Bright and Cheerful

Hello all!  I'm thrilled to be the guest designer for June at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge and here's my project for their new Bright and Cheerful theme this week.

It's always such an honour to feature alongside the phenomenal design team there, and I'm really looking forward to the month ahead.

The new challenge theme this week is Bright and Cheerful...  regular followers of mine will know that's not exactly my usual mode, but it's always great to step outside your comfort zone.

In some ways I stayed very much in my current comfort zone.  I've been really enjoying altering these teabag sachets lately, and I figured if I stayed small, I should be able to find at least a little bit of brightness and cheeriness!  

Recycling too... and that's definitely something to be cheerful about.  I should just say that I'm generally pretty bright and cheerful myself - it's just not my usual crafting style!

Let's take a quick look at the process, and then there are plenty of close-ups later on in the post.  Here are the not-very-attractive naked sachets.  (I'm a coffee drinker apart from the occasional spiced chai, but Cestina of Small Worlds, is helpfully a drinker of many kinds of teas - she's on a Rooibos kick just now!)

The first step is to give the sachets a rough coat of gesso to create a blank canvas.

I then used Wow Bright White embossing powder to emboss a fabulous Katzelkraft collage stamp.  (It's not in stock in the Simon Says Stamp shop yet, but they have it on order - and they do have lots of other great Katzelkraft designs.)

You can't really see it from a distance at this point, but if you look a bit more closely you can see the spiralling clock face and distressed harlequins which are just a couple of elements within the stamp.

Next up are the Distress Spray Stains - Broken China and Twisted Citron.  Together, they create lots of interesting shades as they blend and flow, so I stuck to just these two (not sure what went on with the lighting here - the colours in the main photos above are much truer to life).

And now that amazing stamp comes into its own, of course...

Then it's time for one of my favourite parts... working out what's going to go on top of the backgrounds.  I've now folded the flaps back into place which gives me a squarer format to work with.

The teabag sachets are just the right size for the new Paper Dolls Minis... tiny versions of the Paper Dolls, perfect for ATCs, or other tiny crafting like teabag art.

There are old favourites here and new characters to fall in love with, and as always, I had a lovely time listening in to see who really wanted to be part of this teabag alteration.

And I'm deeply in love with the tiny Snippets Ephemera labels.  I picked out the brightest and most colourful ones I possibly could from the pack.  

For the most part, I tend to favour the neutral ones (big surprise!) so all these pink and red tones were still going begging.

I added strips of Design Tape Trim for the dolls to stand on if they needed it.  I also selected some Snippets Number Strips to add an extra element to each collage.

The final layer of the Small Chat stickers has a little bit of pen doodling around it, and I added some more to frame each sachet collage.  It draws the eye in nicely, I think.

I quite often work with bright blues and greens, but the real hop out of kin here is for me to add red/pink.  It's really not a colour you see around here very much, unless I've been painting some berries or some roses.

Over on the reverse, I kept it simple to let that white-embossed stamping and the vivid Distress Sprays continue to take centre stage.

There's just a tiny bit of Trim to add a dark contrast to those bright colours and glossy white embossing.  I think it really adds visual interest, as does the movement and dimension of the flap of the sachet envelope.  There's nothing inside these yet, but I can think of lots of ephemera, gift voucher or cash surprises which could slot right in... 

And that's it! I hope that's given you some inspiration to go and create something Bright and Cheerful for yourselves.  

If you need a bit more of a nudge, you'll find glorious inspiration aplenty from the Design Team over at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge.

Do come and join in.  As always, there's a $25 gift certificate, generously sponsored by Simon Says Stamp...

... so you could get to go shopping for supplies - always a bright idea; or you might get picked by the team to go in the Spotlight which is guaranteed to make you cheerful.

Have a great week everyone, and even a bright and cheerful one!  Happy crafting, all.

Bright reds - scarlet, pillar-box red, crimson or cherry - are very cheerful and youthful. There is certainly a red for everyone.
Christian Dior

If more of us valued cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
J.R.R. Tolkien

Long time, no see...

I know, I know... I'm sorry, it's been a shamefully long time since I posted here.  Life has been overwhelmingly busy, mostly in a good way.  There's so much to deal with when you move to a new country, try to build new income streams, and also start tackling gardening full scale.  I have been creating, but - cards on table - the speed of posting on Instagram as opposed to creating a blogpost (I've never really come to terms with the Blogger changes) has meant that has become my platform of choice while I've been so busy.

