Let's Hear it for the Boys!

I've had a very busy month but none of it had anything to do with crafting! The highlights were flying to Edmonton in early May for 10 days to visit my Mom for her 90th Birthday, planting my garden, and the biggie was out townhouse complex started a re-roofing project this month and I am in charge of it. It is a 3million dollar job so the responsibility is enormous. Due to a lot of organizing parking issues and service truck accessibility we are running smoothly. The job will take a year to complete and I am the site manager. If we had any building or contractor stamps sets I would have made a card with that theme but... I don't have any Dad's so the only card I send is from our dog to my husband. I think the barbershop kit is so cute it was an easy decision to use it for my June Linky Party project. It's pretty simple this month as I just made a card and there is only one photo to show you as every angle looks roughly the same!

Here it is in all it's glory! The cute little baby boy attempting his first shave is from Crafty Secrets "Baby Boy" printables. The rest of the paper including the buttons, frame, and barbershop pole are from Crafty Secrets "Barbershop Kit". Other than just cutting and arranging these super cute things I used a stylus on the back of the pole to give it more curve and I did the same thing to the back of the frame. I used distress inks on the edges of the papers. 

TUTORIAL

When I first saw digital buttons I thought to myself I would probably never use them because really... why wouldn't you just use real buttons? When you're really fussy about matching shades as exactly as possible and you see along with the paper you want to use are the buttons in the exact colour, you learn to make paper buttons that look as real as possible. This is what I did to make the buttons I used on my card.

- cut out the buttons

- shape them with a stylus

- punch out the button holes

- put toothpicks in the button holes

- cover the surface with a coat of with Judikins 

- make sure you remove the toothpicks before the glaze dries completely and let dry for an hour

- tie thread or twine through the holes

Now it's your turn to dazzle us with your creations! Please use Crafty Secret products in your project if you want to be eligible for the grand prize.  Be sure to link up your project to the Crafty Secrets BLOG so that you can be eligible to win this month's prize package. Details and guidelines can be found on the Crafty Secrets Blog. 

Please visit the rest of the design team to see the beautiful projects they have created.

Kathy Clement, DT Leader http://www.kathybydesign.com

Darlene Pavlick, Dar’s Crafty Creations   http://darscraftycreations.blogspot.com/

Diane Hover, Nellie’s Nest  http://www.nelliesnest.blogspot.chttp://chelemom.blogspot.com/

Ginny Nemchak, Polly’s Paper     https://pollyspaper. wordpress.com/

Gloria Stengel, Scraps of Life   http://gloriascraps.blogspot.com/

Melody Clement, Paper Melody’s   http://papermelodys.wordpress.com/

Michele Kovack, Thoughts of a Cardmaking Scrapbooker http://chelemom.blogspot.com/ 

Shantaie Fowler, Inking Pink http://www.inkingpink.com/

Sheila Rumney, Sheila Rumney Design and Photography,  http://www.sheilarumney.com/

Teresa Golirsch Horner, Victorian Paper Queen, http://victorianpaperqueen.blogspot.ca/

Thanks so much for visiting my blog

Cheers, 

Elizabeth

Happy Birthday Mom

Welcome to our "anything goes" May Linky Party!

My creativity up and left me this month. This month's contribution was born of the need for a Birthday Card for my Mother's 90th Birthday on May 7. It all kind of came together based on what she likes. She has never understood stamping and always says to me "why don't you just draw or watercolour, why would you use a stamp". 

My parents were very generous with lessons as we were growing up and I had watercolour and oil painting lessons. She understands when I have my friends over to stamp and sees the social aspect versus me all alone in my studio painting but fails to understand stamping is a different art form than painting. Mom loves it when I watercolour her a card, so it was a given that my card must be watercoloured. She also loves roses and Crafty Secrets just digitalized my favourite Rose Stamp so that was also a given. Totally by accident I realized when you get a copier image wet the colour runs, much the same way a watercolour does so I printed the rose in a rose shade and the leaves green then deliberately allowed the print to run. This is what I ended up with.

