Christening Angel

Vivien has been asking me to design a Christening image for quite a while now and this is what I've come up with.  I think the design would also work for a new arrival or even "Baby's First Christmas".

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Vivien's Card

You can see that she kept the image beautifully soft when she coloured it and used plenty of crisp, clean white card with lots of texture to define the different areas.

Raspberry House

What bird wouldn't like to live in a cozy little house beneath a fruiting raspberry vine?  Delicious, juicy berries right outside the front door and lovely blossoms to fill the air with perfume.... sounds good to me!

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Sue's beautiful card.  Many thanks for the inspiration over the last month Sue!

Viv's gorgeous creation.

Tutorial - Circle Cards

Circle cards are fairly easy to construct, and the technique can be used for just about any shaped card that you wish to make.  The only thing you must remember is to leave a spine where the card can fold.  If you cut all the way through you will only end up with two pieces of cardboard!

1.  Use your favourite circle cutting tool to prepare the card base.  You will notice that the circle on the left has one flat side, which is the actual fold of the card.  The circle on the right is just a single piece of cardboard cut to the same size.  I will adhere the full circle to the front of the card so that it appears to be whole.

2.  Gather all the pieces you wish to use for your card.  I have the card blank, which forms the base of the card; the full circle you saw in the last photo, which I embossed with little dots; a red layer and a purple layer with a piece of ribbon threaded through it; and my coloured image.

3.  Simply layer your card as you wish, securing each piece of cardboard with double sided tape or glue.

4.  Add some extra embellishments if you wish, and your card is done!

Lamp and Quill

Originally Designed: 2012

Remastered: July 2022

Original artwork by Beccy Muir, all rights reserved. Images are for personal use and must not be copied, swapped, shared, resold or mass produced without the express written permission of the artist.

Birchwood Birdhouse

We're currently redoing our front garden to add lots of bird and insect attracting plants, which of course means that we're going to need some housing for our new guests.  The image I have for you today is inspired by the work we are doing outside and all the little creatures we share our home with.

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Vivien's wonderful card

Sue's beautiful creation

Stamped Cushion

Every now and then I feel the need to handle something other than paper or cardboard, which is when I drag out the textiles or the paints or clay...  I'm sure a lot of you can relate to what I'm saying!  Anyway, I just happen to have a couple of metres of "grubby" calico, hand-dyed by a lovely lady who has a gorgeous little shop at Old Petrie Town - well worth a visit if you are ever in that area of Brisbane.  I used some beautiful Prima stamps, inked up with black StazOn, to add the images to the fabric, which actually stamped a great deal easier and clearer than I thought it would.  I coloured here and there with my copic markers being very careful to colour well within the lines to give the ink room to bleed across the fabric.  A couple of turns in the sewing machine, a length of cotton lace and voila, one pincushion!

Magnolia

Most of us enjoy working with floral images and designs, so today I have a classic, single blossom magnolia for you.  You can work with it individually as Sue and I did, or put a couple together as Viv did with her card and bookmark set.

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Sue's card with beautiful, soft pinks and greens.

 

Viv's gorgeous card and bookmark set using a couple of the magnolia images.

I layered parts of the image for a little more dimension.

Little Chairs

At the most recent Brisbane Paper Craft Show I picked up these gorgeous little wood chairs from the Twiddleybitz stall - I can never resist making a purchase from them, everything always looks so good!  Anyway, I had some lovely hand dyed calico at home that I used to make very tightly stuffed seats for each chair.  A few licks of paint, some pieces of lace and trim, a couple of hand stitched cushions, long scrapbooking pins and a scattering of little flowers completed the project!

The Performer

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Mini Album

I have so many 6" x  6" books of patterned paper it's ridiculous.  I thought it was about time I actually cracked a pack open and put it to good use... this little album was the result.  I added some beautiful flowers and a butterfly as well as a sentiment tag using a stamp and punch from Stamping Up.  The lace and organza ribbon is from my stash - another area I really need to crack open more often!

Basket of Oranges

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Sue's card

Viv's Card

My Card

(sentiment by Kaisercraft)

Homegrown

I found a new button on my drawing program recently and just had to experiment!  I like the results too... kind of artsy but rustic as well and perfect for some homegrown veges and infused oils (can you guess who's been watching MasterChef??)

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Viv's card... don't you just love the sentiment?

My card.

Petite Paris

I don't know what I was thinking when I started out on this little drawing adventure!  Oh my goodness it took a lot of patience to finish this one... and I don't even want to talk about the colouring!  But I am happy with the finished result and I really did enjoy making a card with it.  I was going to make a big frilly, fancy frame but once I had the image down on the base card I suddenly decided I shouldn't overcomplicate it any more than I'd already done.

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Sue coloured the image with soft pinks and greys and then made this gorgeous step card.  She added some pretty blossoms and a beautiful piece of lace to finish her project.

Vivien very wisely opted to use the coloured version of the design to make her lovely card.  She teamed it with some wonderful French-themed stamps for a great look.

I printed the coloured image out three times and then layered it for a great 3D look.  I decided to keep the rest of the card clean and simple.

Technique Class - No Line Colouring

Some clever person has come up with a fantastic technique to colour your images so that the outline is barely visible.  I think it gives a kind of painted look that reminds me a lot of decorative art.

In the examples I saw, the artists all stamped their images with a very light coloured ink.  I figured we could all do the same thing by printing our digital images in a very light grey tone.  (There's a quick How To at the bottom of this post.)

I really enjoyed this technique and loved the end result.  I found that it's important to have a lot of contrast between the different layers of the picture so that each individual element stands out, particularly if they are the same colour group, such as the petals of the poinsettia.  Give it a go... start simple and use a fairly large image so you can see what you're doing.  Have fun!

HOW TO: Open the image in Microsoft Word and resize it as desired.  Right click the image and select Format Picture from the drop down menu that appears. On the left hand side of the next menu that appears, select Picture Colour then click Presets, which will bring up several different colours for your image. The fourth choice along is called Washout, that is what you want to select to get a very light line.

Flower Wreath

I started out drawing an intricate little flower wreath with delicate blossoms, long stamens and pretty curly leaves, but half way through I had to rush to finish and ended up scribbling in the last few flowers for the sake of placement.  When I came back to the drawing I was quite surprised to see that the scribbly flowers actually looked much better than those I had so carefully drawn... isn't it always the way?

This image actually comes in a set of eleven files.  You get the coloured version, as shown below (but without the watermark), plus ten black and white line drawings.  The first line drawing is the basic image, but the other nine have sentiments in the centre.  As you can see from Sue's and Viv's images there's a card for every occasion - Thank You, Happy Birthday, Best Wishes, For You, Get Well, Missing You, On Your Special Day, Sympathy and Thinking of You.  That about covers it, don't you think?

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Sue made this beautiful birthday card (above) in various shades of blue and white.  She coloured two of the Happy Birthday images, then cut out the flowes from one and adhered them to the other with foam tape giving her card an extra dimension.  She also created a lovely little set of Thank You note cards (below).

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Viv also made a gorgeous set of cards using the different sentiments from the set.  She has coloured each one and added a beautiful matching ribbon as well as a little flower embellishment.

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