Bright and Cheerful

Hello all!  I'm thrilled to be the guest designer for June at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge and here's my project for their new Bright and Cheerful theme this week.

It's always such an honour to feature alongside the phenomenal design team there, and I'm really looking forward to the month ahead.

The new challenge theme this week is Bright and Cheerful...  regular followers of mine will know that's not exactly my usual mode, but it's always great to step outside your comfort zone.

In some ways I stayed very much in my current comfort zone.  I've been really enjoying altering these teabag sachets lately, and I figured if I stayed small, I should be able to find at least a little bit of brightness and cheeriness!  

Recycling too... and that's definitely something to be cheerful about.  I should just say that I'm generally pretty bright and cheerful myself - it's just not my usual crafting style!

Let's take a quick look at the process, and then there are plenty of close-ups later on in the post.  Here are the not-very-attractive naked sachets.  (I'm a coffee drinker apart from the occasional spiced chai, but Cestina of Small Worlds, is helpfully a drinker of many kinds of teas - she's on a Rooibos kick just now!)

The first step is to give the sachets a rough coat of gesso to create a blank canvas.

I then used Wow Bright White embossing powder to emboss a fabulous Katzelkraft collage stamp.  (It's not in stock in the Simon Says Stamp shop yet, but they have it on order - and they do have lots of other great Katzelkraft designs.)

You can't really see it from a distance at this point, but if you look a bit more closely you can see the spiralling clock face and distressed harlequins which are just a couple of elements within the stamp.

Next up are the Distress Spray Stains - Broken China and Twisted Citron.  Together, they create lots of interesting shades as they blend and flow, so I stuck to just these two (not sure what went on with the lighting here - the colours in the main photos above are much truer to life).

And now that amazing stamp comes into its own, of course...

Then it's time for one of my favourite parts... working out what's going to go on top of the backgrounds.  I've now folded the flaps back into place which gives me a squarer format to work with.

The teabag sachets are just the right size for the new Paper Dolls Minis... tiny versions of the Paper Dolls, perfect for ATCs, or other tiny crafting like teabag art.

There are old favourites here and new characters to fall in love with, and as always, I had a lovely time listening in to see who really wanted to be part of this teabag alteration.

And I'm deeply in love with the tiny Snippets Ephemera labels.  I picked out the brightest and most colourful ones I possibly could from the pack.  

For the most part, I tend to favour the neutral ones (big surprise!) so all these pink and red tones were still going begging.

I added strips of Design Tape Trim for the dolls to stand on if they needed it.  I also selected some Snippets Number Strips to add an extra element to each collage.

The final layer of the Small Chat stickers has a little bit of pen doodling around it, and I added some more to frame each sachet collage.  It draws the eye in nicely, I think.

I quite often work with bright blues and greens, but the real hop out of kin here is for me to add red/pink.  It's really not a colour you see around here very much, unless I've been painting some berries or some roses.

Over on the reverse, I kept it simple to let that white-embossed stamping and the vivid Distress Sprays continue to take centre stage.

There's just a tiny bit of Trim to add a dark contrast to those bright colours and glossy white embossing.  I think it really adds visual interest, as does the movement and dimension of the flap of the sachet envelope.  There's nothing inside these yet, but I can think of lots of ephemera, gift voucher or cash surprises which could slot right in... 

And that's it! I hope that's given you some inspiration to go and create something Bright and Cheerful for yourselves.  

If you need a bit more of a nudge, you'll find glorious inspiration aplenty from the Design Team over at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge.

Do come and join in.  As always, there's a $25 gift certificate, generously sponsored by Simon Says Stamp...

... so you could get to go shopping for supplies - always a bright idea; or you might get picked by the team to go in the Spotlight which is guaranteed to make you cheerful.

Have a great week everyone, and even a bright and cheerful one!  Happy crafting, all.

Bright reds - scarlet, pillar-box red, crimson or cherry - are very cheerful and youthful. There is certainly a red for everyone.
Christian Dior

If more of us valued cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
J.R.R. Tolkien

To walk beside you

I AM FURIOUS AND DEEPLY UNHAPPY.  I HATE NEW BLOGGER.  I CAN NO LONGER DESIGN MY BLOGPOST AS I WANT TO.  I CANNOT PLACE THE PHOTOS WHERE I WANT THEM.   AND IT TAKES FOUR TIMES AS LONG EVEN TO GET THEM TO WHERE I DON'T WANT THEM.  BUT I NO LONGER HAVE A CHOICE TO REVERT TO LEGACY SO THE BLOGPOSTS ARE NOW NOT AS I WANT THEM TO LOOK.   THE LAYOUT IS RUINED.  NEW BLOGGER IS EVIDENTLY NOT FOR CREATIVE PEOPLE.  I DON'T KNOW HOW LONG I WILL PERSEVERE WITH A PLATFORM WHERE THE "IMPROVEMENTS" ARE MAKING MY LIFE HARDER.

Hello all!  I'm very behind on sharing tags with you here on the blog.  I've had a sudden rush of creative mojo while I've been here in the Czech Republic checking on the building work.  But now I'm heading back to (quarantine in) the UK to start packing up my stuff for the permanent move.  

So there might not be too much going on creatively in the next while - I'm not sure how I'm going to juggle it all.  But I've got plenty stored up to share - it's just a question of finding time to blog it all - so I'm back with a favourite trio today.  I notice I can no longer revert to Legacy Blogger, so this post may never see the light of day at all!  (No longer amused, as you'll see by the prologue at the top of the blog.)