You can see where the colour ran outside the lines. How I did this was as soon as the image came off the printer I immediately took a wet brush to it to allow the lines to smudge. I pooled the water on a line and then tilted the paper so it would run the direction I wanted, that way I could accomplish the desired shading. I worked from the inside petal edge to the outer edge painting the larger petals first as they were easier to manoeuvre, adding in more colour as needed.  All colouring work looks best if you leave some white areas. To create the white areas on this rose I painted the areas I wanted to stay white with frisket. If there are any of you that don't know what frisket is, it is a rubbery fluid you apply to create a mask. Any art store or even Michael's would carry it.

Here is a close up of the rose.

 I tried this on cardstock and 80 lb watercolour paper. The cardstock runs better but you can't "work" it very much as it pills. The water colour paper allows you to play more without the pilling. I also tried watercolouring with H2O's which turned out very well. The colour is more true to the actual colours on the second image than the first, the first one is a bit over exposed. 

It was enjoyable this month to just get out the paint brushes and not fussy cut for ages. I haven't made a card for a long time that didn't require dimentionals! This was made with my Mom in mind to her tastes, she doesn't like buttons and lace, multiple layers and images, in fact she finds most of my cards to be overly fussy. I guess you would call her plain and simple kind of person. Thankfully I know she will love this.  I hope you'll try some watercolour experiments.

Now it's your turn to dazzle us with your creations! Please use Crafty Secret products in your project if you want to be eligible for the grand prize.  Be sure to link up your project to the Crafty Secrets BLOG so that you can be eligible to win this month's prize package. Details and guidelines can be found on the Crafty Secrets Blog. 

Please visit the rest of the design team to see the beautiful projects they have created.

Kathy Clement, DT Leader http://www.kathybydesign.com

Darlene Pavlick, Dar’s Crafty Creations   http://darscraftycreations.blogspot.com/

Diane Hover, Nellie’s Nest  http://www.nelliesnest.blogspot.chttp://chelemom.blogspot.com/

Ginny Nemchak, Polly’s Paper     https://pollyspaper. wordpress.com/

Gloria Stengel, Scraps of Life   http://gloriascraps.blogspot.com/

Melody Clement, Paper Melody’s   http://papermelodys.wordpress.com/

Michele Kovack, Thoughts of a Cardmaking Scrapbooker http://chelemom.blogspot.com/ 

Shantaie Fowler, Inking Pink http://www.inkingpink.com/

Sheila Rumney, Sheila Rumney Design and Photography,  http://www.sheilarumney.com/

Teresa Golirsch Horner, Victorian Paper Queen, http://victorianpaperqueen.blogspot.ca/

Thanks so much for visiting my blog

Cheers, 

Elizabeth

He Rules the Roost, She Rules the Rooster!

Welcome to Crafty Secrets Hen Party Blog Hop. If you are coming from Diane's blog you are in the right place. We are all excited at Crafty Secrets about our new "Farm Chicks" digital art stamp set and to celebrate we are hosting this blog hop.

I've used six images from this fab set to make this side step card. I loved loved loved colouring the happy couple. Colouring has always been my favourite part of crafting and the detail on these images makes it easy to bring them to life with my favourite Copics. The attempt at humour in the title is just a line I printed off myself.

As you can see the happy couple have been busy and there are all kinds of cute little chicks hopping around. It is a single image I just shrank down reversing every other chick. If you look closely I fussy cut them leaving their feet attached for something to anchor them to the grass. Speaking of the grass, it is a Martha Stewart punch. To give the egg baskets more depth I took a stylus to the back of each egg. 

It would appear some feathers were lost when the hen objected to being fussy cut! The final touches were adding some red pops here and there.

Every good blog hop has a prize and ours is no exception. One lucky winner will receive their very own set of "Farm Chicks Digital Art Stamps" and the digital "Chicken Farm Paper" as well. To win, simply visit every blog listed below and leave a nice comment. Then, finish up this hop on the Crafty Secrets BLOG and let us know that you've visited and commented on all the designers' blogs. The winner will be randomly chosen from one of the blog comments on one of the designer's blogs. How fun is that? Cluck cluck cluck...

Without further ado... put on your walking shoes and join the fowl couple in a funky chicken over to the next blog to visit Ginny.

Blog order:

Kathy

Dar

Diane

Elizabeth < you are here

Ginny

Gloria

Melody

Michele

Sheila

Thanks so much for visiting my blog.

