Taste of the Orient

The images on this were taken from Robert Addams Goes East CD ROM.  The card was black textured card from the Papermill range.  I decoupaged the image - cutting out the orchids was a real pain, but well worth the effort in the end.  Unfortunately, I do not have Japanese characters among my fonts, so I settled for doing the sentiment in a font that could be ready by the recipient, printing it on vellum, and immediately embossing it with silver powder.  This is one of the techniques I learned from Shaz at Silverwolf Cards.  On this occasion, I put the sentiment into a text box in WordPerfect (my word processor of choice, but you could do it in Word or Works) and put a border round it, embossing that at the same time.  You do need to be very organised to do this and have your powder ready to sprinkle the instant the printer allows you to grab the paper.  You will also need to experiment a little with your own printer's settings to ge the right level of ink.  I find that if you choose a high quality print, it is too slow going through the printer and has already dried too much to take the embossing powder, so on my printer I have settled for a simple Text print.  You can do more than one sentiment at a time, but try to get them in a line at the bottom of the page, and don't go for more than one row at a time, otherwise you may find you cannot get the powder to stick.  You may wonder why I say the bottom and not the top of the page.  That is because my one printer will not recognise vellum / parchment and I need to attach a piece of ordinary copy paper to the back with repositional glue and put them through together. and I just find it easier to print from the bottom and cut off the bottom of the paper.  You do have to remember when you do the next one that your paper is now not A4 and move your sentiments up a little.

25th June 2010 - mixing mediums up

This card was an early one, done when my craft box was quite a small one. I printed the base card with a background paper, downloaded free from the net. Then I added a shaped vellum wrap, embossed and cut with one of my few stencils. I had found a huge box of pastels in the bargain section of Lidl, and used them as chalks (applied with twists of cotton wool - large economy pack) to highlight the embossing andshade the vellum to match the card. A small embellishment and a peel off Happy Birthday finished it off.

Pastels applied to things that appear to have gone wrong can really create brilliant results, that everyone thinks you have spent hours doing.

Relaxing is such hard work - 21st June 2010

A little bit of tweaking and this holiday photo of an old bridge over the River Tavy will probably find its way onto a card sometime in the near future. Our weather so far has been incredible. In fact, we have spent today in the cool of the caravan site on the Lizard Peninsula. We shall go down later to Mullion Harbour to let the dogs have a good swim, lots of fun, and cooling off too. After swimming they both sleep all night - peace for us.

I have done some crafting while we have been away, just a bit of water colouring, and some embossing, trying out new techniques. I have loads of very old embroidery transfers and have experimented with several different techniques. I have scanned them all to computer, so I can print them out whatever size I wish. Printing onto acetate and using pens to colour in can be very effective, then cutting then to mount them in aperture cards. Just mounting them onto plain white card is also good, covering the edge of the acetate with peel offs or some other type of frame.

Another effective technique is to either print them onto vellum, using My Craft Studio Professional, changing the outline colour to pale grey. Then you use your embossing tools to trace the outline, using as much embossing as you wish to achieve a satisfactory result. The shading tool can transform a basic embossing into something really pretty and delicate. Don't try to emboss deeply to begin with, go over each line 3 times gently to avoid puncturing the vellum. Pansies are a really good flower to start with for embossing and shading. I will try to post a photo of pansies tomorrow, once I have transferred it from camera to computer.

June 12th 2010 - Use your brain power and time to save money

This card is an example of achieving an effective card without spending a fortune in money, just time and thought. This is one of Joanna Sheen's images, really clear and sharp. I saw it demonstrated on TV, printing on to expensive gold paper, and thought it was so good that I wondered if I could do something on the same lines. In my cupboard, I had some plain gold printable paper, so I tried printing on that on best quality print, with quite good results. Then I sprayed it with 3 separate layers of Spray and Shine, which really made the tiger pop out brilliantly. The Happy Birthday sentiment on the front was printed on vellum on text print, and instantly embossed with gold. That way you can choose exactly what you say and the design of the font etc to personalise the card completely. Both the image and the sentiment are mounted on gold mirri card, and then onto the base card from the Stardream and Majestic range from PDA Cards.

Today's Tip: At some time, you will almost certainly start on a project which goes wrong. don't bin it or destroy it yet. Put it to one side for a while, then have another look. If you still cannot see a way to recover, keep putting it away and going back to it. It is very rare that a project is totally unrecoverable, and inspiration will hit at some stage and give you something to be proud of.