Summer Party Pennants with ESC {by Jenny Marples}

Hello everyone, Jenny here with you today to share my ideas for creating fabric pennants, perfect for decorating your garden at a Summer party. Fabrics are such forgiving surfaces to work on so it's actually easier than you might think to get great results! 

The new collection of stamps and stencils from Raquel Burillo (Scrapcosy) are just perfect for this purpose, with beautiful floral images, lovely words and clever accent pieces.

Here's a peek at what's coming up...

The stamp sets used all come from the latest release and include ESC56, ESC57 and ESC58, combined with stencils PS528 and PS529. These are all available from your local stockists now.

The pastel palette of colours used for these pennants include PaperArtsy Fresco Finish Acrylic Paints (Cloud 9, Sand, Lemon Meringue, Guacamole, Spring, Cloudy, Mauve and Dolly Mix) which combine so well with Mattints (Acid, Fern, Bellflower and Foxglove).

To get started on these pennants you need to raid your fabric stash, ideally looking for non-patterned pieces in complimentary shades. I chose a neutral, vintage selection, dying some scraps with diluted Just Walnut and Lemoncello Infusions, though you may decide on a different colour scheme to suit your party theme.

Now grab those stencils and get to work, repeating patterns if needed to fill space. The fabric may absorb more paint than you are used to with paper so lift the corner of your stencils to check before you remove them completely.

I find ironing my fabrics before stencilling really helps to achieve that crisp finish. You can also re-iron them once the paint is fully dry. I know, ironing, but it's the fun sort!

Tear apart your stencilled fabrics into smaller pieces and begin to assemble them into rectangular pennants, adding in other scraps as required. A piece of muslin and a damaged lace tablecloth did the trick for me.

Make sure to overlap your pieces and I highly recommend temporarily attaching them together with a fabric glue pen.

A quick running stitch along the edges helps to make those joins secure and you can add extra translucent layers over the top to break up some of the larger areas.

Now it's time to add some colour with those floral images.

 

I felt nervous about stamping directly onto the fabric pennants so decided to make use of PaperArtsy's Blank Printed Tissue (PT10) using grey permanent ink to transfer the images onto one side.

It's a lot simpler to paint in blocks of colour on the reverse of your stamped images - the tissue allows for the colour to show through.

On the right side add a touch of shading with your Mattints.

Try adding a coat of Acid Mattint to the centre of your unpainted glass to make it look like it's been filled with an enticing beverage!

The Acid Mattint with also add that pop of yellow when painted over Cloud 9 paint.

You end up with a much larger range of colours to play with by adding Mattints over your painted images and it's worth experimenting on a scrap of tissue if you are unsure about any of the combinations.

With coloured images at the ready it's time to add them to your fabric pennants.

Use a matte medium like PaperArtsy Fresco Finish Matte Glaze to stick your tissue images to the pennants. Be generous with your application because the fabric will absorb more than paper. And notice how the colour becomes slightly stronger with the glaze applied.

Your tissue images will take longer to become fixed in place so allow for drying time. The upside to this is that you have a small amount of 'wiggle room' to reposition your images needed.

 

The ticket image from set ESC56 is perfect for letting you add some lovely sentiments. I added some extra pieces of lace trim to the pennants and repeat stamped the Greek key motif from set ESC56 on grosgrain ribbon to join them together. You can disguise the joins with little flowers for a seamless look!

And with that these Summer Party Pennants are complete.

Let's give you a closer look at my finished examples;

You can divide your images up to extend across several pennants - I did this with one of the butterflies, some tickets and the mixed flower clusters. 

I'm now thinking this could look good with a warm colour palette, possibly even more vibrant! Which colours would you choose?

Thank you for joining me today.

Jenny

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Here comes Christmas with JoFY {by Katy Norgate}

Hello and welcome everyone, Katy Norgate here today to share some cards with you that I have been making with Jo Firth Young's (JoFY) wonderful new stamps and stencils release.

It is July in the UK and we are currently, depending on your preference, enjoying/enduring a prolonged heatwave! So thoughts of Christmas are a little way off to be fair, but such is the nature of the crafting schedule, Christmas always comes in the summer!

These Christmas themed stamp sets really take me back to some of Jo's very early releases, when I first fell in love with all things PaperArtsy, and I think they are so very recognisably JoFY. So as I say, I have made cards, and have really enjoyed the process: contemplating how I might use these lovely stamps and stencils; making background/collage papers; and then piecing everything together. It will also be a bonus to have already begun some Christmas card prep!

Come and join me to see how I made them. Here are a few sneaky peeks:

So here they are, Jo's new stamp sets and stencils hot off the press last week. They are stamp sets JoFY148, JoFY149, JoFY150 All available from your local stockists

and stencils PS524, PS525, PS526. Also available from your local stockist

In addition, the supplies I have used have been minimal. I have used alcohol inks to make my papers along with my gel plate and brayer; coloured pencils; archival black ink;  glitter glues to embellish, and coloured card for mounting. Any other products I will list as I go along.

