Scrap N Grow

Archive for May, 2012

Good evening. I finished my entry for this week’s Compendium of Curiosities II hosted by Linda Ledbetter over at Studio L3 late last night. This week’s technique is brushless watercolor. The technique’s instructions are on page 49 of Tim holtz’s latest book, Compendium of Curiosities II. This week’s challenge is being sponsored by Daisy from Eclectic Paperie.

Compendium of Curiosities II Challenge Entry Week 7

For my tag, I used Nature’s Moments stamp set from Stampers Anonymous for the brushless watercolor image and sentiment.  Afterwards, I used an acetate die cut from the Sizzix Alterations line called Weathered Clock as a mask.  for a final touch, I added a butterfly trinket from my stash and dyed a strip of Stampin’ Up Vanilla seam binding ribbon  to match the Distress Stain colors used in my technique.

Thank you  you for stopping by and hope that you will stop by again soon.  FYI, I may be intermittent in posting over the weekend as the weather forecasts predicts that I should be able to finally complete staining our deck’s floor.

Michelle

Good morning.  Today, I have a sympathy card to share with you that I created yesterday afternoon after learning that a co worker’s mom recently passed away while I was on vacation.

"With Sympathy" Card

I have to admit that this card is my first sympathy card I have made. I began by first embossing a piece of peacock Ten Seconds Studio Metal using Tim Holtz’s new Book Covers embossing folder and afterwards hand cut the center opening out.  I then used a manila tag and applied a generous coat of Mod Podge and adhered a piece of Music Tissue Roll Wrap from Tim Holtz to the manila tag and set aside to dry.  Once dry, I applied a thin coat of Claudine Hellmuth’s Sable Brown paint to help tone down the stark color of the tissue wrap.  After the paint had dried, I adhered the two layers together using pop dots to create a shadowbox effect.

I chose to use one of my recently made McGill Blossom Punch peonies as the card’s focal image.  I adhered the peony with Inkessentials Glossy Accents to the card front and added a bird accouterment attached to a Memo pin.  I adhered the pin using pop dots placed on the backside of the bird. Next, for the card front’s sentiment, I used an Ideaology Word Band.  I highlighted the word band with Pink Sherbet Ranger paint dabber and chose to accent the word band by attaching a couple of pearl baubles to each side with jump rings.  I then adhered the word band to the card front with a few pop dots to enable the baubles to dangle.

Lastly, I completed final assembly of the card’s layers and stamped a sentiment inside the card. Overall, I am pleased with the card and will present my card to my co-worker later today.

Thank you for stopping by.  I hope that you come back again soon.  Have a great day!

Michelle

Happy Memorial Day. I would first like to thank those of you who are currently serving our beautiful country. I would also like to take a moment to remember those who have fallen in the line of duty.  Words can not merely express my gratitude and thanks for all servicemen and women who are currently serving or have served our country.

Next, I would like to apologize for my absenteeism this past weekend as I had fully intended to post throughout the weekend.  I did enjoy our one nice day on Friday before heavy storms and monsoon like rains drenched our area throughout the entire weekend. Several times our power flickered and internet was intermittent at times.  Storms + complex project + not enough hours in each day = no blog post over the past weekend.  I sincerely apologize and will try and play catch up this week for you.

This afternoon I finally completed my envisioned bouquet of peonies minus the stem’s leaves.  This project was definitely a never ending whirlwind!!! It consumed nearly every free non stormy moment throughout the long holiday weekend. My original vision for this project was to create a bouquet of life like peonies.  Earlier this spring I had purchased several of the McGill paper blossom punches and thought that I would use them to make some peonies.

I started by printing off the peony instructions from McGill’s website.  I then proceeded to select paper and punch the desired number of required shapes.  As I was punching the shapes, I thought to myself that the shapes seem pretty small, but I proceeded anyway and completed the assembly for 7 peonies.  They turned out fine but are indeed very small and lacked a life like sized blossom. I am going to save these for later use on a scrapbook layout, card, or home decor type project.  The completed McGill peonies are pictured below.

Peonies Created Using McGill Paper Blossom Punches

The McGill peonies while nice were not what I had originally envisioned, for I desired big, luscious, full blooms like their live counterparts.  So I instead decided to use my Cricut and the Giant Flowers Cricut Cartridge. A Cricut die cutting machine allows a user to cut my desired shape(s) at any specified size. My luscious, full sized blooms are pictured below.

I elected to cut my flower parts at 3 inches.  The book recommends much larger but with having previous experience using this cartridge, I knew I could successfully cut my shapes much smaller.  I followed the book’s instructions and cut desired shapes in white card stock to assemble a test flower.  I do this typically to figure out the quirks of assembly and for determination of size before using my quality card stock. I am so glad I did as I was very disappointed in the test flower.  In my opinion, the flower was sparse and had a hug hole in the center.  Perhaps, if someone were to use this as a centerpiece or even to place a candle in the center then this would be sufficient but not for a luscious life like blossom that I envisioned. I now knew that I needed to cut mass quantities of each flower part in order to potentially achieve my desired flower.  To do this I  used my Gypsy and placed mass quanities onto a 12X24 mat and cut out shapes once more.

