Brilliant 2012 Extravaganza

How the week is flying by! I've been trying to blog all week about my lovely weekend demoing at the Craft Barn extravaganza. What follows are a few of the samples I made over the weekend featuring a sampling of our newest stamps.

This London Bus sample (HP1208) has painted 'crunchy' craft glassine waxed paper, alternating with mica-powdered die cut flowers. The painted background are 2 colours, the top one 'crackled' over the lower, and washed with watery contrasting paint. Embellished with plaquette number, and a bedtime key.

This again is a crackled , painted background, also over stamped with that lovely fine script from mini 61, and the new cotton reel mini 65. Hot Pick 1214 features labels that can be stamped and wrapped with thread, a great way to bring dimension to the card. And the lace from Hot Pick 1212 is so fine, despite this, it stamps up on top of the painted background with amazing detail. This is one of the fantastic features of the fresco finish acrylic paint, it is so matte, that stamping on top is easy! The dress form comes from the new Hot Pick 1215. Again, a crunchy, fresco-painted die cut flower using grunge flower 1, and the set grunge flower 2/3 layered together is the embellishment I can't live without at the moment.

 

We even have some new collages stamps to match these dies on Hot Pick plate 1209. This plate also has some awesome union jack bunting.

28 demonstrators each doing something different at the Craft Barn is an amazing opportunity to see new products and plenty of ideas how to use them all! Every year there are people discovering this weekend, and loving every minute meeting other like minded crafters, meeting crafty friends, old and new.

This sample above shows the efficiency of using our newest stamping surface, 'Crackly', a robust coated tissue paper, on a particularly textured surface, in this case it was crackled, then sanded and was quite lumpy. Crackly is a perfect medium to use when you want to add an image to an uneven surfaces like wood, canvas, or even a heavily painted tag. Stamp the image in an archival ink (ranger archival, versafine), heat set, and then you can paint from the reverse with opaque paints, or from the front with translucent, so as not to compromise the blackness of the stamped image. Once painted, you can adhere easily to the receiving surface with Satin Glaze.

This lovely label (Hot pick 1212) was stamped onto painted fabric with coffee archival ink, heat set and painted. The paint smoothes out the texture of the fabric, allowing the detail of the stamp to be seen clearly.

So those are some of my samples, but the day before, lucky for Lynne (aka Blingy Lynne, Essex Lynne, Cheryl or Bodgerbird - how does one person have so many names!) and I, we pleaded our case for a day off last week, and off we zoomed down to Lingfield early Friday morning to actually take a class for a change rather than teach one!!

Andy Skinner was weaving his magic with paint to create all kinds of aged effects, and showed us in a perfectly chilled out manner how to turn a paper mâché box into this rather special little number.

I particularly enjoyed the patina effect on the roof, and making the corners of the crackled facings look dented and rain-washed drippy-rusty. If you want to learn these and other techniques, then I suggest you sign up for his online classes, they look marvellous! He also teaches at the Craft Barn every month, so maybe you could catch him there.

So back to the weekend itself, plenty of visitors came by to take a look, many familiar faces! Here is Alison, Beccy, Mickey, Stephanie and Paula. They basically took over my desk and jumped in boots and all Sunday afternoon- they just couldn't watch any longer and had to have a go!

.... so I made space, gave them each a tag, and they played with paint, stencils and for the best part of an hour painted, stamped and embellished what turned into epic tags!

..... While i had a cup of tea, and the brownie Anna gave me the day before-it was delish!

Somehow I have lost steph's photo ( unless I forgot to take one, but I'm sure I did!!!) , but I do have pics of Alison's

Here is Beccy's

This one is Mickey's

And this was Paula's

On Sunday I also popped into the Victoria Hall and walked straight into Helen Chilton, who is partial to a Lynne Perrella stamp or 3! She was showing her amazing pull-tab cards! I think they are fantastic, and so well suited to this technique.

Here you can see them in greater detail.

So I'll finish up with a few more samples I made over the weekend

This one is made on the chunky hanging boards that are so cheap and easy to work on, a paper mâché surface, about 1cm deep, they make a great dimensional addition to your project. I painted it with French roast and hey pesto, then sponged old gold through the diamond stencil. Over this a small Artemio bird (these come 3 per pack) was painted in hey pesto and pumpkin soup, then lightly stamped with script. The whole piece was layered onto another painted tag, and torn sections of old book pages, crunchy, calico were used to create a textured contrast.

And these last 2 again show how stamping on crackly, colouring it, then adding it to your background is a great way to make the colours pop off the background.

I do have a bit of a simple trick you may like to try..... Crackly is a robust coated tissue paper, and if you colour in the image with paint, and once dry, paint over the entire back with snowflake white opaque paint. When you stick the finished piece of tissue onto the background, the background will not show through the tissue, so that the colours of the image stay true. It's a really nice way to attach an image to an uneven surface.

So there you have it, another fantastic weekend, make sure you don't miss the 2013 event!

Leandra

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