Cheers, 

Elizabeth

Sweet Tweets

As we continue on with our Crafty Secrets/Really Reasonable Ribbon cross promotion I made another project using Crafty Secrets "Sing for Joy" and Really Reasonable Ribbon "April Ribbon Club".

I started with an ecru 5x6.5" card base and aged the edges with Vintage Photo Distress Ink. The floral paper is Graphics 45, the next layer is ecru cardstock embossed with swiss dot and inked with an aqua ink. Next is a Graphics 45 postcard again aged with Vintage Photo. I printed off two extra birds on branch images and fussy cut out the flower branch of those two plus the branch with the birds on it. Everything was coloured with copics and I added stickles to the sweet little birdies. Now they are really singing sweetly. Final touches were to add the pearls to the flowers and tie some pretty ribbon. The sentiment is also from "Sing for Joy", printed in brown. I forgot to mention everything is popped up on dimensionals.

Big thanks to Bonnie from RRR for generously supplying the design team at Crafty Secrets with some of her gorgeous ribbon.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog

Cheers,

Elizabeth

  

PARIS IN SPRINGTIME

 Welcome to the April Linky Party

 I have been lucky enough to have gone to Paris 4 times and it is a wonderful experience in the springtime or any other. From the minute I saw this Crafty Secrets Eiffel Tower I knew I would love making it. It is easy to assemble and looks amazing. The stars kind of aligned for this project as a group I belong to decided to do a French progressive dinner and Really Reasonable Ribbon and Crafty Secrets partnered for a cross promotion this month. Our design team received this gorgeous ribbon and Crafty Secrets provided the RRR design team with some of our goodies. I used the aqua shade of the ribbon (3rd from the right) to do a black/aqua art deco colour scheme of the Eiffel Tower and placecards.

The package you see pictured below is the  April Club Assortment. It was a pleasure to work with and tied so perfectly. It would take days of shopping to find ribbon that coordinates so perfectly. You will be seeing a lot of this ribbon on my projects. I am so impressed with this company, the package you see here is a sampler package but if you fall in love with a ribbon you can buy either by the yard or the entire spool at a discount. This is perfect for hoarders like me! It nearly killed me to use every scrap of the aqua ribbon. You've got to check out the RRR site as they sell many more things than ribbon, and as a bonus they ship the same day or next day. 

The aqua shade was a perfect colour for this art deco period piece.

For my tutorial this month I would like to show you the adaptations I made to the tower and some tips for assemblage. Start by printing off four images of the tower. I maximized the paper and made my tower 12" tall so I could use it as a centre piece. The only adaptation I made was to 3D it even more by reworking the 2 decks. In the photo below you will see the image on the left has the deck cut off the sides while the image on the right has it still intact. Cut the deck off all 4 images.

Cut pieces of 2 sided tape (Sookwang) and place on all the tabs. The tower is very small at the top and it's tricky to get your fingers in the small space so attach the tabs at the top on all four images first and then work you way down the tower. It gets less fiddly as you move down the tower. I then printed off 4 towers slightly larger than the first set and cropped the two deck areas as shown below.

Cut these deck levels with tabs on the edge as shown. To make the decks score lines at the floor level of each deck then score a second line slightly below that. Mitre the edges of each piece as shown below

Now attach the four sides together so you have something which looks like this.

Now slide this onto the tower and when you have the placement correct tape it into place. Repeat this for the second deck. Now what I did is a little insane! I wanted the tower to sparkle so I took graphite coloured Stickles and traced every line on the tower. It could still use some more sparkle so I added rhinestones. Here's what I ended up with.

So now I have a gorgeous sparkly Eiffel Tower and I'm ready to decorate it with flowers, ribbon, and a banner and my husband, who likes it so much he shows it off to anyone who comes in the house says "Oh no don't mess it up with flowers". I decided to make the decorations detachable so I could change the colour scheme or downplay the "pretty" appearance for a more masculine group.

The banner starts at the top and reads "Springtime in Paris". The top spray of flowers and banner are glued to a detachable pick and it winds its way around the tower to the bottom which is also attached to a pick. 

TOP FLORAL SPRAY

MIDDLE SPRAY

BOTTOM SPRAY

I made all the flowers and fleur de lis for this project using a variety of sizzix and Memory Box dies.

