Vintage Heart

This week at Sweet Pea Stamps it's our Featured Artist Week and this month the DT are featuring the gorgeous artwork of one of the newest additions to the roster of Sweet Pea artists, Charity Dauenhauer. I chose to work with this beautiful stamp called Vintage Heart:

 

 

I love the mix of steampunk, fantasy and romance in this image - just perfect for a Valentine's card, actually. ;) I coloured the image with a mixture of Promarkers and Prismacolor pencils and carefully cut around it.

 

 

I decorated my card with papers in warm tones (and continuing the heart/romance theme ;D) and textured gold mirri card. I added some delicate vintage lace and layered the image over it using foam tape.

 

 

I love the warm glow that this textured mirri card gives when the light hits it.

 

 

This stamp is available in red rubber or digi format from the Sweet Pea Stamps store.

 

Anything Goes

After last week's "Make It Stitchy" challenge, where we challenged you to use a Stitchy Bear product on your creation, this week at One Stitch at a Time we're back with a vengeance with a perennial favourite challenge theme - Anything Goes.

 

It does exactly what it says on the tin - you can enter any project, using any products you like. Of course, only entries using a Stitchy Bear product will be eligible to win our main prize but entries without a Stitchy Bear product can still win, with a $3 gift voucher to the Stitchy Bear Digi Outlet up for grabs.

 

For my card this week, I worked with this fabulous, rather steampunky Leather and Lace image by Delicious Doodles:

 

 

I loove steampunk stuff so I coloured the image with my Promarkers in traditional/vintagey colours of brown with rich reds and greens:

 

 

I kept with the rich vintage theme for the rest of my card, using a kraft card blank and making my own background by stamping kraft cardstock with a fabulous brocade pattern and embossing it with rich gold embossing powder:

 

 

I added a length of brown lace underneath the embossed panel and matted the image onto more kraft cardstock before attaching, adding some little metal accents in the corners. And the finished I then got out my hot glue gun and made a fabulous, vintagey flower embellisment by layering more of the brown lace (cut into sections and ruffled), a paper blossom and a gorgeous metal flower:

 

 

I'm entering this card into the following challenges:

Catch The Bug - Anything Goes

Little Claire's - Open

The Hobby House - Anything Goes

Daring Cardmakers - Make It Yourself

Just Add Ink - Just Add... Fabric!

Sister Act Card Challenge - Anything Goes
Totally Papercrafts - Anything Goes
Passion for Promarkers - Add Ribbon, Lace or Twine

Sweet Pea Steampunk

I made another card for the Sweet Pea Stamps blog this week, this time using Marlon Teunissen's fabulous The Pilot digi stamp (this is the digi stamp that was coloured on my desk in my WOYWW post yesterday). I love Marlon's steampunk-themed, slightly manga-style images.

 

 

I carried the steampunk style throughout my card with shades of blue and brown, cog and clock motifs and lots of metal effects.

 

I coloured the image with my Promarkers before cutting it out with a Spellbinders die and embossing it and inking the edges. I then matted it onto bronze-coloured card.

 

 

I added some decoration with a bronze Perlen Pen and some Glossy Accents.

 

 

I then used my Cameo to cut a cog design overlay from bronze-coloured card and added random patches of Distress Embossing Powder for a rusted effect before layering it over clock-patterned paper. I attached the matted image using foam pads.

 

To finish off I added a layered flower using paper flowers and a metal flower centrepiece and some foliage flourishes die-cut from cardstock and heat embossed with copper powder.

 

 

I also cut a sentiment with my Cameo and heat embossed that with copper embossing powder before attaching.

 

 

I think this image looks fabulous on a steampunk card - the whole effect is industrial and grungy and steampunky but still quite feminine. :)

 

You can buy this image in both red rubber and digi format at the Sweet Pea Stamps store.

 

Cute Steampunk

Marlon Teunissen is one of the newest additions to the fabulous artists creating stamps for Sweet Pea Stamps and I love her delicate, steampunk/manga-inspired images.

 

When I saw one of her new releases - called Pink Girl - I just had to have a play with it:

 

 

I love the steampunk style of this image but also the slightly manga/Sweet Lolita influence too. I decided to colour her in soft shades of blue and pink, kind of in a Sweet Lolita style:

 

 

The obvious papers to team with this image are the new steampunk-themed Chronology papers from Papermania, which I picked up recently. I inked the edges of the papers with a soft grey ink and added some ribbon and lace for a touch of softness. In keeping with the steampunk-theme, I die-cut a sentiment from textured silver card, which I then ran through the BigShot in a Chronology embossing folder. I also cut some mini cogs from the same card.

 

 

I love how this silver card shines as it catches the light. I cut out the coloured image and attached it in the bottom corner using foam pads and finished off the card by tucking a couple of pearlised butterfly hat pins behind her.

And that was my "cute" steampunk card. :)

You can buy this image from the Sweet Pea Stamps store in either red rubber or digi format.

WOYWW 186

Welcome to the last WOYWW of 2012! :) I hope you all had a lovely Christmas?

