Paperbabe Stamps January Release - Flourishing Hair Stamp Set & Templates - Golden Eye

Hi everyone, It's my first post of this year, I hope you're well and have had a happy start to the new year. 

I have my first project for Paperbabe Stamps January release and this gorgeous new set is 'Flourishing Hair stamps' and templates, I've combined it with a sentiment from the new Flourish and Grow sentiment stamps which are showcased tomorrow, the  sketchy roses stamp set and the Female Face Dinky Stamps.

You can see from the examples below the templates are the perfect masks so I was able to ink and stamp my background whilst retaining the paper colour for the face, absolutely brilliant and makes everything so quick and easy! I used distress inks in fired brick and festive berries and stamped the outline rose stamp in fired brick and chipped sapphire, I used coloured pencil to highlight the petals and for the face. I love the shape of the hairline in the flourishing hair stamps and there are lots of extra curls so you can make it your own, there are some sweet flowers too that I've scattered about and lots of lovely small accent stamps across the new sets that are so useful and which is something I really love about all Kim's stamp sets.

There's lots of inspiration with beautiful samples from Kim (sigh) on the Paperbabe Stamps Blog and links to teamies projects as well. I'll be back tomorrow with another project sample. 

Laurel Burch Mail Art at the Craft Barn - Monday 24th April

 

Hi everyone, I'm sharing another of my mail art postcards today which we're going to be making at the Craft Barn on Monday. I enjoy working with these images and they're great for colouring and masking too which is what we'll be doing. I made this a large postcard size turned to portrait orientation so I could create the scene.

 

 

I masked the images from the Blossoming woman set and used the template that comes with the set which helps with that. There's also a stencil included so the set is excellent value for money as you get both a positive and negative version of the female figure.

 

 

These cats are gorgeous, I've used the three from the Indigo Cats set (large, medium and small) and the single cat and bird stamp, Feline Friend. The stamps work so well with bright colours of distress inks which is what I've used together with pencils, a bit of white marker and some stickles for sparkle

I'll be sharing another postcard tomorrow.

Chris X

 

Stampendous Laurel Burch Cats Mail Art

Hi everyone, I hope you've had a good weekend. I've popped on to share a postcard I made today with a gorgeous new stamp set from Stampendous by the artist Lauren Burch famous for her brightly coloured folk art style paintings of people, animals, birds and flowers. I've admired her art since discovering her art on notebooks so I was very happy to see that Stampendous has licensed them for stamps.

I used the Indigo Cats Set which has three separate cat stamps that I masked together and there are two styles of butterfly as well. I was pleased to find that included in the set is stencil which I used over my distress ink background. I stamped over the background and then added pencil colouring to the cats and butterflies. I've used a rough surface watercolour card postcard from a pad which is nice and heavyweight to take the water used on the inks.

I'm looking forward to making some more with the other stamps From this line. My lovely friend Carole sent me an absolutely gorgeous card using one of the other cat stamps in the line and you can see it in Carole's post here, we are both fans of Laurel's work.

Back soon.

Chris x

 

PaperArtsy Blog Guest - Bleach

Hi everyone, I'm delighted to have a project on the PaperArtsy blog today and the above picture is a taster of a small step by step I've done for the current topic of bleach. I've used a lovely PaperArtsy Christmas stamp set by Claire Lloyd with bleach techniques for her clothes and also for the background pieces and stars.

If you haven't seen any of the guest posts on this topic so far I highly recommend you have a look as there are some very interesting ideas and beautiful projects.

Back soon,

Chris x

 

 

Paperbabe Stamps Challenge 38 - Anything Goes

Hi everyone, it's the start of a new challenge at Paperbabe Stamps today and with everyone's favourite theme of 'anything goes'. As always a great prize is on offer for the winner and we hope you'll join us even if you don't have Paperbabe Stamps.

I used the gorgeous newly released Whimsical Woodland stamps Whimsical Woodlands Stamp Set 1 (Fox) Whimsical Woodlands stamp set 3 (Bunny) Whimsical Woodlands Stamp Set 4 (Butterfly) and Completely Conkers stamp sets to create a tag with layered distress inking and stamping to make a little woodland scene with the sweet mouse and the gorgeous sentiment.

I used distress ink for the background and distress markers for most of the leafy floral stamping, I like the slightly muted watercolour effect you get using this technique. A couple of colours of marker onto the stamp and a light misting with water gives a very pretty effect layer upon layer. The sentiment and the little mouse were stamped in grey luxe ink and I added a bit of contrast with pencils.

Back soon,

Chris x

 

 

Paperbabe Stamps Challenge 36

Hi everyone, challenge 36 starts today on the Paperbabe Stamps blog and this time we have a lovely inspiration photo as the theme.

I went with the lovely colour combination from the inspiration photo above and first created a distress ink background which I stamped over using the Birthday Wishes and Butterfly Pieridae stamp sets and the peony single stamp

I always find the perfect birthday greeting combination in the Birthday Wishes stamp set and at the moment I can't use the Butterfly Pieridae set enough it also has that sweet little heart I've used in the background hich is just one of the gorgeous and useful little stamps that Kim always includes in her sets.

