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

L'Homme avec un Parapluie

Oh, okay then, it's Umbrella Man... but he is en français!  That is to say, he's in Prima's En Francais paper collection:

I'm entering this for The Play Date Cafe's weekly colour challenge - they're looking for designs including combinations of Cotton Candy, Ruby, Citrus and Dusk.  I hope this fits the bill.  And I hope it will also work well for Fussy and Fancy's Friday challenge - Fancy Folds (how's that for alliteration?!).

This is also my entry for A Trip Down Memory Lane's sixth (yup, count'em) challenge, Scraplift It, from their Cybercrop weekend last week.  I'm afraid I haven't managed all the challenges.  Many of them were based around scrapbook pages, and that's not something I've really delved into yet.  But you can see my entry for Challenge 1 here if you're interested.

Challenge 6 is all about taking inspiration from somebody else's project - known as "lifting", and we were invited to scraplift from the Gallery of ATDML's Design Team.  I chose one of Ann Freeman's projects from the June Gallery, a lovely gatefold card.  I really wanted to try out that structure for a card.  I love the idea of something hidden then being revealed.

So yet another member of Team Umbrella Man was deployed, this time to France.  I got the Prima En Francais 6x6 pad a while back, and although I've used the odd paper here and there, I'd never focussed a project around it.  What a gorgeous collection it is!

But I didn't want to be covering it up too much, so I selected a slightly plainer page from Paper Cellar's Victorian Classic to tone in with the Prima ones, and that I've added some stamping and embossing to, selecting images which match those in the En Francais sheets.


Here's Kaisercraft's Eiffel Tower embossed with clear powder over Sepia Archival Ink with a touch of Aged Mahogany on the stamp too (I know, I know, I shouldn't really mix them, but Aged Mahogany by itself was just too rich a red.




The crown here is from one of my favourite sets, Pink Paislee's London Market (new abbreviation suggestion: PPLM - can you bear it?  I just seem to have to type it an awful lot), and the little envelope is cut from one of the other En Francais sheets, backed on card and edged with some Weathered Wood Distress Ink (that would be by Tim Holtz, in case anyone's forgotten!).


I also cut the key trim from the other sheet to edge this fold of the card with... I've done the same on many of the edges.  The patterns on these little strips are just adorable.  The attention to detail, as with all Prima papers, is phenomenal.


I put a touch of Glossy Accents on the red ribbon on the envelope, as I wanted to pick out that detail...


... to go with the actual little red bow I made and attached on the opposite fold.  The only ribbon I had that was narrow enough was a bright scarlet (off some Christmas presents aeons ago, stored and hoarded ever since for the day when I would find a use for it), and looked horrid against the browny-reds of the card.


I used Vintage Photo Distress Stain (TH!) to just tone it down a little, and was very pleased with the result.  I did, however, get very sticky fingers trying to glue it into the bow shape.










So that's what's on the front...  Here it is lying flat, so that you can see how Umbrella Man overlaps onto the other side.  That was one of the adaptations I made to the sketch I was lifting: I'm not much of a one for symmetricality; I like things slightly off-centre, or skewiff.


Now we get to open up the flaps... one at a time now...

First glimpse you get of the inside gives you the TH Eiffel Tower embossed on the inner flap to echo the outer, smaller Eiffel Tower (same colours, same process), as well as a glimpse of another use of the newly-dyed ribbon.


Bunting seems to be everywhere at the moment, I guess because of the Jubilee, but this is a French card, so I've Frenchified the bunting.  Why that should mean it hangs vertically instead, I don't know... but that was the shape I felt I needed to balance the columns created by the flaps of the card.



Again, the little cards are cut from one of the Prima sheets, mounted on card, and inked with Weathered Wood to give a little definition to the edges.


I punched holes using the second smallest punch on my revolving hole punch, and threaded them on to another length of 'vintage scarlet' ribbon.  


Cheat sheet: they're attached in the simplest possible way - with sticky tape on the back side of the card!  I originally had them dangling completely freely, but that caused trouble when closing the card, so now the bottom one has a dab of glue holding it in place.


And here's the fully opened card:

Again, I just want to draw your attention to some of the delights of the detail in the papers:


... these gorgeous tickets of entry to all sorts of lovely places tucked in the corner of the central paper... 