When I finished the tower I thought I should also make some placecards so I printed eight much smaller Eiffel Towers and hand drew the art deco edge styled after an old menu from the era, actually a menu my Mom had saved from a steam ship my parents had travelled to England on. I fussy cut the towers and placed 3 tiny rhinestones on each one. I coloured them with H20's so there is a bit of a sparkle.

Now it's your turn to dazzle us with your creations! Please use Crafty Secret products in your project if you want to be eligible for the grand prize  and as the theme is "Anything Goes With Ribbon" use ribbon or trim. It doesn't have to be an RRR product. You can link your project up to both ours and RRR's blog. Our Linky Party's fun lasts until April 19, and RRR's fun lasts until April 11. If you don't have any Crafty Secret images we have a pretty paper and a seasonal image for you to download and use. The lucky winner of the $25 gift certificate will be announced on April 22.

Please visit the rest of the design team to see the beautiful projects they have created.

Kathy Clement, DT Leader http://www.kathybydesign.com

Darlene Pavlick, Dar’s Crafty Creations   http://darscraftycreations.blogspot.com/

Diane Hover, Nellie’s Nest  http://www.nelliesnest.blogspot.com

Ginny Nemchak, Polly’s Paper     https://pollyspaper. wordpress.com/

Gloria Stengel, Scraps of Life   http://gloriascraps.blogspot.com/

Melody Clement, Paper Melody’s   http://papermelodys.wordpress.com/

Michele Kovack, Thoughts of a Cardmaking Scrapbooker  http://chelemom.blogspot.com/

Shantaie Fowler, Inking Pink http://www.inkingpink.com/

Sheila Rumney, Sheila Rumney Design and Photography,  http://www.sheilarumney.com/

Thanks so much for visiting my blog

Cheers, 

Elizabeth

GO GREEN, March Linky Party

I can't complain about the winter we've had in Vancouver, nonetheless, the arrival of Spring is cause to celebrate. The greening of nature this time of year is always welcome and around our parts the daffodils and cherry blossoms are magnificent. My personal joy is when our Magnolia blooms and it looks to be in a day or two. It's called a dinner plate Magnolia as the blooms are gigantic and it is a deep pink.

I've been gardening a couple of times so far and the Linky Title this month, "Go Green" inspired my garden related project. My box/envelope will be filled with a few gardening items for a dear friend of mine who is a master gardener. It is large enough to fit a pair of gardening gloves, some really beautiful plant name stakes, and a couple of packets of seeds.

The background papers are from Crafty Secrets Retro Kitchen Kit , the tickets at the bottom edge are from CD3 Vintage Typography. The Rose sheet music is a scan I used from my vast sheet music collection. The adorable little girl with the watering can is from Vegetable Garden digital stamp set and the sentiment banner is from Flower Garden digital stamp set.

The box is approximately 6"x12" so I printed the base paper to that scale and I coloured in the pink dots. The pink paper has little white dots on it but they didn't show up after I cut it with the Spellbinder die. I antiqued the edge of the sheet music with distress ink. I coloured the sweet little girl with copics and fussy cut her out.

Are these not the cutest little garden implements? This is new Memory Box die. I took a stylus to them to give them shape and painted them with silver paint.

The banner was also fussy cut and I don't mind telling you it was very fiddly! This is one of three butterflies that were stamped in silver and then embossed, coloured with copics and rhinestoned (is that a verb?????)

Here is my very small attempt to comply with the recycling aspect of this Go Green theme, the twine was formally tied around some snow drop plants I bought.

The final touches included ribbon leaf trim ribbon, the obligatory rhinestones (at least obligatory for this girl), and a couple of pearl stick pins.

TUTORIAL 

Now for the tutorial. I decided I wanted to make the box as big as I could out of a 12"x12" piece of paper. You can make this to any size but all the dimensions shown were to utilize a full sheet.

This shows the box open flat with dimensions. The elliptical lines you see are just to show you where they are placed on the box but don't draw them on your box, later I will show you how to use a dinner plate as a template to trace around with a stylus. The right edge is a tab edge.

I wanted an elliptical shape and all I had were circular dies so I used the edge of a plate, placed it on a padded surface, and drew around the edge with a stylus. This line has to be duplicated in both directions. The outer line is cut around and the inside edge is folded on the crease line you created with the stylus.

