A New Stamp

Among  my Christmas gifts was this rather lovely B Line stamp, and this week I decided to make a card with it. I began by stamping the image onto a piece of ivory card with sepia
Versafine ink. I usually use ColourSoft pencils for colouring but I have
found that although I have the complete set of them there is not much
choice of skin tones so I recently bought some Spectrum Noir pens in
the skin colours and they are what I used for this. I did add a tiny touch of red pencil to her lips though, and a brown one to darken her eyelids, and then some gold Stickles to her beads. When that was dry I cut the piece into a rectangle and used a corner punch to round the corners, and shaded the edge with vintage photo Distress ink.I chose two toning papers from a Paper Mania pack called Nostalgia Warm for the backing panels, tearing them and inking the edges and then mounting  them onto an ivory base card. Next I wrapped some brown organza  ribbon and a piece of pale pink lace across and finished it with a bow and  a little beige rose.The main image is mounted on foam pads over the ribbon.
 I am entering this for, Lets Ink it Up; Anything Goes, and
 Sugar Creek Hollow; Go Girly.

A Bit Of New Year Recycling

My first set of ATCs this year are made of recycled bits and pieces that would otherwise have ended up in the dustbin, Re-cycle being the theme for The Stamp Man ATC swap this month. 

The background is the outer part of some christmas crackers and the flowers are made from the tissue paper party hats that were inside them.I cut as many flower shapes as possible from two paper hats with the two smallest Tim Holtz tattered Florals dies and layered them up alternating the colours and fixed them with a brad in the centre. I then screwed them up and sprayed them with a gold memory mist making them quite wet and then pulled  the petals out again gently with a pokey tool and sprayed them a bit more and left them to dry. Meanwhile I peeled the top layer from a paper table napkin with the candle design on and glued it to a piece of thin card with Modge Podge. When it was dry I cut out the two candles that I wanted and glued them in place. I then cut some leaves from green card left over from my christmas card making, with a Sissix die. This die is quite a bunch, or branch of leaves, so I cut them into smaller sprigs so that I could arrange them around the flowers. I also used some plastic netting that had held fruit from the supermarket to tie into a knot to place behind the flowers. One piece of this was black so I ran a gold Krylon pen over it and was quite surprised how well it worked. It doesn't show very well in the photo but I also added some yellow Stickles glue to all the netting bits and on the candle flames as well. I used a Krylon pen to edge the red card and a red permanent marker for the gold ones.

The Stamp Man Annual Awards

The Stamp Man are running their 3rd. Annual Awards and are inviting us to to show our favourite/best project from last year even if it wasn't originally shown in one of their challenges.There are prizes up for grabs too so why not pop over and take a look.

The project I have decided to show is an altered beer mat that I made for a friendly challenge on the Chocolate Baroque community site back in the summer of last year. It was something a bit different for me as I usually stick to card making and ATC and tag swaps.I was pleased with the way it turned out and it is still hanging in my craft space at home.You can see how I made it here. Thank you every one who left comments on here last week they are all very much appreciated.