... and then the trim alongside the Eiffel Tower stamp, and the fleur-de-lys one on the opposite edge.  


I love how you can just see Umbrella Man standing with his back to you round the edge of this flap!


So, I hope you like it.  I had a lovely time creating it: playing with these delicious papers can't help but inspire you.  


Thank you so much for spending some time here at Words and Pictures.  If you'd like to see more, why not join as a Follower, and you'll be sure not to miss anything.


A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of Life.
Thomas Jefferson

Follow Your Heart - the why...

Welcome (back!) to Words and Pictures.  Thanks for taking the time to stop by.  This will be a slightly different post from usual.

I want to share a project with you which really means a lot to me.  It grew out of thoughts and feelings which were swirling around for some time before I found the way I wanted to express them.  This post will be about the "why" of this wall-hanging, so that you can read the story behind it.

If you want to know the "how", that will be along in the next few days, and you can ignore all the touchy-feely stuff in the meantime!

I am entering it in Simon Says Stamp and Show's Challenge this week, Depths of Distress - on two counts.  Crafting, I think, has really helped me while I have been working my way through a difficult time.  And also, as you'll see when "the how" comes out... I don't think there's a single element on this piece which doesn't use one or other product from Tim Holtz's Distress Range!



Okay, the "why" of the piece...

Crafting has become hugely important to me in a very short amount of time.  It's provided an outlet or release of creativity which I think had been bottled up for a long time... and it's no coincidence that all this happened at a time when I am in the midst of rearranging how my life works almost completely.  


Some decisions I've taken may seem, from a rational, logical viewpoint, almost crazy, but they are based on an overwhelmingly strong gut/heart feeling that things needed to change. 


What this piece has done is to have given me a way of exploring and expressing the things which matter most to me in life, the things I'm in pursuit of with some of these crazy changes.  And it also helped to re-focus my thinking about why I'm making these changes, at a point when it was all in danger of getting a little bit blurry.  


So, I'm just going to give you a little background to the different elements, so you can see how the piece came together, and "read" the story.

The sentiment is really at the centre of it all, Always Follow Your Heart.  How do you make sure you are living your life in the best possible way?  What should you be aiming for, trying for, looking for?  


I think in revolving these questions, I can get far too headbound, and it's incredibly important to take time to listen to the inner urgings of the body, mind and soul.  It's a useful reminder to me to keep doing that...


The Umbrella Man appealed to me the very first time I saw him, in his stamp incarnation.  Something about the angle of his head, the hopefulness of how he's looking out from under the umbrella to the sky, or to the horizon, strikes a chord.  When I created my sky blue sparkly cardstock, I knew it was meant for him... that collision of being ready for rain, but hoping for sunshine.


I've talked before about how I feel about this Photographic Memories stamp from Tim Holtz.  It is so redolent of displaced families in wartime, refugees, immigrants who have lost all they had (the home represented by the torn, faded wallpaper behind the photo), and are trying to find a new home, a new way of life.


It speaks to me of my own family background.  My maternal grandparents had to face exactly those difficulties - seeking an escape from the horrors inflicted on the Jews in Central Europe in the 1930s.  It's a history I always felt connected to on a deep level.


Music turns up twice on the wall-hanging.  It's vital to me: listening, singing, playing; whether as a communal activity or in solitude, music is one of my great joys and great solaces.

The piece of music across the centre of the hanging was the trigger for gathering all the other elements together.  It was quite by chance that this particular line was left over from the page of music I'd used in another project (or was it? Had my subconscious mind encouraged my fingers to salvage that particular line?).  When I read it, I almost laughed out loud, because it so perfectly linked things together: Land of my fathers, that home shall be mine. 


So, just at the point when I am trying to work out a way of making a new life in the Czech Republic, in a place within striking distance of the town my grandmother was born and brought up in (a path made considerably smoother for me by the fact that my mother is already forging ahead of me), following my heart which has always yearned to be out of the UK, here is this piece of paper with not only that thought on it, but that thought set to music!  



The luggage label, of course, is all about travelling, but I didn't want a dark, pessimistic brown label, so again I created for myself the sky blue of sunshine and hope.  The compass is about seeking these new directions, not only geographically but also in how I arrange my work/life balance to create space for family, friends and my own creativity.  I'm not there yet, so I hope the compass will be useful.