I listed my cuts below:

4 Peony centers (not the recommended 2)

8 peony leaf 1 (not the recommended 6)

8 peony leaf 2 (not the recommended 4)

12 of peony leaf 4 (not the recommended 4).

I also cut 2 of peony layer 4 in lieu of the recommended 1. These are for the center stamens.

I chose 2 different colors of pink card stock  and cut enough parts so that I would be able to make 5 of one color and 4 of the other color. Odd numbers are more visually pleasing to the eye. I will warn you that if you decide to make these yourself, please purchase enough card stock.  After all parts were cut, I used Worn Lipstick Distress ink and my blending tool and inked the edges on both sides of each flower part.  Afterwards, I used my McGill molding mat and accompanying tools to mold the flower parts.  I then used Inkessentials Glossy Accents to glue each flower part prior to the final assembly. This step was labor intensive and downright tedious, but makes a huge difference in the final flower.

Regarding the final assembly, I rolled and offset glued consecutively all 4 peony centers ensuring that I did leave a large enough central opening for my stamens to fit. If you need too, glue these together first, I just estimated.  Next, I adhered 8 peony leaf 1 parts and again offset these with each layer. I adhered these at the height of the score marks on the peony centers.  I continued to adhere the remaining leaf parts offset for each row while I held the flower firmly in my hand upside down the entire time to ensure that the adhesive and flower stayed firmly together.

I would also like to share with you and hope to save you the frustration that I encountered using various adhesives. I started out using Crafter’s Ultimate glue and this did work, but I felt took too long to dry before I could proceed to adhere additional flower parts.  I then tried Inkessentials Glossy Accents. This worked better but still required additional time to dry in between each flower part.  I then decided to try hot glue.  While this seemed to work well intially, I became very frustrated as while I was adhering my final petal layers on my flower, I could see that the hot glue previously used cooled clumpy like and that my flower parts were not adhered well. I could see that large clumps of flower parts were barely adhered and were not intact.  At this point I was very frustrated!  So much so that I had to just walk away and take a break.  The next day, I reassembled the flower and the others using Inkessentials Glossy Accents.  I used 2 sets of locking tweezers to adhere 2 parts at a time and let sit to completely dry each time, typically 3-5 minutes.  This was very time consuming!!!!!!! In order to pass time,  I surfed the internet and chatted on message boards. In all, it took me the better part of late Saturday, Sunday, and a few hours this morning to complete the final assembly of these 9 peonies.

For the stems, I had to think outside the box a bit.  These flower heads have some distinct weight to them. I decided to use double thickness floral wire and wrapped the wire with green floral tape.  I used hot glue successfully to adhere the stems to the flower heads. I still need to cut out leave,s but really wanted to post these for you instead of making you wait yet a few more days.  To help conceal the naked stems, I placed the blossoms inside a cute watering can purse I received awhile back for a gift. I then photographed them for you outside in between the bouts of rain.

All in all, I think this project demanded the most time to complete of the projects I have posted thus far. I am pleased with the results and am eager to cut the leaves out.  What do you think about today’s flowers? Which do you prefer?  I would so love for you to leave me a comment telling me your thoughts or ask any questions.

Thank you for stopping by and for taking the time to read this lengthy blog post.  I am in the process of starting to compose my studio gallery organization and will begin to post about that later this week. I also plan to create the poppy next on the Giant Flowers Cricut cartridge as well as complete my Compendium of Curiosities II challenge yet this week.

Thank you again for stopping by.  Have a great night!

Michelle

Good morning to you!  It is a very soggy day here so I plan to play in my studio and embrace my official last day of vacation. Yesterday I posted my challenge entry for Studio L3′s Compendium of Curiosities II week 6 challenge, and in that post I stated that I made several attempts before committing to completing the tag I presented.  Well yesterday afternoon I made my second best attempt and forced myself to make something of a tag I had set aside for discard.  Today’s featured tag is titled “Fly Free”.

"Fly Free" Tag

I began by following the technique for tissue collage, but forget to add my grunge paper die cut element per the instructions on page 38 of Tim’s book.  I did not do this intentionally, but it was this reason that I originally elected to abandon this tag, hence this tag would not have met the challenge’s instructions.

For this tag, I used Tims’ bird cage and hanging sign post element for the focal point images. The images were cut from grunge paper using my Vagabond.  I die cut the bird cage two times and glued only the outside edges together to create a 3D birdcage.  Afterwards, I created an opening for the bird to “fly free” by simply cutting the center bar out the front cage. Unfortunately, the bird elected to perch atop the sign hanger instead of truly flying away.

For added interest and dimension, I added some Prima pearl bling behind the hanging bird cage. Next, I created the word fly out of Tim’s Ideaology line of letterpress grunge blocks. Final assembly included using 2 thicknesses of pop dots behind the bird cage hanger to enable the cage to hang freely without obstruction.  I colored the bird with Distress markers and pop dotted him to perch on top of the bid cage hanger, dyed some vanilla Stampin Up seam binding ribbon to coordinate, and added a F type charm to the top of the bird cage.