 

Ours has been busy - with two little ones, one of whose birthday is Christmas Eve, it was bound to be! :lol: They had a quite silly amount of presents between the two of them and we had a fun day opening them all up, playing with them, eating Christmas dinner, etc etc.

 

 

Consequently, I've not been doing much in the way of crafting lately! Not only because of the pre-Christmas chaos but also because the craft room is in disarray once again... because DH decided to buy this behemoth:

 

 

It's a rather fabulous colour laser printer, which is going to be useful, but he decided it had to go in my office/craft room, rather than his study, and the only place it could reasonably go was on top of the filing cabinet. Which I *was* using for storing things like my drawers of embellies and my files of scrap paper. So I've had to move all those and they are currently cluttering up the spare desk, waiting for me to find the time to have a reorganise and find them a new home.

 

So the desk is back to being chaotic:

 

 

I did manage to clear a teensy bit of space in the work area, enough to make this card for the Sweet Pea Stamps blog:

 

 

I used a beautiful Meredith Dillman digi stamp called Steampunk Fairy. I love Meredith's detailed images and I love steampunk stuff too so this was perfect for me! :) I started colouring her in shades of gold and green, using my Promarkers, but then I added some red too and found that my image had turned out quite festive in colour scheme, appropriately enough! :) I also dug out my Flexmarkers to add a bit of a pale pink colourwash to the background.

 

 

I kept with the steampunk theme and used a steampuk stencil for the card background and spritzed over it with golden Smooch Spray and then rubbed Inka Gold over it.

 

 

I attached the image with foam tape and added some leafy flourishes and a filigree butterfly, cut from textured gold card, and finished things off with some wooden doilies coloured with Inka Gold and some Stickles in red and green.

 

 

A rather festive-looking, not-exactly-Christmas card! :)

 

That's it from me. Hope you're having a nice - and relaxing, if at all possible! - boxing day and not suffering too much from the after-effects of yesterday's festivities.

Sassy Steampunk

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I've been doing a lot of colouring of digi stamps lately. The nights have gotten cold and dark and my sofa is just too darn comfortable so when I can't manage to lever myself off the sofa and into the craft room I compromise by sitting on the sofa and colouring digi stamps as I watch TV. :)

 

Whenever I print a digi that I want to work with I tend to print a whole sheet, to save wasting cardstock, so I will usually fill the sheet with various other digis, meaning I always have a stock of printed images waiting to be coloured.

 

One of the ones I coloured recently was a recent acquisition from Sassy Studio Stamps - this cute little steampunk lady:

 

 

I bought a few Sassy Studio digis a while back but hadn't had chance to play with them yet... but this one was on one of my printed sheets so I had a go at colouring her in with my Promarkers. Isn't she fun?

 

 

I used the image along with some Kanban steampunk-themed papers and some cogs cut with my cameo to make a steampunk tentfold card.

 

I also added a little metal swallow charm that I had hanging around the craft room:

 

 

And I decorated the inside of the card too, using more of the papers and cogs and an embossing folder.

 

 

I am entering this card into the Interior Decorating challenge at the Sweet 'n Sassy Digi Challenges blog.

 

Steampunk

I've had this gorgeous, Steampunk-themed stamp from Sweet Pea Stamps for ages and never quite gotten around to using it... however the current challenge at Sweet Pea Stampers is "vintage" and it seemed the perfect opportunity! :)

It was also a good opportunity to do the "monochrome" challenge at One Sweet Challenge. I coloured the image with my Promarkers and matted it onto corrugated card. I ran bronze coloured card through my BigShot with a cogs stencil and used papers from a steampunk paper pad by Kanban on a kraft card blank. Oh and I tried out my new Memory Box die for the first time and added a flower and some TH Idea-ology bits to finish.

I'm also gonna go mad and enter this card for the current "Anything Goes" challenge at Simon Says Stamp and Show. :)

Steampunk Birthday Card

It's my friend's birthday tomorrow so I made a card to pop in the post to her (cos she moved to Scotland last year! *sob*). I decided to combine the need for a birthday card with the current challenge over at Simon Says Stamp and Show, as the theme is Steampunk... which is a) a cool theme and b) the perfect opportunity to try out the new Kanban steampunk stamps and papers that I got recently off C&C. :)

So here's my steampunk creation:

I made an easel card and covered the front faces with cog patterned paper (I also cut down the top section of the easel card so its smaller than usual, so that the stamped image would extend over the top of it). I trimmed sections of white card for each section and used Tea Dye Distress Ink blended around the edges and then stamped around the edges with the cogs stamp using Tea Dye again. I stamped the dressform image onto white card using Archival Ink and painted it in with Distress Inks before cutting it out. I stamped the dressform stand onto the decorated card base and attached the dressform with foam pads. To finish off I added some Kaisercraft wooden swirls, coloured with Distress Inks, and some layered flowers and stamped a greeting in Tea Dye Distress Ink.

I'm really pleased with how this came out. It looks really pretty and kind of vintagey but a bit industrial-ish at the same time. :) Hope my friend will like it.