The Play tag has a double meaning for me.  I've been incredibly lucky to have been in and around theatres for most of my working life, so obviously "the play's the thing"; but also, in my work as a Text and Voice Coach the absolute key to discovery, for me, is playfulness.  


The freedom to play, which so many of us lose under layers of socialisation as adults, is one of the great joys and privileges of the world of theatre, if you have the capacity to take advantage of it.  Playfulness is at the heart of taking risks and finding your way to new parts of yourself.  It is vital to life.

Which leads me to my other great passion - writing, language and poetry.  It's represented here by probably the supreme user, inventor and re-inventor of words, Shakespeare.  


This particular sonnet is essentially about how life is very short - "every thing that grows / Holds in perfection but a little moment", and yet Shakespeare says that he can keep someone alive through his very writing; the person to whom it is addressed will live anew each time the sonnet is read.  There is something there about the power of words to shape our world which is endlessly glorious to me.

I'll finish with the butterfly.  I can't remember the first time I used it as an alias on a computer... probably to put my high score in on Minesweeper back in days of yore!  But it's somehow stayed with me ever since (in my own head at any rate).  And this butterfly is particularly sweet to me because, as I think I've pointed out elsewhere, it has the words California Theatre across its middle.  Not that I have any particular connection to California, mind - but it is Theatre spelt the English UK way!


The heart echoes the main sentiment, of course: that which should be followed.  And the flowers, apart from being adorable, are there as a symbol of my desire both to be starting a garden, in order to be more self-sufficient (though that will have to be vegetables rather than roses, I suppose), and to be putting down proper roots for myself somewhere. By the nature of my work, I've led a very peripatetic life, always on the move.  It's time to slow down, follow my heart, and I think I may have found the place to do it:  Land of my fathers, that home shall be mine.


I do just want to say that all of this wasn't carefully thought out and prepared in advance.  It gathered itself together on my craft table and in my head and in my heart, and found its way in to the world almost without me... or that's how it felt.  When I look at it now, it's very clear what it was all trying to say - as I hope I've been able to share with you here.


Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.  Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Goethe


And I've just discovered the words of the Czech National Anthem, Kde domov můj:

Where is my home? Where is my home?

Where water rushes through the meadows

And breezes murmur in the pine groves...

Where in the springtime, full of blooms

An earthly paradise it looms.

This is the fair land of Bohemia,

And in Bohemia is my home.

Brown and Blue Tags

Okay, normal service is resumed... we're back to the Brown and Blue!   (I will get to the last few pages of the Rose Album soon, honest!)  This is just a quick post to share some tags with you, before I get back to crafting.  Tim Holtz is so right to feel tags offer a good base to play with new techniques and explore ideas.  One of today's tags is part of the inspiration for a bigger project which is on my craft table (amidst a lot of creative mess) right now.

First, some fairly basic tags which I made as bookmarks to give away at our recent in-house book sale.


(Along with our much-beloved family home of forty years, some of the massive collection of books we've managed to accumulate between us over that time is also having to go.)







We offered them as free give-aways with every purchase and, since they have my website address on the back (not this one, but this one), they were also an advertising venture, as some of the earliest bookmarks were.  I really like the idea of continuing that tradition.









I'm afraid I don't buy the craft manila tags to work with.  I get bundles of luggage labels of all sizes by the packetful so that I don't need to be worrying about making mistakes and wasting expensive materials.  I can just go for it, and if I don't like what I've made... fine, no problem, into the bin with it.


As one of TH's stamps says: Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes; Art is knowing which ones to keep.  I'm not making any claims to 'Art' yet, but I'm getting good at the throwing away.





At the time, I'd just got my first Tim Holtz Perfect Pearls Mist, so I had great fun glamming up these bookmark tags with a bit of glimmer.  You can see some of it at least, I think, if you click for a close-up.  The Pearl and the Heirloom Gold are just lovely for adding a vintage gleam to a project.


I'm in love with the Kaisercraft Tic Toc clocks stamp (paired here on the left with the same company's Grunge stamp), and I also use their Script stamp constantly.  Any excuse to use the Tim Holtz pen nibs too!


Each tag was also inked on the reverse, and had a quote there too, if there wasn't one on the front.  I think these have one of my favourites:  Learn to pause... or nothing worthwhile will catch up to you.

