Tuesday 29 April 2008

Technique Loaded Tag Project

Yesterday Sally Cendral (who keeps popping up unexpectedly at Stamp and trade shows in either France or England) sent me a series of photos she took while I was making a tag for her at Ally Pally recently.

As I have just mentioned the gold texture "happy accident" a couple of posts back, I thought it was timely to share with you a whole project using the idea, with a few other techniques thrown in too.

Step 1.
Apply ink with a Range mini brayer to a blank tag.

To get a soft effect like this, run the brayer over your craft sheet a few times first to soften and reduce the quantity of ink on the brayer, then lightly skip the brayer over the tag with hardly any pressure. You can pick up more ink from the craft sheet until you are happy with the effect on the tag. Try this technique with 2-3 colours



Step 2.
2/3 fill 2 mini misters with water. Add to one 4 drops of Peeled Paint, and to the other 4 drops of Broken China distress ink.

Spray the ink quite close to the tag and use loads to saturate the tag (more than this picture shows...this is only half sprayed!). For contrast, spray each colour in 2 or 3 different areas, then dry with a heat tool.
TIP: you can start with spraying ink straight onto a blank tag, but if you apply ink with a brayer or cut and dry foam BEFORE you spray you will get a much deeper and more interesting background colour.





Step 3.
Once dry, overstamp in the same colours. I used Squiggly Mini #8 in Broken China, and the tree branches (SISC5) in Peeled Paint. (I prefer to stamp blue over blue and green over green to add more depth to the background.)

In the Centre of the tag I have stamped the Heart from SIBM1.




Step 4.
Apply glossy accents to the centre of of the heart. Pour Gold embossing powder onto the wet glossy accents. Heat to melt the EP, and 'boil' the glossy accents until it all hardens (about 2-3 minutes) with awesome textural lumps and bumps.





Step 5.
Its also a good idea to heat the tag from the reverse side to help the glossy accents dry. You can control the texture by moving and holding the heat gun in different positions.







Step 6.
Apply Gold Acrylic Paint Dabber to textured grungeboard wings. I like to use my finger to rub the paint into the grunge, it makes the effect with metallic paints really shiny. Dry the paint.
TIP: Use sandpaper on painted grunge. You will create matte and shiny contrasts - the sandpaper roughens the raised poortions of the grunge.






Step 7.
Apply a contrasting Distress Ink (Aged Mahogany here) to the grunge with Cut 'n' Dry Foam. The ink will sink into the sanded areas where the sandpaper distressed the surface.









Step 8.
Wipe excess ink off the shiny Gold painted areas of the Grungeboard.








Step 9.
Make holes with a paper piercer through the grungeboard and the tag, and then sew the wings into place with soft wire.

This is much faster than using a needle and thread, and is a nice textural embellishment. Its also easy to add small beads as you go.





Step 10.
For final but striking effect, use the Ranger Inkssentials white pen to outline the details of the Squiggly Mini #8 swirl stamp.

Tip: Try adding German Scrap inked with Alcohol Inks (lettuce and stream would look great) at the bottom of the tag. SOme gold ribbon with prima flowers would look superb at the top too.

Wednesday 23 April 2008

Baked Beans...


OK here is an entry in the spirit of our competition. Original uses of PaperArtsy Stamps. We received these yesterday.They are decorated baked bean tins! Here's a quote from the artist...

"The strangest thing I have stamped on so far are ..... baked bean tins!
Please don't Beanalise me for my poor photography!!! Can I enter as many times as I like? If I can get OH while he is sleeping I could cover him in stamps like an all over body tattoo!"

Bring it on that's what we say. Let your imagination run wild!

Get your entries in you have until May 21st to have a chance to
get your hands on a full set of PaperArtsy Minis

Sunday 20 April 2008

One of those cool happy accidents


So how do you think I managed this rustic gold effect for the heart pictured here?

Last week I was playing about with the new Bricks and Mortar squigglies immediately after they came out of the vulcanising press. Nothing quite like hot new rubber....

First of all I lightly brayered shabby shutters all over a tag. I stamped the heart and then surrounded it with rows of lines (the stamp is from SILK1) .

So, crackle the heart...broken heart.....nope......glossy or matte accents....yep that'll do nicely, so I filled the heart with glossy accents.

