Home again with Tim's tags of 2014 Jane's Journal style

Hello everyone, it's great to be back from my wonderful holiday. Most of you managed to guess my destination, it was indeed Seville. If you have never visited this beautiful city I would rate it as a must see along with London, Paris, New York and Rome. We stayed in the most extraordinary hotel, which I plan to write a post about in due course. I took 500 (yes that many) photos and I still need to sort through them. As I have done previously rather than writing 2 or 3 holiday posts straight I will show some of our adventures over the coming weeks.
As a little taster here are just a couple of photos.
The Cathedral

 Our hotel courtyard restaurant

 The view up to our room from my pool sun lounger

and of course lots of oranges

I had a little time at the weekend to get my fingers inky and I decided to make my Tim project for this month. Unusually for me I decided to make a tag and to base it on some of the colours which inspired me in Seville; orange, yellow, blue and green.
This month Tim shared a fun watercolour effect using stencils. You can read all about it here and this is the tag he made.

I don't have his butterfly stamps and I decided that as we saw so many beautiful flowers in Seville that I would use flowers for my stamped images. 2 of the flower stamps I used are very old Papermania and the gorgeous rose is by Visible Image.
These are the Distress Ink colours I used and I also used Tim's Clockwork layering stencil.

Tim showed how to ink up the reverse of the stencil with DIs and then carefully press this onto card.

 I had a play and actually preferred the effect I got using watercolour paper. These were 2 of my favourite prints and I chose the one on the right to work with.

I stamped out my flower images with Archival ink and then using my watercolour brushes I used the DIs to colour them with a sweeping technique Tim demonstrated.

Tim has matching dies to cut out his butterflies but I had to rely on fussy cutting out my flowers.

I decided to give some depth to the flowers and cut into the petals so that I could bend them up a little.I also coloured some crinkle ribbon to match using the same DIs.

 I used Distress paints to alter some TH metal Ideaology foliage.

So here is my finished tag

and some close ups

I used some TH words, most apt for my holiday inspired tag. You can just see how I cut into the flowers and my Visible Image Rose and folded the petals up slightly.

I would like to enter my tag into the following challenges;

Tim Holtz 12 tags of 2014 June

Vintage stamping summer blooms

My Mum's Craft shop ink it up

Crafting Musketeers stamped image

Penny Black and More favourite stamp this rose stamp is one of my fave flower stamps

Crafty Ribbons anything goes with ribbon

A creative Romance anything goes

Stamping for the weekend anything goes

Sweet stampin say it with flowers

We do doobadoo ribbon

Anything but a card summer lovin'

Pan Pastel UK flora and fauna

Simon Says Monday anything goes

The Cupboard Trilogy use yellow

I am hoping to try to catch up with my blog reading over the next few days. I hope you have all been well and for those of you in the UK that you are enjoying the pleasant settled weather. It makes so much difference to come home from holiday and be able to dry the mountain of washing outside. Billy has been our little shadow over the weekend, he is very pleased to be home to his garden too. 

Back soon,

Bye for now,

Jane x

Time out

If Mr Blogger behaves, when this post goes live I will be away on my holiday ;0)
This year we are going to somewhere we have never been to before and I always like to tease you with a few clues for you to guess our destination.  Here goes; you need to try to link all the photos together..

(The lovely tea towel below was sent to me by my dear blogging friend Robin, thanks again Robin x. This has nothing to do with the clue but the image does).

any idea yet..? We will also need plenty of this, I have bought this pocket size to carry around rather than the usual big bottle.

My card challenge today is not holiday related. It is for Father's Day which is it just around the corner. I may not get another chance to share the one I have made for my dear Dad with you until after the big day. I decided that rather than a stamped focal I would use an old photo of me from my childhood.  I made an inky background by blending Pumice Stone, Broken China and Vintage photo Distress inks. A little water splashed added some texture.

I scanned a photo of me from the summer of 1972 with some of my dear pets. This was taken in the garden of our old house in Peckham, S.E London. I changed it from colour to black white to give a real vintage feel. I rubbed the edges with Vintage photo DI and mounted it on a Quickkutz square die cut.

I used one of my favourite quotes stamps again. Above is a close up of my photo with Heidi my dog, Gulliver the Guinea pig, Joe the tortoise and Timmy the cat. And yes these were just a few of my pets at the time...!

My parents moved to Kent in 1979 and now have a huge garden. Dad loves his garden and all the wildlife he sees out there so I added lots of garden elements to his card. I made a little tag from the LOTV Pretty Vintage Le Jardin tags set. Would you believe it's nearly a year ago since I won that awesome stash of stamps from them? I also added a LOTV round Father's Day sentiment. I inked them all with my Distress inks. The bird cage is from my jewellery stash. The photo film die cut is TH and the garden bench is Marianne. We all enjoy sitting out in my parent's beautiful garden so it seemed apt to add the bench with some chit chat words to remind us of sunny days then and now.

I would like to enter my card into the following challenges;

Stamping Sensations animal antics
Bearly Mine One for the boys
Country View Only Men Allowed
A little Bit Crafty Child's Play I hope my child like quality is acceptable ;0)
Live and Love Crafts Summer Garden
PanPastel UK One for the boys
We do doobadoo Different shapes
Frilly and Funkie For all our Fathers
Simon says stamp Wednesday Father's Day/masculine

I hope to have a little internet access whilst away but if not I will link these up on my return. My trusty camera is already packed and I will be back to share some photos with you soon.

Do have a guess where you think I am off to...your guesses always makes me smile. Thanks as always for visiting and take care.

Back soon,

Bye for now,

Jane x

Delightful Dylusions

Welcome to June,  let's hope it's a flaming one. This is how my little garden greeted me this morning.

 I do love June sunshine, it's so warm and just seeps into your body and soul. I had a great week, my girlies came to stay and Daisy is getting on so well. She is so interested in everything around her. Much to the delight of her uncle she loves giraffes.

and she loves the play bus we have here. 

Of course we enjoyed some drinking time out, this was at Costa's...do you think I  love this girlie just a bit?

On Wednesday I took the day off work to join my blogging buddy Brenda of bumblebees and butterflies for her Dylusions spray inks workshop. It was such fun and yes very messy...we sprayed into pizza boxed which made great sense as those vibrant colours have the potential to get everywhere.
We made a series of  "techniques" tags and worked through 11 different techniques. These are a few of the 18 tags I created. The techniques ranged  from ghosting

right through to distress paint resist

to scribble spray

and adding texture using gesso through a mask

and one of my favourite techniques, Doodle ghosting where we also added some doodles with white pen and ink to parts of the tag

We then made our own 2 tags using any of the Ty techniques we had covered.

I chose inks which are not my typical colours and went out of my comfort zone. I spritzed them onto my tag. I made a ghost copy and added elements to both the tags. I added some texture using distress paint through a stencil and then added some stamped elements by Lynn Perrella, using black archival ink. I stamped a very apt and then went over some parts of my tag with doodles using a white pen which you can see here

Here are the 2 tags

I actually prefer the light one on the left and I would like to enter the one below  into the following challenges

Loves Rubberstamps add some doodling

Simon Says Stamp Monday challenge arty stamps

My Mum's Craft shop Ink it up

Crafty Catz anything goes

Party Time Tuesdays anything goes

We do doobadoo different shapes

You will also have noticed a Dylusions creative journal in my photos. We had great fun making an inky spread in that too and I will share that with you in another post soon. Thanks Brenda for a delightful Dylusions Day.

I am back out in the garden again today planting up my pots for the summer...the bees are humming out there already...bliss. Have a lovely Sunday and week,

Back soon,

Bye for now,

Jane x