I particularly like the background on this tag, partly because when you're making one of these watercolour-type backgrounds, you can set it up, but how it turns out in the end is really in the lap of the gods.  It's also one of the lovely, messy techniques, where you get your fingers and your craft mat nice and mucky (the craft mat wipes clean much more easily than my fingers do).  You can have a look at what I mean here.  


Basically you swipe some ink from two or three stamp pads direct on to your mat, spritz some water on until little droplets form, and then plonk the tag down on top of it all and move it around.









I love how this combination of Faded Jeans, Vintage Photo and Tea Dye Distress Inks turned out.  The great virtue of the Distress Inks, as TH will tell you, is that they're reactive with water, so you get lovely wicking and blending effects when they and the water interact.


I've stamped over the top with Sepia Archival Ink (which means I can choose to do another little water spritz if I want to, without it spoiling the stamped image), using one of the TH quotes, and a stamp from the utterly gorgeous Stampology Silhouette Blossoms by Katie Pertiet.

On to a more complex tag design which I made in the last few days while I was blogging about Brown and Blue, and couldn't seem to break out of the habit at all!  But this tag pleases me greatly, partly because, as I mentioned, it has provided an 'experimentation lab' of inspiration for the project I'm now working on, and also because it sort of assembled itself out of lots of things I was just playing about with and trying out.  I'm entering it for the A Trip Down Memory Lane cybercrop challenge Stamp Your Feet:

First, I had a new toy to play with: the Tim Holtz Umbrella Man die.  What can I say?... I loved the stamp, I bought the die - so sue me! 

A series of happy accidents led to his particular incarnation on this tag.  I'd been doing something with blue Distress Stains (can't remember what now, but I guess the colour is not a surprise to anyone who's been following this blog), and had lots left on the craft mat.  Not one to be wasteful of my precious stash supplies, I thought I'd try adding some Picket Fence (white, and more opaque than the other stains) to the mix, as I'd seen TH doing on a youtube clip.  You should get a more marbled effect than the usual watercolour effect, owing to the opacity of the Picket Fence.


I swiped a couple of medium-sized white tags through it, to use up the spare ink, and to set aside for future use.  One look at the summer sky effect it created, and I wanted to use it to cut my Umbrella Man out of.  I like built-in contradictions, creating a pause for thought.

So, as far as I could, I re-created the craft mat mix of Stormy Sky, Weathered Wood, a hint of Chipped Sapphire and, of course, the Picket Fence, and swiped a whole A4 sheet of white through it, as well as some off-cuts I had hanging around  from an earlier project (some things I never throw away!).
  
I also added a couple of spritzes of the Pearl Perfect Pearls Mist this time.  I love the sparkling raindrop effect, within a sky that is lightening to clear blue.  And, for the tag, I distressed his outside edge with (what else?) TH Vintage Photo Distress Ink.





I tried really hard to take a photo that would capture the enamelling on the quote, as I'm dead chuffed with how it turned out.  I first stamped the quote in Stormy Sky with some Chipped Sapphire blended direct on to the stamp.


Then I re-stamped (lining up very carefully!) with the Versamark Watermark stamp, and applied some UTEE (Ultra-Thick Embossing Enamel - for those not in the know.  It took me a while to catch up with what they were talking about in the youtube clips!).  Once heated, it created that glorious three-dimensional enamel effect that gets it its well-deserved name.  As they say in certain adverts in the UK - "it does exactly what it says on the tin".







The tag itself had been used to clean up some leftover brown acrylic a few days earlier, and I now used that as the base to add Kaisercraft's Wood stamp, and ink a little extra Vintage Photo and Walnut Stain onto for the background.  I wrapped two strips of Tim Holtz (who's that, you say?) tissue tape round the tag, and added a touch of colour to the butterflies using Distress Markers in most of the lighter blue shades.


The tag is finished off with some crinkled paper ribbon, inked with Vintage Photo to bring out the edges and the creases.  As well as using it to thread through the label, I felt it needed a little down one side too, just to balance the colours.




I've gone in to quite a lot of detail with this one since, as I say, some of the component parts are going on to play a role in the bigger project I hope I'll be sharing with you in the next few days... if I go and get on with it now, that is.

Thanks so much for dropping by, and have a glorious time (scrapping or otherwise) until we meet again.


If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.  Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Henry David Thoreau