Here it is with the edges cut and the crease folded in. I placed a strip of sookwang 2 sided tape on the left flap edge to fasten it closed.

There you go, fait accompli! Now you are ready to decorate you own box.

Crafty Secrets has a pillow box digital printable if you don't want to be bothered figuring out your own.

To thank you for playing along, you’ll find a FREE gardening digital paper and printable over on the Heartwarming Vintage BLOG that you can download and use in your project. Or use any Crafty Secrets goodies you might have in your stash to play along. We also have dozens of FREE DOWNLOADS that you can use in your project. You do NOT have to follow the theme to play along, but it’s always fun when you do.

One lucky participant will be randomly selected to win this lovely prize package from Crafty Secrets valued at more than $25:
* Digital Garden Papers: 18 sheets of designer paper including 2 collage sheets of gardening seed packets, vintage gardening text sheets, a garden maze and beautiful botanical papers. (http://craftyvintagegirl.com/index.php/digital-garden-papers-dp-08.html)
* Digital Garden Printables: 16 images, ready to print in a resizable format. (http://craftyvintagegirl.com/index.php/digital-garden-printables-t-21.html)
* Garden Girls Digital Art Stamps: 18 digital stamps taken from vintage etchings featuring 3 sweet garden girls, images for building scenes and sentiments. (http://craftyvintagegirl.com/index.php/das-l21-garden-girls.html)
* Bunny Gift Bag and Tag set: Printable Bunny Bunny Kids Bag with Gift Tag can be re-printed to make adorable mini purses to hold greetings, money, gift cards and small gifts. (http://craftyvintagegirl.com/index.php/bunny-kids-gift-bag-and-tag-printable-download.html)
Thanks for playing along! We can’t wait to see what you bring to the party!

Please visit the rest of the design team to see the beautiful projects they have created.

Kathy Clement, DT Leader http://www.kathybydesign.com

Darlene Pavlick, Dar’s Crafty Creations   http://darscraftycreations.blogspot.com/

Diane Hover, Nellie’s Nest  http://www.nelliesnest.blogspot.com

Ginny Nemchak, Polly’s Paper     https://pollyspaper. wordpress.com/

Gloria Stengel, Scraps of Life   http://gloriascraps.blogspot.com/

Melody Clement, Paper Melody’s   http://papermelodys.wordpress.com/

Michele Kovack, Thoughts of a Cardmaking Scrapbooker  http://chelemom.blogspot.com/

Shantaie Fowler, Inking Pink http://www.inkingpink.com/

Sheila Rumney, Sheila Rumney Design and Photography,  http://www.sheilarumney.com/

Vicki Chrisman, 

http://vickichrisman.blogspot.com/

Guest Designer

Karen Letchworth, My Cup Runneth Over http://karen-mycuprunnethover.blogspot.com/

Thanks so much for visiting my blog

Cheers, 

Elizabeth

  

Kodi

It's Ron's Birthday on Friday and I have made him enough golf cards to last a lifetime. We have an adorable dog named Kodi which we both adore and I decided to paint him a watercolour card of the dog. I didn't put a sentiment on it because he will want to put it in a frame for his office wall.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog,

Cheers, 

Elizabeth

BE MINE

Welcome to the Crafty Secrets Valentine Linky Party

Is it just me or does it seem that Christmas was just yesterday and here we are celebrating Valentine's Day? This Linky Party is very dear to my heart as our theme this month is to include a music element in our project, either songbirds/words to a song/or in my case cat musicians. Although I don't perform much any more, until 2 years ago I spent much of my life playing the piano. I was over the moon when Sandy brought out the "Party Cats" stamp set and I saw the cat musicians. I have used this set through the years to make many cards for fellow musicians. You don't have to follow our theme but it's more fun if you do. There is a free digital paper and stamp provided for you if you want to participate and have no Crafty Secret Valentine images located on our blog site.

I don't make Valentine cards for family or friends, just a special one every year for my dear and patient husband. You have no idea how difficult it is to live with a concert pianist. It isn't a life of sitting back listening to beautiful music but rather problem passages of music repeated many dozens of times. You also have to tolerate a monster instrument taking up a huge percentage of real estate in the living room.  Add to this I have also taken the lions share of our rec room with my crafting stuff and there you have the reason for a special Valentine every year.