Then i decided that was going to take too long to dry, so I thought, let's sprinkle the glossy acents with regular Gold Embossing Powder, then heat set until the glossy glue goes hard.

Got out the heat gun, and as you may well know, the EP melts, then as the glue under the EP heats up its starts to bubble and boil.....very cool I'm thinking.....and pretty soon I worked out that if you held the heat gun steady at different distances, you can actually maintain a 'bubble', or particular texture. So I did that until it stopped bubbling and went kind of hard. So now i have a very cool textured blob that i think is going to be a 'thing' I do for a while on lots of little projects!

Have a great week, hope you get time to sit down and play too! I am really looking forward to teaching in Folkestone, Kent at Scrapfriends on Wednesday, and then we are joining 2 of the kids on a school trip to the Natural History Museum in London on Friday.

BTW On Saturday 26th April, Emma from Imagine That PaperCrafts, Upminster Essex is having a Squiggly Ink Demo Day, so make sure if you are near her to pop in and have a looksie!

Have some fun
Leandra

Saturday 19 April 2008

How fab is this?

Linda at LB Crafts sent me this today in the post as a thanks for demoing last weekend. Its so simple, and so effective, just typical of her classic style that always looks just right!. I *love* it! I think it might need a few more buddies to keep it company. What a cool idea for Christmas decorations!

She has stamped the most popular squiggly mini #8 in jet black archival ink (Ranger) onto a small acrylic tag.

Next the Teeny tiny house from Bricks and Mortar Plate 3 is stamped onto copper metal twice...becasue this is a see-through hanging decoration, she has got the same house on both sides!

She used her Ten Seconds Studio tools (available at LB Crafts) to make a simple strip, a bit of ball & cup, with a micro-wheel eaiter side. That is secured with glue, and an eyelet at the side allows for a simple bead dangle.

At the top she has used prima flowers (and brads) both sides, with copper wire and a rust fine ribbon hanger to finish.

Thanks Lin, what a great mail day for me!



Tomorrow I'm going to share a new technique (happy accident) from last week using 2 products you're bound to have in your stash.

Keep those stamp competiton entries coming in, we've had some wonderful projects come in this week, keep up the good work. Remember we are looking for weird and unusual ways to use PaperArtsy stamps, so think outside that box some more. We know you're all a little bit weird and wacky deep down! At least we hope you are. I keep telling my kids - why would you want to be normal??? LOL

Wednesday 16 April 2008

Our Big Fat PaperArtsy Competition...

Yep we are having a prize give away. We want you to send us your photos (jpegs to newsletters@paperartsy.co.uk) of the most original thing you've done with a PaperArtsy stamp, no holds barred. The comp is open to anyone worldwide and the prize is a full set of 42 PaperArtsy Minis. Value £197 GBP (approx $400 USD). We'll post a selection of the entries each week here on the blog for you to see and we'll announce the winner on May 21. So get on your bizarro thinking cap, get a caffeine buzz on and show us what you can do.

Speaking of coffee, to set the tone, and maybe get your brain moving, check this one. Greg Costello from The Workhouse Coffee Company in Reading sent me this photo. Apparently the staff at his gourmet coffee shop spend the quieter afternoon hours stamping coffee cups with PaperArtsy stamps ready for the next days business. The customers love it and we do too.

Right then, get going and show us your ideas.

Thursday 10 April 2008

Coming Soon....new 'house' Squigglies

Even though we have been particularly busy, we have still managed to squeeze in some new stamps for April. The launch of these new babies is at Ally Pally this weekend, available from the LB Crafts stand. The theme is houses, and I love them so much already. So useful, so much fun, and great for a lot of diferent situations.








I adore the rulers, these make perfect borders. The houses all have frames, so you can put images behind if you cut out the frame, or you could draw in your own doors/ windows detail. I also thought I might stamp another image inside the frame. I also think I will love using them as secret doors - interactive stuff is awesome on cards.




I think some of these stamps will work great with scrapbook layouts, and the quotes are perfect for cards, so these are really versatile.

I can't wait to see what you do with them.













Available from April 14th 2008
www.paperartsy.co.uk

Wednesday 9 April 2008

Home to stay at last!

