Encore - Lovers Love The Spring

Encore Posts

While I'm away, there are some scheduled posts with new creations coming your way, but I'm also taking the chance to do some catching up here at Words and Pictures.   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.  I'm calling them "Encore" posts and they're formatted differently (all the way down the centre), so you can spot them easily.

Please don't feel that you have to comment all over again!

Hello everyone, catch up time here again at Words and Pictures, with a project which originally appeared over at Calico Crafts in their previous life.  These days they offer a fabulous range of Calico Craft Parts which are pure delight to create with, but I still remember with fondness the eclectic range of crafting goodies they used to supply.  Here's what I wrote back in February 2014.

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I'm delighted to share a little touch of Springtime and a little touch of Shakespeare with you. I was even lucky enough to catch 10 minutes of sunshine between torrential rain showers for some of the photos.

I'm always amazed by the difference in colours depending on whether it's in sunlight or in shade...

It's another hanging created on a side piece of the same chopped up book box as the last one... waste not, want not. (Calico don't stock the history books box set I'm afraid!)

I painted the thick cardboard with DecoArt White Wash acrylic paint and added a coat of One Step Crackle Medium (also DecoArt) around the edges.   Once it was dry and crackled, I rubbed Burnt Umber paint into it and wiped away the excess with a babywipe.

Then I began assembling my Spring collage pieces.   One of the joys for me at Calico Crafts is they have such lovely things that you really don't need to do very much to create something special!

The grapevine heart is 8.5cm across, and comes wrapped about in plain wire.

I have to admit that I unravelled that and re-ravelled it (yeah, I don't think it's a word either!) with rusty wire - a bit fiddly, as I had to re-ravel before fully unravelling so as not to have the whole thing disintegrate on me, but I think it was worth it... but then I'm a rusty wire junkie!

These adorable little speckled eggs - they've just had a whisper of gesso added, and then the white splatter at the end.

And the ruffle roses have had a couple of coats of gesso to rough them up a little and make them a touch paler.

The three driftwood planks absolutely delight me and, again, they've just had a rough coat of diluted White Wash paint for an even shabbier chic look.

Being a rusty wire junkie, I couldn't resist wrapping the planks up with a bit more of the stuff.

And the whole thing is layered over a piece of script paper torn from the Kaisercraft Timeless Classics 12x12 pad.  I inked the edges with Jumbo Java Versamagic Chalk Ink, which is a lovely rich colour, perfect to add definition to the paper behind the twigs of the heart.

The words - ah, the words - are from one of the songs in Shakespeare's As You Like It. The first verse is at the foot of the post... it's not necessarily his finest hour, but it's pretty!

They're stamped using the Artemio Typewriter Alphabet stamps onto lightly inked paper, and then edged with the Jumbo Java Chalk Ink again.

Some rusty wire through the eyelets at the top, some hot glue gun action, a little white paint splatter and we're done!

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I hope you like it, and I really, really hope that Spring will be here soon in reality.  According to the weather forecasts I've been looking at at the time of adding these top and bottom paragraphs, the weather in China is likely to be an improvement on what we've been having in the UK - so fingers crossed for all of us!  Thanks so much for stopping by, and I'll see you again soon.

It was a lover and his lass,

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonny no,

That o’er the green corn-field did pass,

In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,

When birds do sing, Hey ding a ding, ding:

Sweet lovers love the spring.

Song from As You Like It by William Shakespeare

A little Christmas offering

Hello all - a little Artistic Outpost offering for you today... a simple little Christmas card.  And a lovely offering from Artistic Outpost themselves: a well-timed sale with 15% off all Artistic Outpost stamps until November 18th - perfect for stocking up on Christmas presents!!




For now, here's a really quick way to boost your Christmas card making... 

In fact, you could probably make this card in less time than it's going to take me to write this post (especially if Blogger keeps misbehaving)!

I started with kraft cardstock, and stamped the adorable wintry cottage from the Midwinter plate in Coffee Archival.  I used a white pencil to add the snow to the scene.

I added one of the lovely new Christmas Chalk sentiments and edged the card using the Prima Chalk Edger in white.

Inside, I stamped the little '25th' also from the Christmas Chalk plate, and there you have it.  With stamps this good, sometimes that's all you need!

Simple, quick card-making, and simple quick post-writing - I bet you didn't think I could do that.  Don't worry.  I give you fair warning: normal (War and Peace length) service is about to be resumed on Friday!





Oh, the weather outside is frightful
But the fire is so delightful
And since we've no place to go
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!
From Let it snow! by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne

(I can't be the only person for whom that's a Pavlovian trigger to go and watch all the Die Hard films!)

The Wisdom of Flowers

Hello everyone, thanks so much for taking the time to stop by.  I seem to be back on the greens and the flowers at the moment...


Some of you may have already seen this over at Artistic Outpost, but it's my first chance to share it with you here at Words and Pictures.


I've a tag for you today.  No big surprise there... Tags have always played a big part in my crafting and, especially just at the moment when real life is so busy, they're a quick way to get some satisfying crafting done.  


There'll be more complex projects under way soon, I hope - but I do love a tag... hope you do too!


This one uses stamps from the recent Artistic Outpost releases, Chalk It Up and Chalkboard Wisdom.












I started by applying texture paste through the Crafter's Workshop Cornflowers stencil to create the flowers.














And then I applied lots of dots of various Fresco paints and used rough brushstrokes to blend them onto the tag.

Once the paint was dry, I sanded back the flowers to reveal the white texture beneath.












I added the corner flourishes from the Chalk It Up plate, stamped first in white using the Prima Chalk Edger, and then overstamped in Peeled Paint Distress Ink.













