Love

A super fast and easy Valentine to share with you today. My neighbour wanted a clean and simple Valentine so I had this together in about 10 minutes. The card base is embossed and I just cut a piece of sookwang tape and punched out some different sized hearts. I used Martha Stewart chunky glitter and covered the punched hearts. The hearts were just arranged in a heart shape...a couple a rhinestones and voila.

Thanks for visiting me,

Happy Valentine's Day,

Cheers,

Elizabeth

If You Down to the Woods Today

This is a tickle week over at Splitcoaststampers Teapot Tuesday

Challenge. What this means is we send our cards to each other. The challenge was to create a woodlands scene. Since I already did a card with mushrooms and woodland fairies quite recently I was stymied. After searching through my many stamps I ended up just drawing this little scene. I've been so lazy lately with my watercolours that I once again ended up using my copics.

After I finished uploading it to Splitcoast I wished I had added a deer to the meadow. Oh well next time.

Thanks so much for visiting me,

Cheers, 

Elizabeth

Teddy and Me

A cute little card to share with you today. I used a stamp from the Crafty Secrets "Bedtime Kids" set. The Teddy bear is a Sizzix die which out cut out in both brown and white. I flocked the pieces added rhinestone eyes, nose , and heart and tied a ribbon around his neck.

Thanks so much for visiting me,

Cheers,

Elizabeth

Wild as a Rose

Just finished a card for a Splitcoaststamper's challenge with a gardening theme. I used Crafty Secrets background paper which prints out sepia but I changed the tint to grey and coloured it with copics. The seed package and rose image on the package are from Crafty Secrets "Flower Garden". It's garnished with some ribbon and a rhinestone and pearl button.

Thanks for dropping by

cheers,

Elizabeth

Three Peas in a Pod 3D ATC

This week over at Splitcoaststampers the Teapot Tuesday was to make either an ATC, Downton Abbey project, or mixed media project. I chose the ATC. This cute little box folded down measures 2.5x3.5 qualifying it as an ATC.

I used Crafty Secrets "Retro Kitchen Digital Kit" for the image and red paper. The sentiment is hand lettered, around the edge I scribbled some lines, and cut them out. I used the subject peas and made a few pea pods to decorate the sides. The pea die is Memory Box, I painted the top pod layer with H2O's and substituted rhinestones for peas. The lacy edge is a Martha Stewart edge punch. A few extra rhinestone peas scattered about and some ribbon and....voila!

Folded down

Thanks so much for visiting me at

paper pass times

cheers, Elizabeth 

Up the Wooden Hill to Bedfordshire!

First and foremost, Happy New Year, may you all be blessed in 2015. This is a month of reflection and at least for the first few months adherence to some resolutions. One of my main resolutions is to spend more time in my craft room. When we moved to our present home I tricked out a craft room in the basement and I don't like it down there. My last room, although small, had a floor to ceiling window looking out on a mountain creek surrounded by 200' cedar trees and birds singing all the time. We haven't a spare room to devote to my crafting so it's the basement or nothing. If any of you saw the room I craft in you'd think me a chronic complainer as the room is large, well equipped, and beautifully finished but in this space I am not inspired. A friend of mine (who is a psychiatrist incidentally) decided I am mildly depressed and suggested I take a walk in the woods a few times a week for inspiration and hang art that inspires me on my craft room walls. Anyway the outcome of this is I have made myself a promise to be much more productive, by setting achievable goals.

If I am slightly depressed (only where crafting is concerned) I do know a great contributor, ELECTRONICS!!! In a 3 month period my hard drive crashed, my much loved camera broke, and on this project my printer failed when I tried to print on linen. Actually I was proud of myself, after getting over the fact my long planned linen growth chart was doomed for failure I came up with the idea of a child's carousel without too much sorrow for myself. It was hard to capture the whole thing in a single photo but here are two shots of it.

For the TUTORIAL this month I will take you through the steps to create your own carousel.

