J for Jenna

I recently visited our local branch of The Range to buy some ribbon to finish off a crochet project I had been working on, and while I was there I spotted a whole shelf of these brown board letters. They had obviously only just come in because they were all in good condition and hadn't been knocked about and battered and              
as soon as I saw this J I thought of my little baby great granddaughter. She is almost 11 weeks old now and can be coaxed into smiling at us.

To start with I gave it a couple of coats of gesso and while it dried
I stamped the little angel images onto tissue paper with  black Archival ink and coloured them very lightly with pink coloursoft pencils. I haven't got any pale pink paint so I mixed a tiny amount of Fresco Finish Rusty Rose with quite a lot of white to get the shade I wanted and used it to paint the sides. Next I painted the front and back white and then stamped some flourishes with the pink paint. I used an Adirondak Willow paint dabber to add some colour through a piece of sequin waste, and stamped some bits of a music stamp for more background interest. I tore out the parts of the angel images that I wanted and glued them on with matte multi medium. When all was dry I gave it a thin wash of watered down gesso. I used a Krylon gold pen on all the edges. The chipboard letters to spell her name were painted with a gold paint but I thought they looked a bit dull so I used Versamark ink and clear embossing powder to give them a nice gloss finish which doesn't really show in my photo. I gave it all two coats of craft varnish for protection and finished with a ribbon bow and some paper flowers coloured to match. All the stamps I used on this are from Crafty Individuals.  Jenna isn't really old enough to appreciate this but her mum liked it.

I am going to enter this at Make It Monday - Anything Goes.

Thank you for taking a look and for your lovely comments. Jean

Time for Something New

 First of all I apologise for not posting anything here for so long, I got caught up in the bustle of the holiday period and have found it difficult to get back into blogging since.

Over at Chocolate Baroque our Alphatag swap project

is finished and we all now have a lovely collection of
colourful tags to treasure. Again I am sorry that I didn't get round to showing my last few tags, I will try and make a photo of all the tags I made and also one of all the tags I recieved. Watch this space!!

So for our new swap we are making two "Quintiles" to swap each month. Quintiles are 5" square pieces of artwork, and the theme for this month is Winter Wonderland. I found this a nice size to work on and for my first one I used a stencil and sparkle medium from Imagination Crafts to make the snow flake swirl on a piece of their shiny blue card. The tree image is a Crafty Individuals stamp inked with Versamark and embossed with WOW white embossing powder, on a piece of the same blue card. I trimmed it close to the image and then mounted it on navy and then white card stock. I used Versamark ink and the white embossing powder to edge the main card and then added the tree image on foam pads over a piece of white ribbon and added a few gems for some extra sparkle.

For the next one I used matt blue card and stamped and embossed the Crafty Individuals snowflake background stamp all over and embossed the edges as before. the main image is a Chocolate Baroque stamp which I coloured with distress markers before stamping, and then added a little stickles glitter glue to highlight the snow. I then trimmed it leaving a tiny white border and stuck it to the background and added the curly swirl that I cut from sparkly white paper using a Dienamics die.
 I enjoyed making these am looking forward doing the next ones and also to getting my swaps in the post.
Hopefully now that I have managed this post I will back soon with another project.


Happy crafting to all, hope you are all managing to keep warm and safe in the snowy weather. We had quite a bit of snow here on Friday,(more than usual for this area) and although it has rained most of today and had washed most of it away, late this afternoon it turned back to snow and has left a little layer again.If it freezes tonight it will be a bit tricky for those who have to venture out to work in the morning , fortunately that is not me and I will be indoors crafting in the warm.

Thank you for taking a look, and for you comments I do appreciate them . Jean