I hope you'll join us in the challenge this time and there's a lovely prize to win as always.

Chris X

 

 

 

Tim Holtz Summer of Creativity week 3

Hi everyone, hope you had a good weekend. I've joined in on the third week h iTunes of revisiting Creative Chemistry 101, I think this is a great idea for inspiration has gone for a walk and practicing the techniques can help to get back into the flow. The challenge this time was to use distress stain or inks and mica powders, which I enjoyed and made a couple of tags with the techniques we looked at this time.

Thanks for stopping here today and I'll be back later in the week.

Chris x

 

12 Tags of 2016 - May

.....except I'm starting on tag 5 :-). Hi everyone hope you had a good weekend, it was a long holiday weekend here with suitably varied weather but not too bad overall. I haven't done a Tim Holtz tag challenge for ages, sometimes it's nice to go through some techniques and a tag doesn't take too long so I had a look at the May tag which I'm just scraping in on and all the techniques are explained there by Tim.

I was inspired by the tissue tape or tissue wrap in my case resist technique and the tissue I used is the postal design which has lots of designs within it to isolate, I used some numbers and a pointing finger tag some of which has been buried under subsequent layers but it's a lovely effect with the ink resist on top. I paired up the numbers with Tim Holtz number block stamps and used the exclamation for the focal image.

I continued the blocks theme with the Tim Holtz blocks layering stencil and texture paste tinted with distress inks and crayons. I've also used splatters of distress spray inks in tarnished silver and picket fence, dyed some seam binding with distress stain, added some distress embossing powder and doodled with black and white pens to finish off.

Back soon,

Chris x

 

Paperbabe Stamps Challenge 18 - Anything Goes

Hi everyone, hope you've had a good week. The new challenge is up on the Paperbabe Stamps blog today and this time it's 'Anything Goes' and as always there's a gift worth up to £20 from Kim to be won, all are welcome to enter and combine challenges too.

For my tag I've used one of the brilliant new mixed media art quotes sentiments 'Art Risks' in red rubber which is the perfect size for large tags, journals and canvases. I stamped in brown Archival ink over a distress ink spritzed background and mounted this piece onto a similarly distress inked tag that I added some DecoArt crackle paint to through a Tim Holtz stencil.

The Artcuts birch ply butterflies are embossed with bright embossing powder from WOW with some glitter and micro beads added to the blue one. I've added micro beads, some pen dots and butterfly ribbon to finish off.

Have a great weekend.

Chris x

 

 

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Summery Card

 

Hi everyone, hope your weekend is going well. Here in the south east of the UK it's incredibly hot and humid, not my kind of weather at all but it reminded me of this card that I haven't got round to posting. The result of a play with some Paperartsy Hot Picks stamps and a leftover scrap of a salted distress ink background.

 

I stamped over the background in a collage style with stamps from the Paperartsy Hotpicks sets 1006 and 1011

I added some rock candy distress crackle paint over areas of the flower, the sentiment and the moth and outlining with a white pen added then mounted on black card and various distress ink coloured card.

Have a lovely Sunday.

Chris x

 

 

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12 Tags of 2014 - June

 

Hi everyone, hope you're having a lovely weekend. Here by the skin of my teeth is my June Tag for Tim Holtz's 12 Tags of 2014 and this is definitely going to be a favourite technique for the future. TH's tag is here if you're joining in...there is one day left :D!
 

I picked some of the brighter colours of distress inks: picked raspberry, ripe persimmon, mowed lawn, peacock feathers, mustard seed and shaded lilac, I really like the bright summery effect of these colours together. I continued the colours for the butterflies and also for the ribbons and enjoyed using Paula Cheyney's technique to tie the ribbon.

 I was very lucky and excited to be picked as one of the winners of the May Tag challenge and would like to thank Tim and Mario and the sponsor of the challenge Inspiration Emporium for my lovely prize...what a treat!

I've improvised with the stamping on the right hand side of the tag using stamps from the Urban Chic set and I used an ideology clock face instead of the cogs but it was nice that I had the same butterfly stamps which I cut out and the star stencil.. I changed the layout and cut out a whole tag from watercolour paper using the stencil as a template.

Enjoy your Sunday!

 

Paperbabe Stamps - sunshine card

Hi everyone, I'm catching up after a holiday with my Paperbabe Stamps card and bringing some sunshine with the gorgeous Paperbabe Stamps Set High in the Sky. My card can be viewed in full on the Paperbabe Stamps blog.

Back soon,
Chris x

Paperbabe Stamps - Introducing MayLeeDee

Hi everyone, I'm back again today with a very sweet introduction in the 

Paperbabe Stamps 

July Release which is:

'MayLeeDee Digi Stamp' 

She's a real cutie and a dream to colour, I did enjoy myself giving her the sepia look with shades of brown distress inks and a tag stamped with stamps from the 'Design a Knit' set which was showcased yesterday. There are two versions of MayLeeDee and I'm back tomorrow for the Launch Party Blog Hop with the other version of her.   There's lots of inspiration from Kim, she's being sharing some marvelous tips for working with the stamps the last two days and you'll find her gorgeous samples at

Paperbabe Stamps blog.

See you tomorrow for the blog hop!