I started with a wooden embroidery hoop. First I painted it with silver paint and then punched out the letters to spell "Twinkle twinkle little star" which were covered in glue and extra chunky silver glitter. That was all left to dry. Next I  used my big shot to punch out the star and moon border by Memory Box. That was painted silver and the stars and moon glued, glittered, and left to dry.

The silver hoop was assembled with the letters and border. I cut silver cord in 2 lengths the shorter cords hold the children and the longer cords hold the stars on the bottom and the upper half attaches to the hanging hook. The cords are glued inside the hoop. There are 5 alternating long and short cords. Lastly I glued strips of silver paper inside the hoop to hide where the cords are attached to the hoop.

The next step was my favourite of course, because it involved colouring. I used  "Bedtime Kids" to create these adorable little sleepyheads. I love this wonderful new Crafty Secrets set and it is wonderful value with 55 images.                                          

To create the kids I printed the five images you see hereand I paper pieced their pyjamas. The wonderful thing about digital papers is that you can scale the paper to any size you want. If I had used a normal sized patterned paper the scale would have been way too large. I shrank the patterns until the print looked about right for the images, overlaid the images and then cropped the excess paper so I wouldn't waste much ink (a trick I learned from Melody Clement). For each child I printed 4 images, one with the image exactly the way it comes, the second with the image reversed, the third with the image printed on the patterned paper, and the fourth reversed. Of the two images printed on patterned paper I cut out any skin part and the plain printed image I coloured the skin parts and slippers with copics. The pyjamas were shaded with copics as well.

I had 15 foiled stars and I cut out 15 glittered stars to back them with. To assemble I glued the pj's on the kids and glued the backs and fronts together sandwiching the silver cord between them. The stars were assembled the same way with a foil star on the back and a glittered star on the front face, three to a cord. The five cords were tied together at the top and wired to an "s" hook.

If I was to make it again I would have used fishing line as the cord didn't allow the sandwich to lie as flat as I would have liked. However the silver cord does look pretty .

"Now, go visit the rest of the design team blogs below and be sure to leave them some love. Then, link up your own Crafty Secrets project on the BLOG and you could win the entire Bedtime Kids Stamp Set! We’ve loaded a free image from the set into this month’s Linky Party post as our way of thanking you for playing along. You can download the image and use it in your Linky Party project, or use one of the FREE PRINTABLES found on the blog page. The rules are simple: Just create a NEW project featuring Crafty Secrets, and link it up on the Crafty Secrets blog before midnight Pacific Time on Sunday, January 18th. "

Crafty Secrets Design Team

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

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

Our own dear,

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

Thanks so much for visiting me at Paper Pass Times

Happy New Year

Elizabeth

Have a very Linky Christmas

What a time I've had since my last post. First I had a fabulous 3 week holiday in Las Vegas visiting friends, this trip we went to Grand Canyon and enjoyed time spent in the art galleries of Sedona. While I was away all kinds of new Crafty Secrets kitchen stamps were launched. I was chomping at the bit to get into these fabulous stamps. I had my computer open for about 15 minutes when my hard drive crashed. It took me a couple of weeks to regain my files and other things stored there. Everything I touched had to be realigned even my camera discs had to be located and re-downloaded so I could download my photos. Anyway that is all in the past and I spent the past week happily working with the new stamps.

I don't know if colouring takes me back to my idyllic childhood but I have always loved that part of crafting the most. I use most of the mediums: copics, distress ink, pencils, watercolours, and oils. Because it doesn't create a lot of mess I most often use copics. I find if you colour the images yourself rather than print precoloured images you can match back ground papers or customize in any way you wish.

December's Linky Party allows me to combine three important things, finally getting my hands on these fabulous images, creating my project in theme (cooking and calendar), and finally a special Christmas present for a dear friend.

My project is a calendar/cookbook with a page for each month. I was so eager to make the pages I didn't really think of how I would bind it. I strongly recommend you start with that thought. My tutorial was going to be "How to cover a 3 ring binder" but I don't think my method was very expedient as it took an entire day. If I had it to do again I would make a dust cover out of cloth. Instead I would like to take you on my creative journey explaining as I go the steps I took.

