Gothic Text

Hello all, and a happy weekend to you, or as one would say in Czech, "Hezký víkend!"  I'm here with a quick post (I hope... #newbloggersucks) to share another pair of the tags I made while I was over in the Czech Republic trying to make sure all the building work would be done so that all the packing I'm now doing over here will have somewhere to go.  Confused?  Not as much as me, I guarantee!  Anyway, here are the tags...

I've called the post "Gothic Text" because not only is there gorgeous crackled Gothic text texture in the background, but there's also a Gothic font on the book page scraps which form part of the collaging.  That's what made me decide to share these now, so that I can play along with Sandie's Book Print theme at Tag Tuesday.

I had a lovely time wrinkle-free distressing, smooshing and dripping and splashing inks to create the backgrounds.

Again, Speckled Egg is the catalyst here, and it pairs so beautifully with some of my favourite rusty browns, Vintage Photo and Rusty Hinge.  

I think there might be some Broken China too, and it's all in a combination of Distress Inks and Oxides.

This isn't Tim's new stencil, but a recent one of Finnabair's in similar style, which I'd already snapped up a few months ago.  Irresistible when you love text as much as I do.

There's some collaging with Idea-ology film strip, ephemera and a Muse Token, rusted with paint (no alcohol inks in the travelling stash).

And a couple of brilliant Photobooth snapshots provide the real focal point that all the collaging is building up to.

I'm very happy with my crackled Gothic script on the one tag...

... and the printed stencil marks which you can find if you look closely on the other.

You also have to look quite closely to spot the book page fragments, but I promise they're there... in fact they were the first part of the collaging to take their place.

And I'm very taken with the clock sticker from the Tim Holtz Halloween Sticker Book (only I think it may be from last Halloween's edition, not the new one.

In any case, I like it so much I didn't want to waste any, so I cut it in half to use a bit on each tag!

I hope you like these.  I know it's pretty rare for me to use orange unless it's for autumn leaves, but if I think of it as rust, that helps me get over it!  Thanks so much for stopping by and I'll see you again on Monday with a very special post.  Hezký víkend and happy crafting all!

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.

Robert Bringhurst

Every page should explode, either because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography.

Tristan Tzara

I'd like to share this pair of tags at Tag Tuesday for the Book Print theme there

#newbloggersucks  

Okay - does anybody else get the thing where you're adjusting the position of a photo and it randomly hops to the top of the post with a broken bit of text attached to it and now all messed up in alignment so that you have no choice but to remove the photo, delete and re-paste the text where it ought to be and start all over again uploading the photo?

Also, I apologise again for the appearance of my posts these days.  They're not as I would like them but #newbloggersucks.  And of course it takes nearly twice as long to get a result which I hate.  It's a bit soul-destroying when I used to enjoy this so much.

My thanks to all those trying to offer work-arounds and solutions.  I will try to explore everything in time, but I'm a little preoccupied with trying to move country at present, so #newbloggersucks hit at just the wrong time.

Bold Book Text

Hello all!  I was tempted into attempting another New Blogger blogpost by the lovely theme over at Tag Tuesday this fortnight.  Sandie is looking for tags using Book Print.  Book page fragments are something I use very often, and there are still plenty of tags made while I was still in the Czech Republic (liaising with builders ready for the move) which I haven't shared here yet, so I thought this vibrant pair would fit the bill.

(It seems that if I completely abandon my carefully-honed blog-writing process, which I've developed over eight years of blogging, and which I could do at the drop of a hat, without stress or taking too much time, then I may just be able to get the photos where I want them... so here goes.)

I found myself obsessively creating Distress Ink/Oxide backgrounds while I was away.  It's been a while since I've been so ink-oriented - there's been more paint and mixed media over the last couple of years.

The inky return was, I think, partly because I was working with a limited craft stash, but it's also because Speckled Egg Distress revived my love of combining colours.

Now, there's not much of it on these particular tags, but my goodness those topcoat spatters make a difference to the autumnal browns, golds and purples underneath.

And I didn't want to hide too much of all that bold colourful gorgeousness, so these skeleton leaf stamps of Tim Holtz's were a good choice to let the colours continue to shine through.

The Paper Dolls, as usual, were making their own decisions about who was going to get to play a part in the tag design.  This chap is always very forthright about saying yay or nay.  This time it was yay.

