Susan Seabert

Tuesday, 26 May 2015

Friendship

Good morning everyone! Jennie here today with my second project of the month and I am sharing with you a single layer stamped card using the lovely stamps from the Stampers Anonymous Bird Feather Set.

I don't have too many photographs to share with you of the process as they seem to have disappeared off my camera!

I started with a piece of cream cardstock and using Everygreen Bough Distress Inks and the Harlequinn Layering Stencil blended very softly a background. I wanted to create a muted background so I could just stamp directly on top of it.

I then used the Feather stamp and again with Everygreen Bough stamped it twice, BUT I stamped off first onto some scrap paper so what you are seeing is a second generation stamp. Again this all helped in keeping the colours light. I added some script stamping around the edges of the cardstock in Vintage Photo, again stamping off to keep it muted.

Finally I was able to stamp my main features in Black Arcival Ink and as I had kept the background light this worked well, with just a little colour showing through the black images.

The final effect is quite striking and I love the muted Evergreen Bough in the background - normally it is such a bright colour.

I hope this gives you some inspiration for trying out some bright colours but using the second generation stamp to achieve more muted tones.

Thank you for joining me today.

Jennie x

Live the Dream

Tim Holtz Stampers Anonymous - Bird feather	Tim Holtz stamp set - Shabby French	Tim Holtz Layering stencil - Harlequin	Tim Holtz Distress ink pad - Evergreen bough
Distress ink pad - Vintage photo	Ranger Archival ink pad - Jet black

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Sunday, 24 May 2015

Bird Crazy Birthday

A little birthday card using the popular Bird Crazy stamp set from Tim Holtz. I decided to also use some of Tim’s ideas from his April tag – creating the band across the card, with the stamped and inked layer tucked underneath. He explains this far better than me! The link to his tag is here and you can see my version here.
I started by working out my dimensions as this is a standard C6 card. So I cut some card from one of Tim’s paper stacks to 14.3 x 10cm and some white card stock to 1 cm less all round. I then cut the 3cm band for the lettering 2cm from the base, stopping fractionally under 1cm from each edge so that the white card would slide through.

I then took the alphanumeric thinlits and cut ‘birthday’ across the band. This was my mistake of the day! When I now slid my white cardstock in, the negative shape of the letters was too wide! So I improvised and instread of just using the negative space (as Tim had done) I cut some actual letters to place into the space created.
I did this by inking a piece of card with scattered straw, wild honey and vintage photo distress inks and spritzed some water over. Once dry I cut my letters and one of the mixed media thinlits.

The white card stock was spritzed with a little weathered wood distress spray although this ended up hidden. I marked in pencil the position to stamp the bird so he sat just above the band. I then used distress inks to colour him.

I also created a mask for the bird so I could use the wrinkle free distress technique on the remainder of the card stock and not get any of the varied blue tones over the image. (Inks used: Stormy sky, faded jeans and tumbled glass.)