Upcycled Mini-Egg Tube Storage Solution

The master of crafty invention, Tim Holtz (along with his friends at Ranger Ink), has come up with a brand new mini-applicator tool for the ever popular Distress Inks – if you’ve not come across it yet, it’s circular and smaller than his previous rectangular ones. I’m still waiting on my order for the tool, but I had a delivery of the replacement foams…

I came up with a storage dispenser for the foams, but the design was a little flimsy and I wasn’t entirely happy with it. As I was munching through some Cadbury’s mini-eggs (don’t you just love this time of year?) I was pondering the design… and then realised as I was about to chuck the tube away that it might be the solution. A quick check showed it was just the right diameter to take the foams, and a new design was born. Before… and after:

Design Team Call: Second Round

I managed to get through to the second round of the Creative Expressions Design Team Call 2013-14, and the next challenge was to create a project using their ‘Belle of the Ball’ stamp set. This comes as a rubber sheet which needs cutting up and mounting on the foam backing suitable for use with acrylic blocks – some of the images could have done with a little more space round them, but I managed 🙂

The closing date was yesterday, which allows me to share the projects with you – and yes, I did more than one: one to show I can make a card, another to demonstrate I can think outside the box, and a third to demonstrate altered art and making something out of a cheap pound-shop photo frame. The centre canvas one is quite a size, and even the bow is adapted from the dress stamps. The frame one is a 4×6″ aperture, with the centre coloured dress mounted in front of the glass – printed with Versacraft black ink onto white cotton and coloured with ProMarkers.

I’ll share another tip with you – the label that accompanies the rubber stamp sheet laminates well, and the foam covered stamps stick nicely to it and the whole lot still slides nicely into the original packaging. Perfect storage solution 🙂

 

 

Altered Art Book Pages for a card

It’s my turn to post again over at the Crafting Cafe, and this month the theme is ‘altered art’ with the sponsor once again the fabulous Delicious Doodles. I’ve printed their Pansy & Butterfly digistamp directly onto old dictionary pages – for more details, go to my post on the design team blog.

 

 

Christmas Stained Glass

I’ve just posted my latest WOW! Embossing Powder project over at the design team blog. I learnt quite a lot about embossing powder onto glass! Follow the link to also learn how I managed to take a photo of a mirror without being in it…

Altered Art Triptych

I actually crafted for pleasure yesterday, rather than just to meet commissions! This is the first piece I completed:

Twelve Tags of 2012 – September

I’ve been playing with various options of putting colour onto metal – here are the results! I’ll be showing how to do them at the Manic Stamper Craft Club on Saturday.

The tags are first covered with metal foil tape (really thin foil – serves me right for going to the local poundstore!) and then I used a small embossing ball tool to emboss the outlines. Rub over the whole tag with black acrylic paint, and then wait for it to almost dry before rubbing off the paint from the tag – it should catch in the outlines. Add colour with acrylic inks (I used a paintbrush), Promarkers or alcohol inks (I used the Adirondack alcohol ink pen filled with blending solution to pick up dried alcohol inks from a palette). I love the aged look to the metal caused by the black acrylic, and the translucent colour from the Promarkers/alcohol inks. The acrylic inks are more luminous due to their opacity. By the way, alcohol seems to denature acrylic, so if your black coating doesn’t work out, wipe over with alcohol hand gel and try again!

And as a bonus, I’m publishing the forget-me-not doodle as a tangle pattern 🙂