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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