I started in my usual and favourite fashion by making background papers using alcohol inks with the stencils, on my much loved and yellowing gel plate. I used cheap copier quality card (200gms) to make the prints. It was my intention to have cards with lots of bright backgrounds, but you will see as you scroll along, that that is generally not what happened!

I think the smaller patterned stencils make the better alcohol prints. Here I laid stencil PS148 onto the 'clean' gel plate, then dropped small amounts of alcohol ink into the spaces. I allowed the ink to dry before removing the stencil. If you remove it when the ink is wet, the ink will continue to travel, and you will lose the definition of the stencil.

After removing the stencil, allow any remaining wet ink to dry before taking a print. Given the rather hot weather alluded to earlier, the ink was drying very quickly, and even with the acrylic paint used to take the print, I was having to be pretty speedy with this process.brayer

Using a brayer (PABRAY1) I applied white acrylic paint evenly over the whole gel plate. You want just a fine layer of paint for this - e.g. keep braying paint off, until you can start to see the image underneath. Lay your card onto the gel plate to take the print, while the paint is still wet, massaging the back of the paper well to ensure the best print possible.

Here are a couple of prints created. This is the first print

There is usually quite a bit of ink still left on the stencil, so I lay the dirty stencil back on the gel plate, give it a few squirts of alcohol blending solution, or isopropyl alcohol to reawaken the dried ink. If you then follow the same process to get a print, you get some more subtle prints, such as this one below.

Next I had a play with some contrasting purples using stencil PS525, following the exact same process. Please excuse my very yellow gel plate which makes the purples look red here!!

And got these prints:

 

I then continued for some time, playing with these colours to make lots more prints. Here is a collection. You can see that the more I played the colours mixed to create some lovely blended prints. I just keep going until I really cannot get any more ink off.

Here are some close ups of a couple of my favourites.

These pages below are yummy 'scraps' made when cleaning my brayer ....... bound to come in useful too!!

Masking stamps is a simple technique to layer stamps more than once, which I have used below for these two cards. Many of you will already know this technique well, but for those that don't, here goes.

The first image you stamp will be the prominent image, this technique will put further stamping behind the initial image. You will need your stamp, or stamps if for example you were creating a floral scene. Here I am just using the one stamp to create a much taller tree. You will also need an ink pad and some scrap paper; I like to use post-it notes as the thin strip of adhesive comes in useful for keeping the mask in place. You can purchase sheets of adhesive masking paper, but for small images like this it isn't really necessary.

Stamp your first image onto your project. I stamp the image again onto the post-it note, and fussy cut the overlapping edge.

Stick the partially cut out mask onto your stamped image.

and stamp onto your project a second time, lining the images as you want them.

For the purpose of demonstration, I decided to stamp a third time. You'll see that some of the hanging stars overlap a bit here, but since I am paper piecing, these will be hidden. -see finished card above.

It is now time to make the cards.

For this first card, I stamped the baubles from JoFY148 onto a piece of white card stock. In addition, I stamped them onto one of the gel prints. I fussy cut the individual baubles, and attached them to the images on the white card, as the images below show.

I mounted the card onto complementary coloured card and raised it with foam tape, With the addition of some glittery embellishment, the card is complete. I love the the vibrant baubles against the clean white card.

I followed a very similar process of paper piecing with the following cards.

A touch of additional stamping and colouring with crayons for this one.

I used the masking technique, described above, to stamp this Christmas tree twice and the trio of baubles three times.

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Another technique I used was to make a wreath, with the leaf cluster from JoFY150. Using a circle mask with a diameter of about 10cm, I blended peeled paint distress ink. This is a helpful guide to align the leaf cluster. I stamped using the VersaFine shady lane ink around the diameter. I practised a couple of time first on spare card, so that I could line it up well, and to see how may times I needed to stamp avoiding overlap. For this 10cm diameter, 9x stamps worked perfectly.

I used coloured pencils for the leaves

I then paperpieced the bauble trio and the star trio from JoFY149

I used a thin strip of acetate to attach the baubles so that they are dimensional. More mounting with coloured card and glitter glue to embellish. I have to say this is my favourite card of the lot!!

So here are my finished cards. What I thought would initially be lots of bright backgrounds, ended up being more subtle paper pieced images, enabling these beautiful stamps to take centre stage. Products used are minimal, making these cards very doable projects even with limited supplies.

Here are a few close ups to see some of the finer details.

I used Ranger crackle accents to embellish the tree here.....

Effective use of glitter glues....

Ranger glossy accents, glitter glue and a strip of acetate to keep the large bauble mobile......

Thank you so much for taking a look ....I do hope you will give these beautiful stamps a stencils a go....... Happy Christmas card making ...... Ho ho ho!!!

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