I really love this seated girl, clutching her basket and facing us with barely disguised trepidation.  The book page fragments create the perfect highlighting accent to draw our eye away from the vivid background towards the characters.

He demands evidence for any matters arising - refusing to believe anything but strong physical proof for that which he cannot see with his own eyes.

She has only her basket of collected curiosities and her active imagination to offer in defence of things she feels with all her soul to be possible.

I rather like the little fine twine oval frames too - one for her to perch in and one for him to lean on.

I hope you like them too, and I hope you have a good week ahead of you with some time for yourself and whatever you love somewhere in there.  Thanks so much for stopping by and I'll hope to see you again soon, either here or elsewhere in Craftyblogland.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Carl Sagan

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

Sherlock Holmes, courtesy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.

George Carlin

Right, well, the photos are going left and right, but I can't get them to overlap by a few lines as they've always done, so there's a load of bare blank space going begging.  It might not bother you, but to my fastidious design eye it's hideously ugly.  And it takes extra clicks to place them, to resize them, to position them... and I've still had to abandon how I write (text first, flowing, then adding photos once the text is complete) which messes up my train of thought and makes the whole process very unsatisfactory.  New Blogger IHATEYOU #newbloggersucks

Having yelled that, I would like to share this pair of tags at Tag Tuesday for the theme Book Print

Encore - Magical Trees

Hello all!  December is running away from me!  I'll have something new for you tomorrow (or the day after, depending on when I get the post written), but for now I thought I'd share a sparkly winter creation which appeared over at the Country View Crafts blog in December 2015, when I was still on the team there.  I've chosen to share this one now partly in honour of the Sparkle theme over at PaperArtsy this fortnight.  (Watch out for me over there in a week or so!).  If you're not sure what I mean by an "Encore", check out the low-down at the end of the post.  Here's what I wrote back in 2015...

__________________________________________________

Hello all, Alison here with some sparkling fir trees for you.  I don't break out the glitter very often, but if not at Christmas, then when?!  And after a brief skirmish with the bright traditionals, red, gold and green, I'm back in my neutrals comfort zone... in fact pretty much monochromatic.

It's also my first time having a play with Tim Holtz's new Vintage Platinum Glitter Dust... I think it probably won't be the last!

For the background, I swiped Ground Espresso, Pumice Stone and Hickory Smoke inks on to my craft mat and did some wrinkle-free distress technique on to the tag.  It turned out there was more Ground Espresso than the rest, so it all got rather dark rather quickly.  I spattered some Fresco Snowflake over it to lighten things.

Then I thought it would be nice to have some snowfall, so I used the Speckles layering stencil to add some more white paint, and sponged a bit on to the foot of the tag too, to create some snow drifts.  I decided there wasn't quite enough snowfall, so I added a couple of spritzes of DecoArt Media Mister in Shimmer White.

Turns out that was a good idea, as you get a whole lot more shimmer into the bargain!

The trees were cut using the wonderful Woodlands Thinlits, and I painted them with some Ground Espresso Distress Paint so that they would be the right colour under the glitter dust.

I used Sticky Embossing Powder to adhere my Vintage Platinum Glitter Dust, and then rubbed some off again in places so that the trees would have a slightly more distressed "bark" look.  Yeah, right... whoever heard of glittering bark?!

I used a pastel pencil to create some shading under the trees to ground them.

And I stamped the word from the Handwritten Holidays #1 set in Versamark before embossing with dark brown embossing powder.

The whole thing is mounted on some white card, both layers distressed with the Distressing Tool.  And I topped it off with some simple Crinkle Ribbon (slightly grunged with a hint of Ground Espresso) and fine twine.

It was a bit of a nightmare trying to photograph my sparkling trees, balancing the tag in the ivy in strong wind, trying to catch the last rays of the afternoon sun....  sometimes catching one bit of shimmer, sometimes another.

But I hope you think it was worth it.

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There you go... earthy and sparkly and snowy all in one go!  Thanks so much for stopping by today.  As I said, I hope to be back with something new for you very soon.  I hope all is going well with everyone's Christmas preparations.  I think I'm behind!!  (That will be the winter bug that set me back, I suppose.  Thankfully I am feeling much better - thank you all for asking.  Avoid it if you can... it's a stinker!)  Good luck all!

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain - a magic wand in Nature's hand...
John Muir

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 busy.

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!