These backgrounds are a combination of Distress Inks and Oxides smooshed on the craft mat - but the key ingredient (and the key element in my reawakenedmojo) is the addition of Speckled Egg to my favourite colour palettes.

It's a glorious colour by itself - veering from delicate blue tones to soft greens depending on context - but the joy for me has been in finding how it plays with the other colours I adore.  So there is Vintage Photo here, and some Rusty Hinge.  There's Stormy Sky and Wilted Violet.  And there had to be Pumice Stone too.

The tangled branches stamped to create the undergrowth are a Penny Black image.

And there's a Wendy Vecchi vintage text background embossed in white to echo the book page fragments behind the Paper Dolls.

I was feeling the lack of die-cutting ability, given I had only my travelling stash to work with... but the solution was these twig trees.

They were a fortuitous by-product of a weekend of hard work cutting, chopping and clearing overgrown plants and trees in the garden.

I wasn't doing it all by myself - a lovely young Czech friend came and spent one of his last weekends before starting his architecture degree doing most of the work... I was merely an assistant.  I think he thought I was a bit mad when I started hauling branches back out of the carload headed for the greenery skip which bobs up around the village at this time of year.  I now have a lovely collection of branches large and small to get creative with once I'm settled back here.

The Paper Dolls almost chose themselves.  The little guy in the hat is a constant favourite of mine - I could do with twice as many of him in each pack in every size!

And the toddler has also put in many an appearance on various tags and ATCs over time here at Words and Pictures.  He's carefully holding on to one of the branches to help with his balance.

I do like the seated girl too.  In fact, I glued on an extra branch for her to rest on.

The words are from Tim's Clippings stickers... found text without going to the trouble of finding it.

  

It's funny how, as you flick through the pages, the phrases you need just seem to appear.

You have to peer between the twiggy branches to catch all the words, which makes for a nice active engagement with the tags.

No need for anything fancy at the top - some simple fine twine finishes things off.

I hope you like them as much as I do.  And I hope you'll bear with me over the next few months.  It's been a busy six weeks dealing with builders and searching for flooring/showers etc where the chosen ones from 2018 were no longer available.  And it's going to be worse as I pack away my life's belongings and ship them across Europe.  

But sooner or later I'll be back in action properly... though maybe not on Blogger given New Blogger, which makes me desperately sad.  I'll have enough on my hands working out how life works in a new country, with a difficult language, and building new income streams given the theatre work is on hold for the foreseeable future, without struggling to deal with a platform which has been "improved" to make my life harder.

But looking on the bright side, it's a beautiful place I'm moving to.  I'm sharing some photos of South Bohemia on Instagram, so you can take a look if you would like to here... @b0hem1anh0me

Thanks so much for stopping by today.  Take good care of yourselves as the second wave takes hold.  Stay safe, stay well, and stay creative.

I want to cultivate the seed that was placed in me until the last small twig has grown.

Käthe Kollwitz

White (ish)...

Hello all, I'm over at the PaperArtsy blog this evening with some Shades of White for their current inspiration theme.  I decided to see if I could work with contrasting white...

There's not a lot of contrast available between shades of white, so the resulting pair of tags are pretty subtle, but I rather like them.  If you have time to hop over and check them out, I'd love to know what you think.

Thanks so much for stopping and hopping, and I'll see you again soon.

White. A blank page or canvas. So many possibilities. 
Stephen Sondheim

September Leaves

Hello all and a very happy September to you.

I thought I'd drop in to share some more of the backlog of tags I've been creating with a newly active mojo here in the Czech Republic (overseeing the final stages of building work before coming back to the UK to pack up my life and ship it over here - all before 31st December... stressed, not much!).

But partly because of my limited travelling stash (fewer decisions to make - just got to go with what I've got), and partly thanks to Speckled Egg (a colour which fired my enthusiasm no end) I've found myself getting really inky at the craft table.

This is one of three backgrounds which all came into being together, but each took a slightly different journey as I worked out what to put onto them.  So here's the first of the three and the other two will tip up soon.













The background is a combination of inks and oxides, smooshed until they made my heart sing.
















I stamped the Tim Holtz leaves onto another smooshed background and cut them out, clear-embossing the outlines before adding little sprinkles of Frantage Aged Silver.














I think that gives them a look of sparkling dew or sunlight catching glossy leaf edges.












In between the stamped leaves, I wedged some metal filigree leaves which have also had a coating of the Aged Silver powder.  The gleam is gorgeous without being too in your face.














The stars are also done with the Aged Silver over some stencilled texture paste.














The paste I used was a bit sloppy, so we haven't go the cleanest of finishes on the edges of the stars, but that really doesn't bother me.  I just love the gnarly knobbly texture.














The Quote Chip seemed like the right way to add the words.












I dyed the crinkle ribbons to match for the topping and tied them with some simple twine.  The fine silvery ribbon is cut out of the shoulder of a blouse (one of those ones they put in to keep them on the hanger, but I never use them for that... much better to add them to the craft stash!).













The sparkle is really rather lovely on this.  I don't get blingy very often but just occasionally it's fun!  I shared a little video clip of them on Instagram, but I seem to have deleted it before uploading it here.















I have still got the one of all three tags together though, so I'll make sure to hang on to that until I've posted all three, so you'll get to see the video in the third of the posts (if New Blogger lets me upload it).

















Have just had to revert to Legacy yet again in order to get my photos where I want them.  If they don't sort it out before taking Legacy away, it is going to be the end of my blogging I think.  I am so sad, angry, frustrated, depressed about it.

Sorry, didn't mean to end on a down note.  I really hope you all have a wonderful September.  Happy crafting all.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
Walt Whitman