Bewitching White

Hello all, delighted to welcome you to Words and Pictures today; it's great to have your company.

I'm sharing a card with you today which is inspired by The Stampsmith Challenge this month, which is to work in Monochromatic White (using at least one Stampsmith stamp).  

This was a real challenge, and I'm not sure I've cracked it yet - so I hope to play again before the end of the month!  But for now, here's my White Witch...

It's stated in the challenge that of course you will need to stamp in a colour other than white, but I'm not generally inclined to meekly do as I'm told!

So I had a couple of goes at using white embossing powder on the bewitchingly beautiful Serena.  I thought it looked pretty cool, but then of course you need to stand there altering the angle of the card the whole time in order to be able to see it.

In the end I conceded that they were probably right about using a colour to stamp with - and I stamped her using the blue from the  Colorbox Archival Coffee House set.  

Much better - now you get to see her properly.  I find this stamp absolutely enchanting - I'm serious about Serena being bewitching!








The sentiment is stamped in the same ink.  And one of the things I'm really pleased with is the subtle sparkle in the background.

It's a simple spritzing of Tattered Angels Chalkboard Glimmer Mist in Chalk...

... and you'll spot that the Tim Holtz paper distresser has been in action on the edges everywhere!

The next layer up is white card embossed with the Tim Holtz Distressed Frame folder - and here's where my monochromatism started to get in trouble.

I just couldn't make it work in pure white... so I put some of the same ink onto the craft mat and, using a water brush, I added an extremely diluted wash of it onto the frame.  It really is almost white...








I've used the delectably delicate Madera Corner die from Memory Box and glued only in places so that you still get some extra dimensionality from the branches.





Between Serena and the Distressed Frame, there's a little paper doily and some frayed cheesecloth.



Those who know me and my work well will be able to imagine how hard it was to refrain from getting out the Vintage Photo - or at least the Antique Linen - to do some edging on the doily, but I decided to be firm with myself, and left it in pristine white.








I do like what I've ended up with... but I have to admit, I'm not quite sure whether it counts as white on white.  Having really enjoyed the challenge, though, I'm willing to give it another go, and see where it takes me next time!











Thank you so much for stopping by... I hope you've enjoyed my White Witch, and if she's now got you in her thrall too, hop over to The Stampsmith and have a look at all their beautiful stamps.  I promise you'll find plenty for your Christmas wishlist!

I'm entering this in Monochromatic White, using at least one Stampsmith stamp, over at The Stampsmith Challenge.

The first of all single colors is white ... We shall set down white for the representative of light, without which no color can be seen; yellow for the earth; green for water; blue for air; red for fire; and black for total darkness.
Leonardo Da Vinci

White...is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black.
G.K.Chesterton

I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.
Mae West

Thank you for the music

Hello all, and a happy Sunday to you, wherever you are in the world.  So happy to have your company for a while here...

I'm listening to "Sunday music" as I type this, and sharing a canvas with you that, again, came out of playing while listening to music - as so many of my projects seem to have done recently.  So this piece also expresses some of my gratitude and joy for the great gift of music, and its inspiration.

I've been wanting to expand into canvases for some time - particularly inspired by the amazing Trish Latimer at Ink... Paint... Beads....  And I'm combining some of my favourite things again - my first love, stamping, especially with an inky, textured background and, in addition, the colour blue is quite a feature here.  

With the larger canvas I've been able to go a step further with the background, trying out some new techniques, and generally having a really good, messy muckabout!  I love the texture of the canvas showing through the ink and paint.  

It is, in fact, a canvas mountboard, 8 x 10, about £1 from The Range.  I thought it would be a good idea to find out if I enjoyed working on canvas with these cheaper versions before breaking into the piggy bank again for full canvases...  







Turns out I really love it!!  But I'm also perfectly happy to stick to the mountboard for now.  

I started by gluing down bits of book pages and music manuscript.  The print on these has mostly disappeared under the layers, but I still love that you see the edges, and that - thanks to the papers - there are places of smooth texture as well as the lovely rough canvas.