Tree Poetry

Hello all!  Just a very quick tag for you today.  I wanted to join in with Joan's lovely Trees theme at Tag Tuesday and, although it's been a busy week what with the Blushing Coral Butterflies and the Insect Instructions, if I don't post this today, it might be too late.

The background for this has been hanging around for months... just some Tim Holtz paper glued to a tag and washed with gesso.

I had stamped the Carabelle tree (it's only a partial stamping - the whole stamp is massive) and then ground to a halt, so there it sat on the craft table, just a bit grey and dull.

Then the Trees theme came up and I thought I really must be able to turn it to some good.











It helped when I added some spritzes of shimmering blue to the sky... a combination of Tattered Angels and Lindy's Stamp Gang sprays, but I'm not sure which colours.

I don't shimmer very often, but when I do I think I ought to do it more!










It's that time of year when the browns and oranges kick in, so I'd been spritzing and smooshing a couple of other tags with various autumnal shades.   (You'll get to see those larger leaves in action later in the month.)














I grabbed one of those tags and used Tim's leaf punch to cut some leaves to drift down through the sky...














... and gather on the earth beneath the tree.















On the tree itself I used a water brush and various Distress Inks to add a bit more depth and variation to the trunk and branches.














I stamped one of the quotes from my very first word stamps, PaperArtsy EAB01 Trees & Flowers, on a separate piece of cardstock.














The topping is some Distress-dyed seam binding tied with twine, and the whole tag is mounted on pale card.








And that's it.  I know... pretty short for me, but I did say it was a quick one!  I hope you've all been enjoying a lovely weekend, and I'll see you again soon.

Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
Herman Hesse

I'd like to share this over at Tag Tuesday where the theme is Trees
At the More Mixed Media Challenge it's Anything Goes with an Optional Twist of Orange

A Midsummer Day and Night's Dream

Hello all!  I'm very happy to be back with this week's project in the the Designer Spotlight at Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge.  It's an honour to be creating alongside the amazing SSS Design Team for the month of August, and this week's theme is a beauty.

The challenge is Midsummer Blues.  It's another lengthy post, taking us through a whole midsummer day and night, so pack up your favourite beverage and maybe some snacks, ready for the moonlit forest path ahead!

I honestly set out on this one with no very clear plan in mind.  In the early stages of thinking I felt a bit stumped, but gradually two elements floating in my imagination started to merge and, without really knowing where I was going, this diptych is where I ended up.

The first of the imaginative prompts was A Midsummer Night's Dream.  With my Shakespeare connections you can't say the word "midsummer" to me without that play popping into my head.







 So that's where the fairy connection came from.
















And I also had a thought about the summer solstice floating around... that midsummer date when day and night shade mystically into one another...
















... so the idea of a double tag with day darkening into night was born.  But the whole creative process took days to progress from that very early inspiration to the finished piece.















I thought I'd work with a pair of the Etcetera tags, so that their sturdiness would allow my diptych to stand tall.  These are the size #8 tags, so the whole thing is just over six inches wide and six-and-a-half inches tall.














I knew things had to be blue to fulfil the challenge title, so having stuck some book script paper onto them, I dipped the tags into Stormy Sky and Chipped Sapphire Distress Inks, keeping the dark tones towards the bottom right and trying to leave the upper left as pale and light as possible.








Over that I positioned Tim Holtz's lovely Clockwork stencil and did some sponging of Midnight Fresco Finish Chalk Acrylic in the night time corner and Snowflake in the daylight regions.

In the play most of the action takes place in the forest, so I had to have some tangled branches.











This is a Hero Arts stamp, embossed in Wow Primary Bark.  (SSS has lots of Wow embossing powders but not this earthy dark brown as far as I can see - I'd recommend it to them!)














Central to my thinking were the sun and the moon and these came courtesy of the glorious Stars & Moons mould by Prima.













The round moon is playing the role of the sun for me... we're all about the imagination and playing parts in the theatre here!













I didn't happen to have any Paperclay around, and I couldn't be bothered to get my Melt Pot out, so I thought I'd try melting some beeswax pellets directly into the moulds using my heat tool.













It worked, but from then on I had to keep reminding myself not to use the heat tool to dry anything anywhere near them, or they'd revert to being a puddle of wax!














A quick coat of gesso gave me a better idea of how they might look in the long run so that I could work on what else would be involved.














There were some straw fibres hanging around on the craft table and in an idle moment I tried out what they looked like behind the moulds... sold!













