September moments

Good morning, it's time for my 2nd design team project for our "Contrasting (or complementary) colours" challenge over at Country View Crafts. All the details can be found here. For my first project I made a card using the purple-yellow contrasting colour pair. If you missed that post you can find it here. My card was a very in your face one and this time I went with the contrasting colour pair of blue-orange. This time however I made a much more gentle blend of the colours as it suited the mood of the stamps I used. The inks I used are distress oxides, salty ocean and wild honey 

I blended them in this way.

Then I placed the Visible Image Lava on top and using a piece of damp kitchen roll took some of the colour out. 

 I used stamps by Visible Images, Live in the moment and Ripples. 

 I stamped using orange blossom archival ink. 

I stamped the dragonflies in black versafine , clear embossed them and added a little glitter to their wings (which you can see in the final photo). 

Here is my finished card

with a close up showing the little hint of glitter in the wings.

I hope I may have inspired you to join in with our September "contrasting colours" challenge. You can use any stamps/products, the choice is yours. 

You can enter our challenge as many times as you like and combine with other challenges. There is also a £20 crafting voucher up for grabs to the lucky randomly selected winner to spend over on the Country View Crafts on line store. Remember that UK postage and packing from CVC is free on all orders over £7.50! Once again all the details for the September  challenge can be found here.

Back soon,

Bye for now,

Jane x

Tuscany memories

Hi blogging friends. Today I would like to share the memory album I made following our wonderful holiday to Italy in August. We were so lucky to get away and it was a perfect holiday, miles from anywhere and just enjoying good food, sunshine and good company. Sadly our trip annual to Rhodes would have been tomorrow, but that has been cancelled, so I am even more grateful that we got away to Italy. 

We stayed on a wine estate in Tuscany so social distancing was no problem at all. We were miles from anywhere. 

I spent a pleasant hour crafting each day with my obviously limited holiday supplies in the shade with Daisy. We also sat by the pool or in the gorgeous gardens catching up with our family. We had one day out, to the zoo, which was wonderful as it was so quiet. Here are a few photos to share or the villa, pool and gardens.

I wrote an index card each day, took an Instax photo and made a little ATC sized project using inspiration from what I saw each day. I have shared these ATCs on Instagram and if you would like to see them in my feed  you can do so here

When I got home I made a background for each ATC and put everything together. 

I also had Daisy to stay recently and we made some fun shaving foam backgrounds so I used those for my front and back covers. 

Daisy also had made ATCs with me so we put her album together when she stayed. Mine has taken a lot longer to finish as I had some design team commitments in between.

I took a few photos before I bound the album together as they were easier to photograph that way. I used all Tim Holtz products for my album as it was also a reminder of the most amazing crafting summer I had watching his awesome Facebook Lives. I also used the same toadstool on the cover that was on the tag he sent me when I won my demo prize. If you missed that post you can see it here

Here are ATCs mounted on their pages.

I documented the flight and the pool..

...finding dragonflies in the garden and all the busy bees.

 The gardens were so beautiful so my Lady Rose set was most appropriate

and we saw some spectacular bugs too!

and here is the album all finished. I made a ribbon tie.

 There is an index card (obviously not shown) on the reverse of the page each day where I wrote my memories. The little Instax photos are such fun to add.

And one final shot of the cover. It was a wonderful adventure, so many memories all now documented forever. These albums are always such a labour of love to make but so good to look back at. 

Thanks so much for stopping by today. I hope you are all keeping well and enjoying the last few weeks of the summer. Thanks for the kind comments you take the time to leave me, I really do appreciate them.

Back soon,

Bye for now,

Jane x

Hello September

Good morning and welcome to September, the months are really flying by now and autumn will soon be knocking at our door. 

It's also time for a brand new challenge over at Country View Challenges

The theme is "complementary (also known as contrasting) colours". I looked up the definition for this as I rarely use a colour wheel in my designing. Here is a summary of the definitions I found: Contrasting colours are clashing colours which come from opposite sides of the colour wheel. In traditional colour theory the recognized pairs are red-green, yellow-purple and blue-orange.

 You can find all the details of the challenge and more examples made by my talented teamies here.

So for my first piece I went with the tradition colour theory of contrasting colours and used the yellow- purple contrasting colour pair to work with. 

This is what I got up to;
The products I worked with were Visible Image's Daisy Daisy stencil,
Dare to be different and No regrets sentiments stamp sets.
I applied some Infusions violetta powder onto watercolour card and made the background. Next blended yellow distress inks through the stencil and onto the card too. 

 I splashed alcohol inks onto glossy card stock

and then blended some archival ink through the Daisy stencil

 I cut this out an placed it over the stencilled image on the card.

 I stamped the Visible Image lips, cut them out and coloured them with purple glitter pen.

 I stamped the words and clear embossed them.

Here is my finished card with a few sequins for some extra bling!

I think it has a real Rolling Stones/60s vibe and I really did have fun working outside of my usual coluor choices. Purple is a colour I rarely use!

I hope I may have inspired you to join in with our September "contrasting colours" challenge. You can use any stamps/products, the choice is yours. 

You can enter our challenge as many times as you like and combine with other challenges. There is also a £20 crafting voucher up for grabs to the lucky randomly selected winner to spend over on the Country View Crafts on line store. Remember that UK postage and packing from CVC is free on all orders over £7.50! Once again all the details for the September  challenge can be found here.

I will be back on September 12th sharing a card I made using the contrasting colour pair of blue with orange. Thanks so much for stopping by today.

Back soon

Bye for now

Jane x