I then had a little play with some texture paste, and one of the lovely Tando masks I was lucky enough to win recently.  So cool, and so easy to get some really interesting texture onto the canvas.  And the mask is really good quality - it feels really strong as you use it. 

As well as scraping the paste through the mask, I also gave it a few cuts and strokes with an old credit card for added detail.  

In some places, I also just splodged some paste down, and then pressed onto it with an acrylic stamp block, lifting it straight up again to get these really cool textured patches.  

Of course, later it got extra definition from paint, ink and, in this case, some metallic Distress Stain in Pewter painted on with a brush.

I think it was at this point that I also grabbed some of the strings which are always lying around and stuck them on in little piles of random spaghetti.  They come off the cheap luggage tags I got.  

Sadly, I have now discovered that there really is a difference between them and the beautiful smooth Manila ones sold as craft tags - but I'm going to use up the ones I've got first!  Plus you get all these great strings to play with, of course...






I let all of that dry overnight, and in the morning I gave it a coat of gesso to knit it all together.  The next stage was some spritzing and spraying with Ranger Colorwash sprays as well as some Tattered Angels Glimmer Mist.  

I also added Distress Inks, using a blending tool, and some Perfect Pearls mica powder in Pearl for shading and highlights.  As mentioned above, I also used a paintbrush to add some Pewter Distress Stain direct from my craft mat - again to get some metallic highlights in places.

I then went in with the stamps - the text from Tim Holtz's Apothecary set, the music from the Pink Paislee London Market set, and some flourishes from Whimsy which I then embossed with Weathered White embossing powder.  

The flourishes are positioned so that they "grow out of" the random spaghetti - order out of chaos!

The focal image is stamped - in my usual way - onto tissue paper, and then glued into place.  



I love this ballerina from The Stampsmith, and I'm so delighted with the way you can still see the text stamping and the textures coming through the tissue.  



She's deliciously ethereal anyway as an image, and I hope I've enhanced that by having her hovering within the canvas in such a ghostly fashion!  

Finally, there's the sentiment - and I do realise some of you may have had an Abba song running through your heads for the duration, but that wasn't really my intention (although I love Abba, I was actually listening to Prokoviev!)... it was just a simple statement of gratitude. 











The letters are the black plastic Random Alpha Parts from Idea-ology, altered with some paint, alcohol inks and Perfect Pearls.  

Slightly strange fizzing chemical reaction at one point, but I splodged some paper towel on to calm it down!!






Thanks so much for your visit.  I'd love to know what you make of my first 'proper' canvas; every single one of your comments is deeply appreciated.  I'm off to do some Sunday browsing to see what you've all been up to...  See you soon!

A painter paints pictures on canvas.  But musicians paint their pictures on silence.
Leopold Stokowski

Without music, life would be a mistake.
Friedrich Nietzsche

I'm entering this in the following
Simon Says Stamp and Show... my Favourites are still stamping and inky backgrounds
The Stampsmith theme this month is With Gratitude, using a Stampsmith stamp
Unruly PaperArts are challenging us to Add Dimension to a Canvas

Friendship Tag

Hello all, a very warm welcome to you all, and an especially big welcome to the new followers - it's an absolute pleasure to have your company for the journey.

I've got a little something today using a Stampsmith stamp which delights me... she's called Serena, and the piece is inspired by this month's Stampsmith challenge Bags and Tags.  It's a tag in a bag!

I used a tissue bag which actually came as part of the packaging in a delivery from the Funkie Junkie Boutique - waste not, want not, you know!  It's quite shiny so I wasn't sure how well it would take the images, but I'm delighted to say it worked very nicely.

I think it's such a beautiful image that the only stamps I was prepared to use alongside it were from my favourite floral set, the Autumn Leaves silhouette branches.  I like that they're slightly thorny, not straightforwardly 'pretty'.

