A Garden Journey Book

On AFTCM I am participating in a swap where we are making a house shaped book themed " A Garden Journey". A friend on the group was kind enough to send me a template of various shapes for the house and I cut them out on some cardboard.

For the front I printed off a gate on a piece of acetate and cut it to size.

The first page is an picture of a door from my friend Adrienne from her personal collection which she shared on one of our groups. I cut out images from an old calendar which had various garden themes and worked them around the door image. For the peak of the house I chose a butterfly from a brochure - one of my favourite things.


The back of this page was covered with some scrapbook paper and again I used some flowers from the old calendar as well as a magazine page.  The image of the lady is from magicmoonlightfreeimages.blogspot.com. I added a border from an old greeting card at the bottom and the word sticker on the top.

Page 3. I coloured a piece of cardstock with Cathie Allan's Stamp Smoosh technique, and lightly stamped a music stamp all over, cut it out and attached it to the cardboard shape. I stamped and coloured the LaBlanche stamp of the little girl in the daisies, cut it out and added it to the stamped background. To complete the page I added a transparency which I recently bought and a little sunflower button to which I added a punched image and a dewdrop which I coloured with alcohol ink.

The back of this page was covered with scrapbook paper which really is not floral but I thought it would work well with some little dimensional plastic flowers that I had in my stash. I added gems to a couple of the flowers that had holes in the centre.

Page 5, I started by stamping an old favourite PSX stamp of a garden pond scene and coloured it with Lyra coloured pencils. I then added colour to the background with chalks then added stamped trees, rocks and grass. I printed off the bird image which is a freebie from Elizabeth's blog. I then stamped the "welcome" stamp coloured and cut it out and added it at the bottom.

The back of the previous page started off with what my friend Trish B calls "worksheet wonders"; basically a piece of paper that has been under a project while stamping or spraying. In my case this was a piece of cardstock that was under a project that I was spraying with Adirondack color wash. There were a lot of white spaces so I added Ranger distress stain over the whole sheet, which is transparent enough to allow some of the original colours to show through.

I stamped a Judikins Sunflower stamp on the background using distress ink and distress embossing powder.

I printed off a poem and put it under a cute little frame that I bought for a couple of dollars at Michaels. The bird image is a thin sheet of self-adhesive cork precisely laser-cut from Magenta which I coloured with pigment inks. Finally I added a butterfly, a little rainbow and a grass sticker.

Page seven, I covered with a floral themed paper. I had some chipboard pieces left from my Ezee Pzee design kits and decided that the tree would be my centre piece. I coloured it with acrylic paints. I found some apple and squirrel stickers in my stash and added them to the tree. I also had a smaller Magenta cork bird that I had already coloured and added it on one of the branches. The little pink cat was from a stash of embellishments and I thought he/she would be perfect sitting under the tree, perhaps hoping the squirrels would come down?

At the top I added the acrylic daisy and the Escape stickers  to finish off the peak.

The opposite side of page 7 started off with a piece of a brochure with a floral design at the edge. I printed a poem/quote and coloured over it to make it blend into the background, but the edges still showed so I added some sticker borders around it.

The bird image is from Elizabeth's blog and the 3-D bunnies were a gift from my friend Tracy. To complete the peak I cut out a large flower from the old calendar to make it look like a roof. The little bees are from a free sheet of images from vintagepaintworks.com. I am not sure if these are available anymore as I could not find the site when I recently did a search to link to them.

For the back cover I cut a piece of thick vinyl and stamped a saying at the bottom in Stazon ink. I had some wooden bird pieces from Kaisercraft which I painted with acrylic paint and glued to the cover.

This will be on the way to my partner later this week. Hope she likes it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Calendar Pages-Prototype #2

I was back in my craft room last night and still not sure about the first prototype that I made, so I started playing around with an another idea, part of it being inspired by Cathie Allan's article in the October issue of Scrap and Stamp Arts.

I decided to make a page that would reflect a little bit about Remembrance Day (Veteran's Day in the US) and did the stamp smoosh technique again using blue tones at the top for the sky and red, creamy brown and yellow at the bottom.

I printed the poem In Flanders Fields written by John McRae, a Canadian Doctor who served in WW1, and placed it on a piece of red card stock.  I stamped the birds (Tim Holtz) on the "sky" portion to represent the larks mentioned in the poem.

