Shoshiplatypus

What’s On Your Workdesk this Wednesday?

Sheba (my Cougar cutting machine) has been earning overtime wages this week for all her hard work. Cutting, cutting cutting… lattices and fun with squares.

Cracking the Carding Code

I think I have finally cracked the code with card making. For too many years I’ve had a love-hate relationship with this craft, a mixture of duty and creativity. Shoshi being Shoshi, I want to spent at least a week on a single card, but can’t stand the thought that it will most probably end up in the bin after the birthday or recovery from illness etc. I’ve always said, “Make a work of art and put it in a frame, and people value it, but make a work of art on a folded piece of card to enable it to stand on the mantelpiece and it is treated as ephemera whose destination is the bin.” As a result of this I’ve found the whole exercise pretty soul-destroying, and this isn’t helped by self-imposed pressure (usually at the last minute, another thing that doesn’t help) to make cards for friends and relatives and having to start from scratch each time.

I’ve been watching a lot of Jennifer McGuire recently and she is brilliant, and has so many tips to save time and be more efficient, and she also makes awesome cards!

If you have been following my blog recently you will know that I’ve started an organisation system to enable me to make up basic card-making supplies in bulk in advance – card blanks, mats, envelopes etc. I have also been organising all my stamps and dies and it’s quite an experience, finding long-lost stamps, and ones I’ve had for ages but never used, because they were all in such a muddle in different places in the room. Organising them has made me want to use them more.

I am now making 3 or 4 cards in a single session! At this rate I shall build up quite a stash which I can draw upon when the need arises, taking the pressure off, and making the whole process more enjoyable.

Card making supplies

I’ve dedicated one of my new baskets to my card-making supplies and have now got most of the dividers in place.

Behind each divider are Avery Elle pouches containing card blanks, mats and envelopes for easy access. This system is working very well.

Sentiment strips

I made another batch of sentiment strips in my desktop publisher and printed them on glossy photo paper.

Wreath card

Before I get onto the main activity of the week in the Cardiology Department (yes, my heart really is in it these days), I’ll show you the card I made from a serendipitous background that came about when I was cleaning off the purple dye on my DVDs after I’d removed the foil coating (part of my mosaic tesserae project). Julia said she could see a wreath card emerging from that, so I decided to use this as a basis for the design.

A few weeks ago I bought some sets of layering stamps and co-ordinating dies from Ebay and had a terrible job sorting out how to use them, but succeeded in the end and marked them all accordingly. I had a couple of sessions with the stamping plaform, bulk stamping two sets of flowers and leaves which I then die-cut, and arranged over the purple base. Jennifer McGuire has a brilliant technique for glueing these die cuts down. I’ve always struggled when arranging embellishments and then having to move them to put the glue on them, and not getting them back as I originally decided. She arranges them, then takes a piece of Press ‘n Seal and presses it down well onto the assembled flowers etc. She can then lift them all off in one go and apply adhesive to the backs, and then glue them all down together. Brilliant. It really works.

Here is the original background – unfortunately not much of this is still visible under all the flowers, but I know its there, at any rate.

Work in progress on the card. All the flowers and leaves are now in place, and I thought it looked a bit flat.

The addition of a bit of shading with one of my Tombow dual markers made all the difference.

Lattices

As I said, Sheba’s been working overtime. Several weeks ago I designed these lattices on Inkscape:

and promised I’d get round to cutting them and sharing the results with you. I have cut six so far, all in black.

They all came out extremely well. These are to fit a standard 4.25 x 5.5 inch card. The great thing about Inkscape is that you can make things whatever size you want.

Folded down squares

Ages ago when I was on the cutting machine forum somone posted a photo of a most intriguing background she’d created with her machine, and this week I rediscovered the photo and decided to have a go at recreating the effect. I created it in much the same way as I did with the lattices – using the Tiled Clones feature in Inkscape which enables you to draw one shape or image and set the parameters as to how you want your grid to appear, and the software will create a grid. For this particular pattern, this is what I drew.