Step I:  

Printing my papers

I decided the size I would need would be half a 8.5x11 so I printed the two halves in different prints.

I didn't want the pages to be too bulky so I turned the page over and printed the backs with a different design. I used the three papers shown from" Crafty Secrets Retro Digital Kit".

I used the free printables Sandy offers at our "Crafty Secrets" blog. The recipient of this project likes old world images, she prefers crisp white rather than aged sepia backgrounds so I printed the white version. I enlarged the months so they fit 3 to a page.

Now the fun bit starts, choosing your images! I decided the format would be 6 pages with an image and an alternating page with a recipe between each image page. I choose 6 images that would finish out at about the same size. First they were printed and then cut with a Spellbinders die as shown. I die cut an extra 6 frames for the recipe pages.

The pages start with January and on the backside is February etc. January has the image and February the recipe card. June shows the recipe card and the front side would be May, the image page. This shows you one side of each page. This was very time consuming as I coloured the images and embellishments ie: the apples of January. The diecut image was mounted on the 1/2 page of printed paper. I printed the tags and hand lettered the months. The edges of the month tags and calendars were traced with a red copic marker. I place the calendar, attached a piece of ribbon, added the month tag, and added the pearls to every month. The recipe on the back of each image page relates to the image. For example the back of January is "Apple Pie", the front of "Fruit Pie Pastry" is an image of pastry being rolled out. I loved this part the best. 

NOW THE PROBLEMS BEGAN

Not having the experience of my colleagues I was at an absolute standstill not knowing how to bind the pages. Because I had created pages that had to be flipped like a book, each page had to open flat, and each page had a single back/ front page the only thing that I could figure would be a 3 ring binder. (or a binding machine) Thankfully Martha Stewart makes a small binder that was just the right size. The binder was plain white plastic and didn't look very special so I decided to cover it.

Here is the front cover and the inside covered in paper and retaining the pocket in the front cover. I cut the paper to fit, glued it in place, and used double sided tape and a wide red satin ribbon to cover all the edges. As I said earlier this took me an entire day.

A List of the Stamps Used:

1. Kitchen Memory Digital Kit

2. Vintage Kitchen Digital Stamp Set

3. Kitchen Queen Digital Stamp Set

4. Sweet Stuff Digital Stmp Set

5. Retro Digital Kit 

 

HERE IS THE FINISHED BOOK

Front Cover

The lettering on the cover is hand done and the oven mitts are cut out of patterned paper with tiny bows placed on each one, once again made by me.

Inside cover and January

February and March

The top of the pie has real sugar sprinkled on it. March has a tiny bow on the sweet little girl's braid, glitter on the cupcakes and the cherry is a pearl coloured with copics.

April and May

All the baking in May has glitter on the icing.

June and July

August and September

The strawberries are all coated with crystal effects and look scrumptious.

October and November

December

The carrot pudding is hand painted in acrylics so there is a bit of texture and both the rum sauce on top and also the carrots are covered in glitter. Holly sprig is painted with H2O's.

The right side page is a Christmas card to my friend. Here is a picture of the Christmas pudding on the December page. I am particularly proud of the pudding as I painted it myself, the rum sauce is liquid effects with glitter on it.

I apologize for the length of this post. Santa will be especially good to those who read through to the end. 

“Now it’s your turn!  Visit each of the design team blogs listed below.  Then create a NEW project of your choice featuring Crafty Secrets product and link it up to the blog 

(http://heartwarmingvintage.blogspot.com/)^h. 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 a $50 shopping spree in our online store.  Each player who participates will receive a $6 credit to the online store.  We’ll be popping by to leave you some lovely comments on your blog post, too. Thanks for playing along, and good luck!”

Crafty Secrets Design Team

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

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/

Special Guests

Birgit Norton http://www.craftingwhileIwait.blogspot.com/

Glenda Brooks http://www. glendabrooks.blogspot.com    

 

Thanks so much for visiting me at Paper Pass Times

Merry Christmas,

Elizabeth