This year I have made a concertina card. It gets its name from the musical instrument concertina which is very much like an accordion. The pleated sides of the instrument are the same as the pleated sides of the card, hence the name. Both the instrument and card have been around since the 1800's.

I will start by showing you the presentation box, just the same way Ron will receive his Valentine on February 14th.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY

INSIDE THE BOX

Now we take the Valentine out of the box.

This is the front cover of the card.

I used a clip art frame and painted the scrolls in gold leaf.

The outer frame is German foil ephemera. 

The music titles are a bit of my own humour..

The front inside cover:

The cello is hand drawn, painted with distress inks, and sanded lightly.

I have a number of stamps with the name worn off, the gold embossed

manuscript on the left side is one of these.

I am totally in love with this new Memory Box banner die.

I cut the red banner die in red and then cut it in  gold, 

cutting down the flags slightly smaller than the red ones.

I computer generated the letters and punched them out.

...a bit of red string and a few rhinestone hearts: done!

Now for my favourite part, the 

MAIN EVENT!

There are three stage depths here. The back one consists of stage drapes 

and more of the unknown embossed stamp.

The middle stage has the same drapes closing in a bit on the top

and the sides.

The pianist and singer are stamped, coloured with copics, cut out,

and glued to the top edge of the middle stage.

The front stage has the curtains closing in just a bit more

which creates the depth of field. You might have

noticed that the stage flooring planks

get progressively smaller as

you move back into 

the scene.

The three roller skating cats 

being towed across the stage

are glued to this front 

edge.

All the cat images used in this concertina card

are from Crafty Secrets "Party Cats"

The concertina card:

I used the size of the presentation box to determine the size of the book "pages".  The size of the images and the number of objects I wanted on the stage determined how many layers I wanted. I wanted the musicians to be the main event and not have too many distractions on stage. This shows the three stage windows. You can see how the size of the surrounding drapes and floor increases as you go further into the scene.

The three layers are held in place and the right spacing between the layers is achieved with pleated side rails. The narrowness of the side stage drapes meant a narrow fold was needed at the sides. To get enough distance between the layers I needed two folds between the layers. This next picture shows the pleated sides with the solid front and back covers. the dimension of the cover and number pleats would vary depending on your scene.

This shows the spacing of the layers top down. At the right and left edges of the layers I placed a very thin strip of sookwang tape to affix the layers to the folds. 

The musicians are ready to perform "A Little Night Mew-sic"

		Make sure you visit the rest of our Design Team and please welcome our newest addition,the very talented Ginny Nemchak,

Kathy Clement, DT Leader http://www.kathybydesign.com

Darlene Pavlick, Dar’s Crafty Creations   http://darscraftycreations.blogspot.com/

Diane Hover, Nellie’s Nest  http://www.nelliesnest.blogspot.com

Ginny Nemchak, Polly’s Paper     https://pollyspaper. wordpress.com/

Gloria Stengel, Scraps of Life   http://gloriascraps.blogspot.com/

Melody Clement, Paper Melody’s   http://papermelodys.wordpress.com/

Michele Kovack, Thoughts of a Cardmaking Scrapbooker  http://chelemom.blogspot.com/

Shantaie Fowler, Inking Pink http://www.inkingpink.com/

Sheila Rumney, Sheila Rumney Design and Photography,  http://www.sheilarumney.com/

Guest Designer

Vicki Chrisman, http://vickichrisman.blogspot.com/

Now it’s your turn! Visit each of the design team blogs listed below.  Then create a NEW project of your choicefeaturing ANY Crafty Secrets product and link it up to the blog (http://heartwarmingvintage.blogspot.com/)no later than 11:59PT, Sunday, February 15th.  You do not need to follow this month’s theme to play along. If you do not have any Crafty Secrets goodies, check the FREE DOWNLOADS located in the sidebar of the Crafty Secrets blog.  Be sure to link to the Crafty Secrets Blog in your post, and let us know what Crafty Secrets product you are using in your project. One lucky player will be randomly selected to win our fabulous Vintage Valentine Digital Kit.  To thank you for playing along, we’ve included one free digital stamp and paper to get  you started. Feel free to use these images, or any Crafty Secrets goodies in your creation! Thanks so much for visiting my blog Happy Valentine's Day Elizabeth