I have a lovely Poppy stamp (Embossing Arts) and thought I would use it. I started with a piece of white cardstock and used the "smack down" technique from Cathie's article using a large and small tulip stamp by Magenta Style and gold pigment ink and Mica Magic burnt orange.

I placed the cardstock in the Cathie Allan Postion-it and stamped the poppy head in Blackbird fluid chalk. I coloured it in with some of the burnt orange ink and the tip of a smooch ink applicator. I highlighted with gold lame smooch ink, did the centre with mollasses smooch ink, then added siren smooch ink over the entire piece. With the cardstock still in the positioner I stamped the image again with the blackbird fluid chalk ink.  I did three of these and cut them out.

I took a piece of white cardstock and cut it to look like a cross and added a little red punch flower to it, and placed it on top of the poppies. This again has all the images taped on it as I am still debating about what to do for this swap.

Any comments or critique appreciated. Let me know which one you like best if you were the recipient of this calendar page since I am still torn as to which way to go with the pages. 

Calendar Pages-Prototype #1

I joined a calendar swap and started working on my prototype for the month of November.

Where I live we quite often have snow in November, so I was thinking of a cold or snowy picture when I started creating this page.


I started by taking some 80Lb cream cardstock and Clearsnap fluid chalks inks and did a background using alabaster, ice blue and lavender using the Stamp Smoosh technique I learned from the wonderful Cathie Allan. You load a solid stamp with ink and smoosh it around on the card stock until all the ink is gone and keep repeating this until you are happy with it.
 
Using Tsukineko Versafine Imperial Purple ink,  I stamped the church stamp and added the large tree at the left, both from Stampscapes Since we have a lot of Birch trees here I decided to add a few using a stamp (Stampendous) stamping the first image, masking it off and then adding more to make a grove of trees.
 
It looked a bit naked so I took a stamp with a road, hills and trees (A stamp in the Hand), masked off part of it and stamped it below the church. 
 

I also decided to add a moon using a negative image of a punched circle. I started by colouring it with a grey coloured pencil, added some Twinkling H2O buttercup. then Pearl-ex express white pearl and iridescent violet. This stuck out like a sore thumb so I took the fluid chalk alabaster and dabbed it over the moon with a stylus and white applicator, which toned it down.  

 

Since this is a prototype the calendar grid is only taped on till I decide whether or not I am completely happy with what I created.  

Tool Time

I signed up for the tool time swap on CCSwaps. We are to use one or more of our tools to create an article for our partner. The tools I used were my Cuttlebug, inkpads, rubber stamps, alcohol inks, punches, transfer foil, mica watercolour paints and my computer.

I decided to make a mini calendar for this swap. I started by colouring an acrylic tag with alcohol inks to use as the back.



I got out my stash of homemade background papers and tried to choose an appropriate colour for each month of the year and punched out small tags. I stamped images that would also go with the seasons of the month. After that, I printed off a full year calendar from Calendar Home and cut it to fit on the tags.

For the front cover, I chose a white cardstock that I embossed on the Cuttlebug. I coloured it with Marvy stampads, then adhered transfer foil to the raised embossing. Since it did not adhere to all of the embossing, I then painted over the whole piece with my Mica watercolours from Art Quest which gave it a nice vibrant look.

I added the year by stamping then punching out on some worksheet glossy photo paper, and attached a leaf to finish it.

I was going to put this together with the bind-it-all but decided that I would use a binder/looseleaf ring instead, so that the recipient can make new calendar pages the following year or recycle some of the pieces .

Catching Up

I had a few swaps to complete, so took the time to get them done while Hubby was not around to bug me. Each year I participate in a Calendar swap and this year I chose February. Rather than go with the traditional hearts and flowers, I decided to use a background stamp with a vintage couple and some Ivy. The centre panel was done with Adirondack sprays.

I also had a couple of Artist Trading Cards to complete. One is for an alphabet swap, so I decided to use some feathers that my hubby found in the garden, for the letter F. The background is from a sheet of cardstock with Adirondack sprays and stamped off Opalite and Dr PH Martin inks.

The second ATC background is a candy wrapper glued to the cardstock rubbed with Mica Magic inks and rub-ons. The image is coloured with chalks and edged with leafing.

Pictures of the projects are in later posts. 

Calendar page