture link below to go straight there.















I then used a piece of card to add strokes of dark brown paint.












They're sort of intended to be a little bit 'grassy', but really I just like the dynamic look of them!














I used Coffee Archival and Memento Teal Zeal inks to stamp the Delicate Flowers and the Wayward Blooms by Unity.  On sides where the DFs are in Coffee, the WBs are in Teal and vice versa, creating variations on each double page spread.











The quotes are selected from both the Empowered Words and the Art and Possibility set, as I wanted each of them to include a "handwritten" word.

They're stamped in Coffee Archival and mounted on dark brown cardstock, randomly torn and inked.  Lots of fun arranging these so that they made the best use of the backgrounds I'd created.













Obviously there's lots of inking with Gathered Twigs too, but pretty much my favourite part of this project was adding highlights using the Inkssentials white gel pen.


It's remarkable how therapeutic it is dotting in all the blossoms on the flowers - you enter a kind of Zen trance state!


That's also how this little book feels to me... 







Since there's relatively little variation from page to page, it really foregrounds the quotes, and allows the mind to soften and contemplate. It's very calming.

I've no idea whether what I'm doing is art, but it certainly makes me happy!






The front and back covers got some extra inking to "weather" them, and I used double strands of twine to bind my little book, and that was pretty much that.









As this consists of beer mats altered to make a book, I'm going to offer it as some extra inspiration to join the current eclectic Paperie Get Altered challenge - Altered Books.








All the details of the challenge are here, and there's a prize voucher, generously sponsored by Kim at eP.  It would be great to have you play along.

For now, thank you so much for your time, and I hope you'll be able to drop by later in the week when all sorts of excitement is going to kick off!!  Happy Crafting in the meantime!

Contemplation seems to be about the only luxury that costs nothing.
From I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith

Learn to be silent.  Let your quiet mind listen and absorb.
Pythagoras

I'm going to make this a second entry into the colour challenge Blues, Browns & Beige over at the  Flonzcraft Vintage Stamping Challenge.  Well, if you will pick my favourite colours as the theme...



Click the picture link to go straight to the product:

Unity Stamp Company - Wayward Blooms (Donna Downey)	Unity Stamp Company - Delicate Flowers (Donna Downey)	Unity Stamp Company - Art & Possibility (Donna Downey)	Unity Stamp Company - Empowered Words (Donna Downey)	Chipboard Coasters - 10-Pack - 4"x4" Square - Lightweight
Paperie - Hobgoblin Tissue Tape	Inksessentials White Gel Pen	Archival #0 Pad - Coffee	Tsukineko - Memento Teal Zeal	Distress Ink Pad - Vintage Photo

Escape Into A Book

Hello everyone!  We're kicking off a new Get Altered challenge over at eclectic Paperie today.  It's hosted by Tracy, and she's chosen Altered Books as her challenge theme.  Come and play... there's a prize on offer generously sponsored by Kim at the eclectic Paperie store.

I was a solitary child, a reader, and books have always been hugely important to me.  A book is a route into an enchanted place - an escape to other times, countries or even worlds; a place to discover, learn and explore to the edges of your imagination and beyond.  And, yes, a place where even if there isn't quite a "happily ever after", there is at least a sense of resolution and completion.  Though a "happily ever after" is obviously the best option...


When I first found out about altered books, I have to say my spine crunched slightly... surely this was a desecration of my holy places?  Books are for reading not altering!  
But as we've ploughed through the thousands of volumes my mother and I have collected over the years, I've come full circle.  

I've been holding on to books that are now unwanted as books and using their pages to craft with and, on occasion, taking whole books and changing how they live in the world.  Turns out that if it's a choice between the scrapheap and being altered, I'll do anything to save a book from oblivion!

So here's a book which was being (reluctantly) offloaded, and it's now got its very own "happily ever after"!




Sadly, I forgot to take a before photo - too slap happy with the gesso! - but it was just an old hardback book - in fact, a version of Hamlet with the original on one side and a German translation on the facing page, so it's got my "other life" built into it too!

I started with the outside covers with, as I said, a coat of gesso all over, including the page edges.  I then started playing with my new - and first ever - Dylusions sprays.  

I picked the London Blue and Vibrant Turquoise as part of my shopping after my lucky draw at SSSaS the other week.  (And I've got a couple of the new colours on order - I'll leave you to guess which!)  I seem to be on an incredible roll with lucky dip draws at the moment - sorry, everyone!