I really like the ornate and slightly dimensional effect.















The sentiment is another of my original chalkboard experiments - Brilliant White Superfine Wow embossing powder on black card, with some extra chalkiness from the Chalk Edger and from a white pencil.

It's mounted on padded tape to give it a bit of a lift over the flowers.













The topper is crinkle ribbon dyed with Distress Stains - Peeled Paint and Bundled Sage, along with some Picket Fence, which is what gives it that lovely shabby opaque look.

















And it's tied together with my black and white paper string combination - to tone in with that chalkboard sentiment.


I then distressed the whole thing with the paper distresser and layered it onto some Prima paper by Finnabair, leftover from her workshop, which I was lucky enough to attend recently. (You can check out what it was leftover from here!)


Thank you so much for stopping by today, and all your amazing feedback throughout this busy week.  I'm almost there with the house-moving, so should be back to full speed on visiting very soon... 








With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy.
Lope de Vega

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.
Chinese Proverb

Feeling bluesy...

Hello everyone.  I'm sorry my visiting has been sluggish lately... it's all about moving house round here at the moment.  I'm so looking forward to the point when I'm free to play in Craftyblogland again!

I am managing to squeeze some crafting in - I think I'd go completely spare if I didn't.

Yesterday I came up with a sequence of sorting stuff, filling a box, five minutes crafting; sorting stuff, filling a box, five minutes crafting and so on, and in that way managed to get my Tim Holtz September tag done.

I had such fun playing with the stencils.  Regulars will know I rarely craft without a stencil in any case, so this month's inspiration from Tim was a joy to play with (although I did wreck two attempts by going one step too far before finally arriving at this one).












Because I'm getting to do very little freestyle crafting at the moment, I decided to allow myself my favourite colours for this tag: blues and browns - yay!!











But that's really my main departure from Tim's creation, so if you want the making-of details, I'm going to direct you over to the how-to post of the master himself.

In the meantime, I'm just going to share a few close-ups and colour details of my version, which made me very happy in between the box-packing.












Embossing paste stars giving lovely dimension and texture to the tag...













Love the Picket Fence Distress Paint resist effect (the horizontal stripes are the DP) against my Distress Stains of Weathered Wood, Stormy Sky, Faded Jeans and Chipped Sapphire.

I'm enjoying the Prima Chalk Edger in white at the moment too, so I used that with the rays stencil - moonbeams slanting across the sky anyone?









Layering up the stencils for depth, I did go as far as Black Soot...















... but then overlaid the stencil again and went over it with Vintage Photo.

The edging is Vintage Photo too, of course.











Vintage Photo on the Chitchat stickers too, along with a bit of Chipped Sapphire, and Chipped Sapphire Distress Marker around the outside.













I followed Tim's lead with the Papillon butterflies...















... adding some of the text from the same set.













Stencilling on the crinkle ribbon - very cool idea.













And a type charm: B for butterfly perhaps?  I would have done A for Alison, but the As are all black, and I wanted a white charm.













A couple more Idea-ology bits - a trinket pin and a pen nib, and we're done with a tag that I really enjoyed making.










Thank you, Tim, for yet another fabulous piece of inspiration.

Will do my best to hop around and catch up with some of you soon... and I should be back on proper form in a few weeks.  Happy Crafting all!

I'd like to enter this as my September tag for Tim Holtz's 12 Tags of 2013
And at Country View Crafts the challenge is to play with Layers - plenty of them here!

I love layers!
Alexander Wang

I am not who I was...

Hello all, and a warm welcome to Words and Pictures on this chilly September day.  A fairly quick post today - bet you thought I couldn't do that, eh?  Apart from sneak peeks of course...

And, in an even bigger shock to the system, it's a CAS make - clean and simple (though not that clean to be honest).  I'm sharing a bit of salvage stamping with you today - and I'm squeezing it in because it fits perfectly with the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge of stamping on anything but plain paper.

I stamped on some pieces of slate - an old, broken roof tile which came to the surface as my brother and I cleared out the eaves of our old family home, ready for the big move.  I had to rescue the slates from the skip where he'd chucked them.

Crafting is really not a healthy hobby when you're trying to downsize: almost nothing makes it into the skip in the first place, and the broken roof tile is not the first thing I've hauled out again!

They were pretty mucky, so I gave them a quick clean-up with a baby wipe.  And I kept it simple with the stamping.  






On a couple of pieces I put a rough coat of Snowflake Fresco paint and then stamped in Jet Black Archival.













On a couple of others I stamped straight onto the slate using the white Prima Chalk Edger.
















The leaves are from Tim Holtz's Falling Leaves stamp set.












I'm pretty pleased with how much detail it was possible to get, despite the uneven surface of the slate.

(The little spots are raindrops - it started to spit as I was taking the photos...)

And the little quote is one of the Donna Downey Empowered Words quotes by Unity.













I thought the quote worked rather nicely - neither the skeleton leaves nor the slates themselves are 'who they were yesterday' - nor me...







The sharper-eyed amongst you may have noticed that the smaller two pieces of slate in the photos are in fact one and the same piece - stamped front and back - so there are, in fact, only three pieces in total.

Thanks for dropping in today.  I hope you're having a wonderful weekend, whatever you're been up to - especially those heading to Ally Pally.  I'm sad I couldn't get there - time off from house-sorting has to go on actual crafting in order to make my deadlines at the moment... I will manage it one day.  Happy Crafting, all!

I'd like to enter this in the Stamping On Anything But Plain Paper challenge over at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge

The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.
John F Kennedy

I always shoot for the moon in my work, so that I'm happy when I land on the roof.
Darren Criss

The roof might fall in; anything could happen.
Dashiell Hammett