The wild tangles were perfect to echo the gnarled branches of the trees, as well as the twists and turns and chaos of the farcical knots of the play's plot.














From there things happened slowly over the next couple of days.  I'd have an idea, try something out on the tags, leave it for a bit, come back to see if I liked it... if so then onwards, if not then back to the drawing board.

Two of the tiniest Paper Dolls put in an appearance as some of Titania's fairies.












Perhaps Peaseblossom or Mustard-Seed... or Cobweb.  Whichever they are, they were allowed to stay (contrary to Titania's instruction: Fairies, skip hence!).

They have Transparent Wings to fly with, though I've made them slightly less transparent with some gesso.













The butterfly, however, still has his fully transparent wings, stapled over a punched lower layer for double dimension.












It's gorgeous how the acetate catches the light and gleams at certain angles.

The butterfly lights up the daytime...














... while the night is given a glimmer of extra light by the Idea-ology Mirrored Stars.















I love how they glisten and twinkle amidst the tree branches.














And there's even a morning star creeping over onto the daylight tag.















The light allows the plants of the forest to flourish, diecut from the Wildflower Thinlits and smooshed in various shades of green Distress Inks and Oxides.













Time to add a bit more detail to the Sun and the Moon, ready for their starring roles.

I used Fresco Finish Chalk Acrylics by PaperArtsy in Snowflake and Chalk to give a bit more opacity, and I brushed on Frayed Burlap Distress Ink for dimensional shading.  Tiny touches of Midnight Fresco paint bring the eyes to life.








The moon is a strong presence in A Midsummer Night's Dream... as marker of time - they're waiting for the new moon to hold the royal wedding; as the light by which the fairies meet; and also as a character.

One of the Mechanicals or working men in the play actually plays the role of the moon in their play-within-a-play at the end.










This is Words and Pictures, so of course we need to have some words.  These are fragments from the play text, handwritten with my dipping pen and some grey ink.














Tiny snippets of Crochet Thinlits decorate the phrases, and the daylight one is edged with Stormy Sky, while "night and silence" (yes, please!) has Chipped Sapphire shadows drawing in.













They're attached to the tags with hinge clips (as well as a bit of glue).  Mine are non-branded old-gold versions of these Idea-ology Hinge Clips.














They've had a touch of Mushroom Alcohol Ink as well as catching the white spatter of glimmering stardust.














In A Midsummer Night's Dream all of the action takes place over about 24 hours, so the clocks, stencilled and ephemeral, are measuring the time ticking away.














The paper ones are from the Idea-ology Snippets and Ephemera packs, and you can still just see the shadows and highlights of the stencilled versions in the background.














Some scraps of Idea-ology Linen Ribbon top the tags off.















I like the rustic feel of it, especially when you loosen the weave a little - perfect for my woodland world.













Around the back, I've kept things very simple... who wants to spend time looking at the back of this diptych when there's a magical twilit forest to wander through on the other side?!

Just some woodgrain design paper, gently inked around the edges.  Really it's mostly there to cover up the brown tape which provides the hinges for the diptych.












Having started out on this project by wandering around lost in the dark, I'm thrilled to have made my way to this enchanted world.














From night's darkest shadows...
















... to the soft light of early dawn...









... and especially when you catch those glimmers and sparkles of light, this diptych makes my heart sing.

I hope you've enjoyed dreaming along with me, and that you'll be inspired to play along with the Midsummer Blues theme at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge this week.

As always, there's amazing inspiration from the full-time team, who are looking forward to choosing their favourites, and the usual $50 voucher is on offer for one lucky winner to go shopping at Simon Says Stamp.

Thanks so much for stopping by today, and I hope you all have a magical week!

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.

Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.

Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms. Fairies, be gone, and be all ways away.

Are you sure
That we are awake? It seems to me
That yet we sleep, we dream...

All from A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare

I'd like to play along at Moo-Mania and More where they are having a Butterflies challenge
At Try It On Tuesday the theme is Wish You Were Here - I'd love to visit this enchanted forest!
At Country View Challenges they are looking for Texture this month
It's Anything Goes (as long as it's a tag of course!) over at Tag Tuesday
The More Mixed Media Challenge is an Anything Goes with optional Bright - I've got light rather than bright
And it's also Anything Mixed Media Goes at the Creative Artiste Challenge Blog