Serena is stamped in Color Box Archival in Khaki Green, and the stems are in Ranger Coffee Archival.

As well as being shiny, the bag is also translucent, so there's a lovely ghostliness to the image... according to the light she's either there or not quite there, a quality which I love!








On the tag inside, the Serena image is stamped in the same ink, but this time onto tissue paper.  I did some wrinkle-free distress on the tag surface using Bundled Sage and Frayed Burlap, so there's a textured inkiness already there... and then I glued the tissue-stamped image down, getting some actual wrinkles involved as I did so.






(I tried to keep Serena's face relatively wrinkle-free, however - a girl's got her pride after all.)  I love this technique which I discovered while playing recently.  It gives a great vintage look, almost like fabric.

On the reverse of the tag is another Stampsmith stamp, this time a quote very close to my heart.  I've always loved it and was so happy when I saw that it was available - it's pretty time-consuming to stamp such a long sentiment letter by letter!




Again, I've stamped it on tissue paper, and before sticking it I blended some Bundled Sage over the tag first.  I edged the tag with Frayed Burlap, and I also wiped it lightly over the creased surface of the tissue paper to highlight the wrinkles a little.


The tiny rusty heart here, and the one on the outside of the bag, are cut from some rusty experimenting I've been doing as part of the Andy Skinner Timeworn Techniques course online.  (You can see the results of another experiment here, and there'll be more to come I'm sure.)

In fact the tiny tags are also backed onto the rust, but I forgot to turn them over so that you could see.  And on the back of the large heart it says "LAUGH", since that's the most important thing for me within a friendship...  The words are stamped with another of my £1 alphabets - incredible bargain buys from The Range; I have three different fonts.





I attached them with very fine burlap twine, as the piece seemed too delicate for the bulkier regular one.


I loved making this, so I'm thinking it may not be my last entry in this month's Bags and Tags challenge!


I'm entering this in the following:
The Stampsmith's September challenge Bags and Tags with a Stampsmith stamp
The Fashionable Stamping Challenge at the moment is Anything Floral or Handmade Flowers
Simon Says Stamp would like us to Put a Stamp On It
Hels Sheridan's Sunday Stamper challenge is Stamped Flowers at Ink on my Fingers
It may not qualify, as I didn't actually buy the bag, but it did come from the Funkie Junkie Boutique, and so I would like just to share it at the Sunday Share at Frilly and Funkie
Another go in the Heck of a Challenge inaugural Anything Goes

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
Henry David Thoreau

Friends are those rare people who ask how you are and then wait for the answer.
Anonymous

Friendship exists, clear and absolute from the beginning.  You don't make friends, you recognise them.
Isabel Paterson

WOYWW 168 Leftovers and Winnings

No, no, no... it's not possible that it's Wednesday again!  Over at the Stamping Ground, our wonderful hostess Julia Dunnit is already amassing the linky list of workdesks from Craftyblogland.  After having a snoop around here, hop over there for a chance to snoop around workdesks from around the world.  

Here's What's On My Workdesk this Wednesday...  As I said in the title, it's a combination of leftovers and a lovely prize package.  There are some half-made projects lying around, off-camera, drying or waiting for the next stage - but they're not fit to be seen yet!

In the centre is the card I made yesterday with my first Stampsmith stamp, and which you can get a closer look at here, if you're interested.  
Lying around it are some of the trial backgrounds I'd had a play with in the planning stages, and discarded.  

Well, not discarded, because they'll stay in my scraps-stash awaiting some sort of life in a future project.  I'm thinking some die-cut flowers could be pretty... not that I like making flowers of course!









Then there's this package, which arrived yesterday and which I'm very excited about playing with!  I was lucky enough to win the Gentlemen challenge over at the Vintage Page Designs blog with my album A Proper Gent.  

The prize was a voucher for Ali Manning's wonderful Etsy shop, also called Vintage Page Designs, so I was able to take the plunge and order the Vintage Gentleman kit I'd been drooling over...