I used the Crafter's Workshop Chicken Wire stencil, spritzing through it, and then turning it over to use up the ink left on the surface.  

Since I only have the two colours at the moment, I also added some spritzes of Luminarte's Radiant Rain shimmer mist in Fern to add both some greener colour and some fairytale sparkle to the look.

Next step, of course, was stamping.  And it was inevitable that the Donna Downey Delicate Flowers stamp would get in on the act.  

Anyone who read my Hedgerow Tag post will know that I've become slightly obsessed with these Unity stamps - there's a whole line of projects inspired by them waiting to be blogged!

I also used one of the stamps from my trusty Stampology Silhouette Blossoms set.  These were all stamped in Archival inks - Olive and Sepia mainly - incase I wanted to do some more spritzing later.

I love that you can still see the debossed panels from the original book cover, as well as - if you look closely - the original decoration.  

Those sepia coloured simple flourishes in the central rectangle are from the book itself, not me. 










And I also love the distressed look of the aged book underneath, lending its character to what I've created (though of course it has had some additional assistance from some Gathered Twigs DI).

I let the book choose where to fall open... most of them will have a natural place, and it's no use trying to force them to do things they'd rather not do.  

I then gave the internal pages a coat of ground - yes, ground - a new medium I've been playing with, considerably thicker than gesso, and it gives really good coverage and a great surface to work on.










I used the ground (feels like it should be "ground") on the long edges of the pages too, where it had the happy effect of "gluing" them together into a fairly solid block.  

Then I let rip with the stamping once more... the Delicate Flowers again and the rose branch, in Olive, Sepia, Coffee and some Memento Teal.  










I also tried out spritzing the stamp with the Fern mist which gave me a much more watercoloury look, though most of those ended up getting covered up by the quote I'm afraid.












I was delighted to find that I could also stamp quite nicely onto the ground (grounded?) edges... this has ended up being one of my favourite elements of the finished piece!











And on the narrow edges, I added some music stamping (music - another escape, another way to journey into someone else's imagination) in Teal, using my lovely Hero Arts music background.













(These Hero Arts background stamps are on sale at eclectic Paperie at the moment, at real bargain prices - I'm afraid the music may already have sold out though!)

The quote had been hovering at the back of my mind from quite early in the project (hence the plant stamping on the covers)... 



A garden is another enchanted place to escape into, though perhaps Cicero meant it more practically in terms of growing one's food?




It's written on some leftover packaging using the Inkssentials white gel pen.  



In fact, it's the card peeled away from the corrugated side of a cardboard box, so it's got some internal stripy texture which I've highlighted with Gathered Twigs DI.

I used a Pitt pen in sepia to doodle some ivy onto the quote panels - I'm finally starting to allow some freehand onto my projects!  

I wanted some more texture and dimension, and I also wanted to reintroduce some book text, so I cut some book pages from another rescued book using the TH Tattered Leaves die.  

I doodled on them with both the white and the sepia pens, crumpled them up and arranged them into messy leaf mulch to rest the sentiment panels onto.

Having covered up all the book text with ground (hmmm - still sounds weird), it seemed the least I could do to add some back in - plus I just love the look of book pages!












Obviously, the book wouldn't stay upright without some support, which is where the garden twine came in.


It seemed the perfect ingredient, such a simple solution, and also added some great rustic texture to the piece.


The filigree corners give some extra sturdiness.  I embossed them with the Ranger Weathered White powder, so that they aren't too smooth and shiny but have a bit of a roughened texture, which will also hold some Gathered Twigs DI for a bit of gentle distressing.






There were several stages of this where it really wasn't working for me, and I was tempted to start all over again, but I kept on going, altering, adding, covering and changing things and, in the end, I've got a piece which really enchants me.  I'd like to "get inside it", if that makes any sense...  

It makes me happy looking at it and that, I hope, will make the book happy too, even if it can't be read any longer.


Another long post, I'm afraid, but thank you for sticking with it.  If you've made it this far, then hopefully you'll be inspired to alter your own unwanted books and join in with our eclectic Paperie Get Altered challenge.  

All the details are here.  You have two weeks, so there's plenty of time to read the book first too!

A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Mark Twain

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.  Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
Groucho Marx

I'm entering this in the following:
Simon Says Stamp and Show's challenge Ever After
Papertake Weekly are playing Anything Goes

Just click on the image to go straight to the goodies!