I've had a blast. Since the end of January I think I have been home for maybe 3 weekends!

End of January was CHA in Anaheim, California, USA. I got to go on my own this time which was really cool fun (of course I did miss Mark being with me) but I got to hang with the Artgirlz, and Jenny S from Paperworx, New Zealand, and all the other girlies I bumped into along the way, so it actually was mega chilled. We didn't exhibit this show for 2 main reasons: the US economy has made it hard for them to import while their exchange rate is lower than usual, and the UK trade show 'Stitches' was the following weekend, so there was no time to do both shows with only one day in between.

The big trend at CHA this year was clear stuff, as in acrylic books and stuff. Also felt was huge with all kinds of trims, borders, accents and even 12 x 12 stuff. Then there was the bling. Basically brads were like jewelry , so the bigger and blingier the better. Stamps as a category is still strong. Scrapbookers are getting into stamping big time now! Also lots of fabric trims, eg velvet - velvet brads, velvet ribbons etc. And the lush, bling, glam stuff was seen on papers with gold embossed layers or flourishes, sparkles, glitter, etc as part of the design. The other trends I noticed as far as design elements go were houses (shapes for chipboard, stamps, clear layers, on papers etc) and butterlies/ dragonflies are doing the rounds again.

The following weekend we were exhibiting at Stitches in the UK (Birmingham). I was expecting a quiet show, but we actually were so busy I didn't get to walk the show at all! Stitches is always fun, as Tim and Alain from Ranger are here, so we usually get to go out for a few meals with them while the show is on. It's taken a few years, but now Tim actually really likes Indian food!

2 weeks after stitches I was teaching for the weekend down at Portmouth at Jendenink. We made this charm bracelet. It's a fondue system with the melt pot. Make a paper bead, dip and voila! Sometimes we add gold leaf or perfect pearls to the bead to glam it up a bit. So cool, and a fun way to use the melt-pot for sure.

The weekend after Jendenink was SMAC. This is a trade show in France. We have a distributor in France called ACICAM, so 2 times a year we release new stamps for them. We translate existing PaperArtsy stamps into French which they sell to French shops. So at SMAC we released another 20 stamps, and we even did a French catalogue for them, as they now have about 60 designs (over 180 individual images and 25 minis).

SMAC was great as we stay at a hotel opposite the Louvre. Although the down side was the train took about 45 mins to get out to the show each day, but of course it is super cool to be in Paris too. Suze Weinburg and her husband were here this year, as well as the Ranger owners Alain and Justin, so we had some fun nights out with them all. Suze and I swapped some great melt-pot ideas, and she was blown away with the show, it is really the most beautifully presented show on the world calendar! Go here to see her photos of the show, and here for her newsletter that week. Mona from Creative Imaginations and I planned all our make and takes together, along with Tim's grungeboard, and Ranger products, so I really enjoyed all the cool stuff I got to demo with at the show.

The show trends are so different at SMAC to other shows. Felt was big at this show last year (and still popular this year) but the beads were truly incredible. The main thing I saw a lot of was interior decor items, and texture. People love to add that personal touch to their homes, and they use a lot of scrapping style stuff to do it in a very stylish and classy way. Also people in Europe are not scared of colour, so everything is bold and very beautiful. So inspirational.

So we got home from SMAC, and then 10 days later we were back for Version SCRAP. This is a scrapping show in Paris, with classes and workshops. Mona was still in France working for ACICAM in between the 2 shows, and so we co-ordinated for classes again.

I did this cute flower class (left) with some Creative Imaginations products. And a mini transparent book which was really popular too.

We also did loads of different make and takes on the booth which people could book in to do also. I caught up with Celine Navarro who I also briefly saw at CHA, so that was cool.

As it was school holidays Mark and the kids came over too, and the daughter of our distributor took them to Disney Paris for a day out on Friday. We kept it a secret, and they were so excited. Our kids are now 7,9,11,13 years, so they are a great age for theme parks!

We got back from this latest adventure yesterday. How to blast 3 months in one easy step! LOL

This weekend its Ally Pally, a Stamping and Scrapbooking show in London. I shall be there demoing for LB Crafts on their stand, so if anyone is nearby, come along. Its a great show!