Shining Stones

Creative cards is running a swap for a technique called shining stones. I haven't signed up for the swap yet, but I did have a play with the technique which uses dye ink, brayered over glossy card stock, then spritzed with water, and brushed with a paste made from perfect pearls. At that point you spritz it again and then use a paper towel, with a twisting motion to pull off some of the water and create texture. Because I have a lot of it, I used Pearl-Ex and mixed it with a little gum arabic and some water so it would be sealed. For the blue/green card I used gold and duo blue/green Pearl-Ex, and for the rainbow card, I just used gold.

Crazy about buttons

A group I belong to ATCards was running a swap that required the use of at least one real button. Armed with a whole tubful of buttons and a great Paperbag Studios stamp, here's what I came up with.

Paying it forward

Pay it Forward
I will send a handmade gift to the first 3 people who leave a comment on my blog requesting to join this Pay It Forward exchange. I don’t know what that gift will be yet and you may not receive it tomorrow, or next week, but you will receive it within 365 days, that is my promise! The only thing you have to do in return is pay it forward by making the same promise on your blog. So basically, if you comment and you’re on, I’ll send you something crafty that I’ll make!Once you sign up, copy and paste the above paragraph on your blog, and three other lucky people will be recipients of your handmade work. I will check my blog daily to see who the first three sign ups are, and if they've joined this Pay It Forward exchange, they will be the recipients from me.Make sure to leave your blog address with your message, so I can check your blog. I will also need your email address so I can contact you for details of where to send them.

Women Tip-in Page

A tip-in page is 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 inched - one half an 8 1/2 x 11 size page. In the CC Swaps group to which I belong, there is a themed swap for these pages. This month's theme was women. I chose a vintage poster image for the front from etsy, and the back contains images from the internet, bmuse, and another etsy image from a vendor who's store is called piddix. She's wonderful to deal with and the collage sheets are digital so you can dowload them and print as many times as you like. The quality of the images is superb. I've used some stamps from Paperbag Studios and Stampington for the background. The letters on both the front and the back were made with my Letratag and colored with alcohol ink. I've had the letratag for a while, but don't usually use it because I don't like the white tapes. I had the alcohol inks out today, so I thought I'd give them a shot and they were perfect.

Also, a bit of information about acquiring images from the internet. In this case I really wanted a Rosie the Riveter type figure. I searched in google for copyright free images, so that I could be sure the one I got was OK to use. In so doing, I came across a site on the wiki, explaining what's copyright free and providing bunches of links to images in the public domain. Here's the site...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources

More Wintery Mini ATC's

I made a set of these for a swap, but sadly they never made it to their destination. So, I made another set - this time with some wonderful images from Artchix studio front and center.

It's that time of year

And here are some of the Christmas cards I've been working on. Some use tags from a collage sheet I downloaded from etsy, those are the same images I used for my winter mini atc's. One is a beeswax collage using a challenge image from a group I belong to, Next Generation Stampers, and the final one is a great tree stamp I picked up and embossed. That one is my main card this year, and there are 11 little jewels on each tree although they don't show up so well in the scan.

Winter Mini-ATC's

I recently did a mini ATC swap with a theme of 'Winter'. Mini ATC's are sort of halfway between inchies and ATC's. I chose to use some fun wintry images on a snowflake background.