A card to share...

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you've all had a brilliant week and are ready for a cold weekend ahead - at least the wintery weather is a good excuse to stay indoors and do some crafting. Well so much for my plan to make and share a card every day using the dies from my Crafter's Companion advent calendar - I forgot to take one little thing into consideration when I made that plan - I don't actually like a lot of the dies that came free, eek! In themselves they are quite sweet but most of them are really not to my taste, are quite small and fiddly to use because they have lots of die cut inlaid parts to them like bows and things, and I couldn't even work out what the die was on day two (I thought it was a pineapple to begin with!). There are a few dies that I probably will use, a flower garland, a very pretty butterfly and the word 'celebrate' but the first die the snowflake remains my favourite up to the 8th anyway. I've not really had a lot of time this week to make Christmas cards because I've been concentrating on making a steampunk Gorjuss Girls card for my sister who celebrates her birthday tomorrow. It probably doesn't look like it but her card took me around 3 days to make on and off mainly because there was a lot of die cutting involved.

The images are from 'The Hatter' Gorjuss Girls stamp set and they were stamped onto Sheena's Stamping card using Memento Tuxedo Black ink and coloured in with Pro Markers. The top hat and hearts were diecut out of the same card stock and coloured in with Pro Markers. The hat was die cut four times before being layered together with wet glue to form a thick embellishment - the gears on the hat were die cut from the same card and coloured with Papermania Metallic markers. The gems were added using blobs of wet glue to keep them in place. All the other die cut gears and cogs were cut out of scraps of holographic and plain silver card. The flowers were die cut out of the white card and coloured with Pro Markers (crimson and burgundy). The 6" square card front was made using white card ( Bristol Board in this particular case) and ink blended with Fired Brick Distress Ink and Black Soot Distress Ink, it was further distressed using a distress spray bottle. The card blank is a twisted easel card blank from Every Craft's A Pound, £1 for a pack of 3 with envelopes, they aren't quite 6" square so the front piece over hangs at one side and at the top.

I really like this card and it looks a lot better in real life (my camera is really rubbish!) I just hope my sister likes it. As always if you have any comments or questions then please leave them in the usual places and until next time - happy crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx

Steampunk Silhouette Fairy

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! Uh oh it's Friday the 13th today so I'll be touching wood and encouraging my fur baby Jinx to run in front of me (but not trip me up like he usually does!) as he's a black cat and considered lucky in the UK. With a bit of luck and avoidance of going ANYWHERE I should be ok lol. In all honesty I'm not that superstitious and the only reason I'll be staying indoors is because we're expecting a parcel today. I've had a sleepless night - it was just one of those times when my brain wouldn't switch off long enough for me to fall asleep - so I pulled an all nighter and did a bit of crafting. I coloured in a Kaisercraft stamped image from the "Suga Pop" range which features a couple of cutesy owls (I love owls) but I haven't bothered to take a photo as it was just ProMarker practice. However I have taken a few pics of a steampunk fairy picture I've made for my sister. 

Steampunk silhouette fairy with metal/card gears and butterfly

 Regular readers of this blog will notice that this is an old favourite of mine in fact I made my sister a card using this image for her birthday last December and she liked it so much that when I offered to make her one in the colours of her choice, she jumped at it. Teresa asked me to make her a picture (for framing) using lilacs and purples so I hope she likes what I've made for her. I started off with a 5.5" square piece of cream card (I used cream because I have loads but prefer to use white card stock for toppers and card bases and for this project the original colour is covered with distress inks) and I covered it with Seedless Preserve Distress ink using a blending tool then I went round the edges towards the centre but leaving a space with Dusty Concorde. I blended both inks together until I got a smooth finish as desired. I stamped the fairy image using Memento Tuxedo Black ink but carefully wiped away the central parts (the veins) of the wings so that I could stamp them with cogs and gears. I also stamped the star dust and mushrooms at this point. My Wink of Stella brush pen is nearly out of ink so after swiping it over the steampunked wings I got a new WOS pen out and prepped it, unfortunately I squeezed a little too vigorously and too much ink came out. Although it's called clear the fluid which the shimmer is suspended in actually has a silver tint to it and as too much liquid came out of the brush tip, my wings ended up silvery instead of it having a bleaching effect on the Distress inks as it usually does. I don't mind too much though because although it almost obscures the cogs and gears etc that I stamped if you move the panel to a different angle you can see them through the shimmer which gives them an ethereal appearance - I imagine a steampunk fairy's wings to be half clockwork and half magic. The solid fairy image didn't stamp as dark as I would have liked so I went over it with a black WOS brush marker. I covered the mushroom caps with a layer of clear WOS and added splodges of it to the star dust sprinkles. I added some silhouetted flowers and leaves from a Lindsay Mason stamp set as shown. Once I was happy with this image I layered it onto black card stock then onto purple/lilac holographic card. I cut a sheet of lilac shimmer card that came from Crafter's Companion (I won it a few years ago in a card making competition with some stamps, rock-a-blocks and spray and stick) to 7 1/4" square and layered this underneath the holographic card. Finally I cut a sheet of dark purple ribbed card to 8" square and added the fairy layered topper to the centre. 

Close up of "Steampunked" wings

Slightly different angle showing steampunk fairy

The pictures above show the ethereal cogs and gears in the fairy's wings. To highlight the steampunk elements of the fairy I decided to add some metal embellishments to the finished piece. I usually add a butterfly rub-on to this image but instead added a metal butterfly using a Dovecrafts 'Metallics' mini brad (I punched a small hole through all the layers first using a WRMK crop-a-dile hole punch) I bent the wings up slightly to add interest to the butterfly. I got a cogs and gears die set from ECAP a while back and used them to cut out card shapes which I either painted with copper Cosmic Shimmer paints (absolutely love these paints!) or I covered them with Versamark ink and double embossed them using silver and copper embossing powders. I'm really pleased with how my homemade cogs and gears turned out because the embossed ones are on par with the metal bought ones. I got a selection of made and bought cogs and gears and added them to the bottom right of the panel using different sized brads - I've even found some Woodware screw top brads which look very steampunky! With the exception of the second from the top cog, the gears and cogs can be moved but unfortunately they don't really move each other - I'm going to frame this eventually so having moving parts isn't exactly a priority.

Guess which gears and cogs are the metal ones?

The clue is the screw brads *grin*

Another angle - the wings are now silver!

I hope you've enjoyed this project, I shall be on the look out for a suitable frame (a box frame would be good) and once it's framed I'll add a finished project photo to this post. I really hope my sister likes it too. As always if you have any questions or comments please leave them in the box below and until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxxx