Nappy crafting definitely not happy crafting….

Should have called this post “warts and all” as this week my idea didn’t quite work but if I’m honest it was more the execution of the projects that failed…..

A couple of weeks ago Katie and I made her friend a Nappy bouquet (congrats on the safe arrival of beautiful Betty Rose!!)…

….and much to Katie’s frustration she caught me “salvaging” the one nappy that got trashed in the making “Honestly mum…cant you throw anything away!!!!!”

“er ……..no!” and boy I’m glad I didn’t as Less is More really made my brain hurt with their one layer challenge of three stamps….its bad enough not using bought cardmaking things but to come up with three stamps that was going to be a challenge… so this week I had to do a bit of a cheat….I used some free stamps from Quick Cards Magazine.  I could have stamped with some household things in fact my third stamp was actually a bit of card but I really  wanted to have a go at making my own ink pads to use with stamps….HENCE THE NAPPY….see Katie told you I would use it!!!.

I have made impro ink pads before but finding a medium to successfully contain the ink (food colouring in this case) without clogging or oversaturating is not easy…..and actually its a big thumbs up for disposable nappies as they retain plenty of moisture but still allow some through when pressed…pity my stamping skills didn’t live up to expectation

First attempt …….started reasonably well, thought I would use the back of the stamp to create a shadow (used some double sided tape to attach the stamp onto the base of a flat bottomed glass)…but the colours were disappointing particularly the purple I mixed…dull…dull… dull ….and to top it all I mis-stamped one of the jars…all in all …insipid!

 

 

Second attempt…….

decided to customise the pads with different colours, again shadow stamped but this time used some black ink for the outline… 

didn’t think this one through and ended up with a silly gap at the end, so doodled a lollypop at the end to compensate…but as I dislike the the dark colour scheme for the theme…its more bin fodder…..

one  final attempt…added a little pen ink to the pads and a really quick design just to test the pads and…..

really…really… earth shatteringly….poor layout but the colours were improved…oh well back to the drawing board…

Off to Peru…..

Not me, but someone we know is off to Peru to do some voluntary work, which means of course…another excuse to make a card…. I thought I would combine a good luck card with the LESS IS MORE CHALLENGE “Cut it out”

I hadn’t considered framing the map until I saw the challenge and I must say I think that the great benefit of challenges, is it makes you consider different possibilities.

Once again the challenge lent itself to proper cardmaking equipment to create an aperture (badly wanted my cricut for this one….or my punches at least)but for my self imposed blog rules…… that left me with my trusty scalpel or scissors …..trouble is…. I am truly scissorly (not a proper word!!) challenged….and a bit lethal with a knife to!!

After printing a map  the appropriate size, I placed a piece of copier paper  over the image and with a pencil, lightly traced where I wanted to cut (needed to make sure Peru was visible).

To create the base card I used a 13 x 29.5 off cut of white card

I put the paper template over the base card and cut over the lines with the knife.

After positioning the card pieces over the map I attached them in place with 3d foam pads, then scored the top fold and trimmed the excess from the back panel…..it all finished off with a greeting printed from the pc.

…….and you know what I said about me and knives…..well when I was putting the lid back on….. I managed to take a slice out of my finger!!

…at least I did less damage than poor Paul Daniels…..

Katie's smile!

I created this layout for Scrap the Art's challenge, this time they have chosen one of Andy Warhol's iconic silk screen paintings of Marilyn Monroe. I chose to replicate an image of my daughter, it was only a little snapshot taken on a phone but I had wanted to use it in a layout but was never sure quite what to do with it. The challenge gave me the perfect inspiration and it's very apt as my daughter is fascinated by Marilyn Monroe, so it was nice to give her the "Warhol" treatment.
I printed the image on various colours of cardstock but not in a uniform manor as Warhol did for his painting. My reason for this was to use up scraps of card and try and keep to economical crafting, so the colour scheme was very much dictated by what I had hanging around rather than opting for perhaps what I would have chosen. The base page was also not bought especially, it was the paper insert that comes inside the plastic refill page protectors. I finished the design with some sketch style doodles and lettering, using a permanent marker and some brush markers. The layout was extremely quick to create, but then I decided to round the corners of each picture as I did ion the insert in the last post......this did add quite a bit of time to the project!!