And Ali included some delicious extras: gorgeous pastel seam bindings, some embroidered ribbon, and yummy buttons of all sizes and colours.  Look out for them on a project coming to this space soon...




Thanks so much for stopping by, and if you're playing along at the Stamping Ground I'll do my best to see you very soon over at your Workdesk...

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
Theodore Roosevelt
But crafty goodies come a close second!!

La Sylphide

Hi all, thank you so much for stopping by... and a big welcome to the new followers - thank you for joining the gang!

I'm sharing a new stamp today - very in love with it - it's from The Stampsmith.  Their main focus  is on photo-real images, so it's pretty new for me, and I'm still experimenting with the best surfaces and inks to get the best possible stamped image.  But my experiments have been hanging around on my desk, so inevitably I started to slide papers and ink colours towards them, gathering ideas around them ready for the first card/project... and here it is:

Isn't she gorgeous?!  Ballet was my first love, so I'll understand if not everyone goes head over heels in the same way I do whenever I look at her!  I originally stamped her in Coffee Archival, but she's had some Victorian Velvet blended over too, to get that wine coloured depth.  The Paper Distresser came into its own giving some dimensionality to the edges of the thickish cardstock.

I wanted a really romantic background for her, but also one drawing on nature, given I feel she's a wood or water nymph of some kind.  From very early on, the ink pads which came out to sit round her were Vintage Photo, Weathered Wood, Stormy Sky and Victorian Velvet, and eventually I decided to just sling'em all in there!

I created the first layer of background using Tim Holtz's wrinkle-free distress technique: swiping the inks in patchwork direct onto my craft sheet, spritzing with water, and then laying and tapping the paper into the pools of colour until I had an effect I liked.  I cut it to frame my Sylphide, and then used the TH Paper Distresser to give some life to the edges.

I did mean to take a picture before I stuck the whole thing together, but I forgot - sorry! - so you'll have to make do with peering around the sides of the dancer.  






Next, I added possibly my most used stamp of all - one of the branches from the Autumn Leaves set, Silhouette Blossoms.  It's just the right amount of thorny, so not too florally sweet.  I put both some Coffee Archival and some Victorian Velvet onto the stamp, and used it to add a framing element in all four corners of the background.

The second background layer is the Tattered Angels texture stamp from the Architectural set applied in Coffee Archival to some Kraft paper, inked with Vintage Photo and Victorian Velvet, and subjected to the Paper Distresser too!

The leftover background trimmings got pressed into service too, as I so liked it.  First I stamped the tiny manuscript music from the Pink Paislee London Market set on the back of what was left.  Then one strip was left quite broad to create a 'ribbon' of music under her feet.

The rest I cut into very thin strips to create some fine paper ribbons for the embellishment in the top left of the card.

I do like doing this, as it means you can really co-ordinate your ribbon to the project.  You may remember other examples from previous projects.  


I curled some inwards and some outwards, so you get some with music showing and some with the ink colours.



I used two long attachers to loop some natural twine around and tied it in a simple bow, running along the line of the music.

The whole thing is mounted on white card, with a very fine, delicate edging of Stormy Sky.



I'm very happy with this card - I think there's quite a lot of me in it.  The colours really please me; I adore the random element in creating one of these inky backgrounds; and, as I said, I think this stamp is really beautiful - down to the sheen on her satin pointe shoes!  

I hope you've enjoyed sharing it even half as much as I enjoyed making it!!  Thank you so much for dropping in - I so appreciate your company and hearing your feedback.

I'm entering this for the following:
The Stampsmith Challenge - it's an Anything Goes, as long as you use at least one Stampsmith stamp
Make Your Own Background over at the Anything Goes Challenge Blog
And since we're on an Anything Goes hatrick... this goes in as another No Rules entry at Simon Says Stamp and Show
That Craft Place are having a Vintage fortnight

Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body.
Martha Graham

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.  And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
Friedrich Nietzsche