Pretty underwhelming really, isn’t it. All my other stuff has involved cutting something out, but this design just cuts these little right-angle lines.

You lift the larger point and fold it down, attaching it with a tiny dot of liquid adhesive, and this is where the magic appears. Quite an impressive 3-D effect, expecially with a contrasting paper behind.

This is the first set I did, with Speckled Egg and Peacock Feathers Distress Inks added, and a darker teal cardstock mat. I also used some of my new holographic card – this always photographs with very bright colours but in real life it’s much more subtle – silver with a hint of colour. The “Thanks” on the middle card is foiled using the ToDo machine and a new hot foil plate from Spellbinders called “Sweeping Thanks” which I got this week.

Here are the turquoise cards in detail.

The first cuts I did were rather small (1/4 in) so I made the grid larger. Nice and bold, but I wanted something in between.

With an inked, or partially inked background, you get 3 different tones: the dark cardstock mat showing through the holes, the uninked reverse side of the card folded down, and the inked front side of the card. For this one I created an ombre effect. (I got some of those really soft blending brushes this week as well – they are absolutely the best for blending that I’ve ever experienced!!)

The pink set. I made these yesterday, all with the intermediate sized grid. This time I just used Victorian Velvet Distress Ink, and a combination of pink and dark red cardstock, and holographic card. I’ve also added a few Sheba cuts from my stash – I made up the flowers a long time ago and have a box of these ready made.

This one has a strip of holographic card behind the grid. I trimmed the grid back to allow more space at the bottom. Again, the colours from the holographic card are not how it appears in real life.

A simple card with just two layers. I added a drop of liquid pearls to the folded down point in each case.

Detail of a 5-inch square card, which is entirely covered with the grid, and so far has no added embellishment of sentiment. On this one I added a dot of dark red stickles on each folded down point, and again it’s backed with holographic card.

Finally, a 6-inch square card, again with holographic card, and again with no sentiment or embellishment as yet. In this case I added a little dot of dark red with a fineliner pen.

Foiling

I’ve been foiling this week as well. I began with some sentiments, inlucing a new set of hot foil plates I got this week, and my original set. They come with co-ordinating dies. These are now all in a baggie in my card-making basket ready for use.

This is one of two lotus flowers I have, and a very pretty background plate. I used different colours of cardstock to foil.

 

 

When I had finished, there was quite a pile of “spent” foil on the desk and some of it was too good to throw away. I searched online and found some excellent instructions to use this with double-sided adhesive paper.

I used some old patterned cardstock as it didn’t matter what showed through the foil as the holes were so small. The results were incredible – and again, the colours from the camera are far more vibrant than in real life.

Here are some positives and negatives.

Before we leave the studio, I’ve got another nifty idea from Jennifer McGuire. She said it was quite difficult and time-consuming centring a personalised stamp on the back of a card (“Hand made by…” etc) so she made a grid to go in her Misti to help centre the card, making stamping easier. I decided to make a grid for each of the standard sizes I use, and laminated them. They fit in my Tim Holtz stamping platform.

Jennifer has also made a kind of jig for the stamp itself, using one of the offcuts of lamination from the grid. You make it to fit exactly inside the stamping platform lid, and you can tape it in place. The stamp is glued to this and all you have to do is line up the bottom of the jig with the bottom of the card and stamp. I’ve just peeled the rubber off the wooden block of my “Handmade by” stamp and it’s now glued onto the laminate strip but I’ve yet to try it.

These helpful DIY items will live in the stamping platform along with the sticky mat I made a couple of weeks ago.

Kitties

Four little paws lined up.

Lily with two pairs of wings, like a little butterfly.

Adjusting to the colder weather.

Ruby in a little nest of my hubby’s making.

I think that just about covers my activities this week, apart from a new soup recipe which I’ll share another time – delicious!