I love my blog though, and Craftyblogland will always be a special place to me - so I'm going to try really hard to put in an appearance at least once a week, and there are various things coming up which will kick me into keeping that resolution, so fingers crossed!

For now, let me catch you up with just some pictures of what's been going on creatively in the meantime... mostly tags rather than bigger creations (that busy-ness problem again), though I hope you'll like the Easter nest of eggs, and I've just (literally) dusted off my watercolour brushes and started doing some painting again.

I've also been doing quite a few tiny pieces in series - altered cash envelopes, altered teabag sachets and so on.  Keeping it small means I'm more likely to get finished!  And there are some pieces responding to the dark news from Ukraine (all too immediate here in the Czech Republic, where the Russian tanks were still a presence only thirty years ago).

Take a look...

So that's a taster of what's been going on... (and you're getting a debut with that second rose painting - it hasn't appeared on IG yet!).  I hope you've all been doing okay and that, wherever you are, you are enjoying some sunshine (either spring or autumn).  I'll aim to do some visiting soon too, but June is going to be a very busy month in a number of ways, so it make take a while to get round to everyone.

Stay safe, stay well, and I'll see you again here soon.  Happy crafting, all!

Time is the longest distance between two places.    It's good to be back after all this time.

From The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other's worth.

Robert Southey

Life is...

Hello all!  I'm here with a trio of altered money envelopes today.  They were made as samples for one of my latest stamp sets, launched last month by PaperArtsy.  All the quotes on these come from EAB19 Life & Living.

They ended up needing to be a trio because each of them starts with the phrase "Life is..." (or in one case "Life isn't..." but it then goes on to tell you what "Life is..." in the second half!).

The cash envelopes are actually just slightly larger than ATC sized, especially when you leave the top flap open, as I have, to receive possible gift vouchers or cash as a gift.

I won't keep you long, as these were really pretty simple to make, but just in case you want to know how, keep reading.













I started by smearing gesso onto the envelopes with a palette knife.  It's really not important to be neat or precise with this bit.








Next, I added watery washes from the chosen palette - a green-turquoise-blue-purple spectrum.








Once that was all dry, I stamped some of Courtney's fabulous leaves from ECF06, combining Leaf Green and Olive Archival directly on the stamp.

Some of the postmarks from the same set are stamped around the place in French Ultramarine Archival.














The French Ultramarine is actually a soft purply pale blue, so fitted perfectly with the paint palette.













I stamped the quotes on separate pieces of card, and embossed them in Wow Earthtone Pepper. 















I love this speckled grey, especially when it catches the light... it makes me very happy.














And I did want to have the authors' names somewhere in the mix.  Obviously, you can just cut them off and discard them, but sometimes I like to have them around.














Rather than have them conventionally attached somewhere as a footnote, I used them as little balancing accents in opposite upper corners.














Okay, Helen Keller made it to footnote sort of place in the bottom corner, but only because that was the position needed to get a balanced composition.















The cotton thread adds movement and dimension.














I love how the spontaneous coils and swirls bring everything to life.  And of course there's plenty of splatter, which I find has a similar effect.














If I'm using the method of stamping on a separate piece of paper and then cutting the quotes up, rather than stamping straight on a project, the positioning of the words is worth some attention.

For instance, with this Einstein quote, you can create the pause needed for the comic timing of the quote by leaving visual space between the words.

But maybe that's just me... I know I do have a strange and particular brain as far as words are concerned!




So there you go - another batch of samples from the new stamp sets.  I hope you like them.  My favourites are still to come.  That's going to be a more complicated blogpost to write.  





Hopefully now I'm safely settled in the Czech Republic (for a few weeks at least - all a bit up in the air, depending on building work) I'll have more time to play with.  I've got most of the unpacking done, and the travelling craft stash organised... there's quite a lot, though the pile is smaller than on some occasions in the past - have a look here, third photo down!).











Three Tim Holtz stamp folders, plus assorted extra stamps; plenty of Distress Ink and Oxide pads in the TH Cargo Case; tools and brushes and powders in the little Wendy Vecchi bag; and a couple of cardboard boxes rammed full - here's a sample of the top layer of the little one.  Next time out I'll try to remember to show you a couple of pictures of my current set up.





I hope you're all thriving this week, or at least surviving.  Stay safe, stay well everyone, and happy crafting!

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them - that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.
Lao Tzu