Thank you for stopping by, I hope that you liked today’s attempt #2 tag.  I hope that you come back again soon.

Note: I will be back later this weekend with more inspiring projects as tomorrow (Friday) is supposed to be the only nice day till next Tuesday.  See you then.

Michelle

Good morning.  I just completed my entry for this weeks Compendium of Curiosities II hosted by Linda Ledbetter over at Studio L3.  This week’s technique is called tissue wrap collage. Directions for this technique can be found on page 38 of Tim’s book, Compendium of Curiosities Vol II.  There is still time to enter if you have a chance. This week’s challenge is being sponsored by the Funkie Junkie’s Boutique. They will select a winner at random to receive a $25 gift certificate to use in their online boutique.

Compendium of Curiosities Week 6 Challenge Entry

This week’s technique challenged me to push beyond my comfort zone. One step in the technique instructs you to cover a shape, essentially use it for texture in the background.  I do not typically do this as I personally feel it hides/detracts rather than adds to the overall piece. Perhaps with a bit more practice, I will embrace this technique again in the future.  I must admit that in the process of this technique, I tried and scrapped several attempts prior to completing today’s featured tag.

After several previous attempts, I finally chose to use the filmstrip die as my background element. After running the die with grunge paper through my Vagabond, it occurred to me that I did not use paper as the die is intended for.  OOPSIES, as a result, it did not cut all the way through. It was not a big deal, I just used my scissors to complete the cuts by hand. Afterwards, I followed the directions regarding the remainder of the technique on page 38 inside Tim’s book.

My overall interpretation of the tissue wrap collage technique is that the technique is intended to create a textural background for a project.  At least that is how I have decided to use it. I decided to use the new Vintage Camera die from Tim as my focal point image.  I elected to paint the camera and its pieces similar to the photo on the die’s package. I struggled a bit when I was trying to adhere all the pieces together as they did not seem to fit well together once painted.  I also struggled with initially trying to remove the die cut pieces from the die itself. Tim’s die pick enabled me to remove them, but the pieces were not salvageable to use.

At this point, I was hesitant yet to adhere the camera to the tag, as it kind of bothered me that the covered filmstrip die was not really very visible and would become even more nondescript if I were to just adhere the camera to the tag at this point.  So I decided to highlight the filmstrip by adding a few mini vintage photographs.  This helped my brain to make more sense of the hidden filmstrip shape. I made the mini pictures out of snippets from a Red Lead collage paper and adhered them to Tim’s fragment pieces using Glossy Accents.

Finally, I adhered the camera to the tag using several pop dots. For added flair, I rolled a bit of Tim’s filmstrip and stapled it using his tiny attacher tool to the tag and glued a sentiment from his Ideaology line to the front of the camera. Lastly, I added a few final embellishments including Ideology corners, coordinating seam binding ribbon, and a word stick.

Despite my challenges with this technique, I am pleased with the outcome.  Thank you so much for stopping by and I hope that you will come back again soon.

Michelle

Good morning blog friends.  Today is day 2 of my vacation. The weather forecast for today is 80 and sunny.  I have plans to spend the day outside staining our deck’s floor as I prepped our deck floor yesterday for staining today.  Last night, I relished in having play time in my studio and completed Tim’s Tags of 2012 for May. This year in place of his 12 tags of Christmas, he instead showcases one tag per month and started with February, he has said “he owes us January”. His tags while beautiful, are really a great learning experience as they are chocked full of old and new techniques utilizing supplies from his various product lines.  This month’s tag is none the exception.

May Tag Inspired By Tim Holtz Tags of 2012

Each month, I typically try and follow his tag to a tee to ensure I try out and learn each technique presented, but this month, I added my own twist.  I instead decided to create two tags, his version and my variation. Click here to be taken to Tim’s post regarding today’s featured tag. Tag 1 was Tim’s tag and tag 2, my variation.  I worked on each tag side by side and step by step with some notable variations.

For my variation, tag 2, I elected to use Tim’s Sewing Room Alterations die for the dress form and his Bird Cage die for the lower portion of the dress form.  This idea was inspired by the dress form stamp he used in his tag.  I die cut the dress form out of Claudine Hellmuth’s sticky back canvas and painted it with Pitch Black Adirondack Paint Dabber and embossed it with Tim’s Damask embossing folder from Sizzix. The lower portion of the dress form was cut from grunge board and painted black just as I had painted the dress form.

I also decided to place my measuring tape towards the top portion of the tag and added a fun pair of Studio 490 Art Part scissors. I painted the scissors with silver Adirondack Paint Dabber and used my Crop A Dile punch to create a hole for the scissor’s blades junction and inserted a silver brad fastener for added detail.  At this point, I have to admit that my variation was making me giddy happy. So much so, that I kind of started to abandon tag 1, Tim’s tag. Sorry Tim, no offense, but I loved the depth and all the extra stuff on my variation.

Moving on, I placed several pop dots on the backside of the dress form parts and the measuring tape and adhered them.  I tucked in the scissors and place a small drop of Glossy Accents for hold.  I then attached a Ideaology Accoutrement button with a Ideaology mini pin to the dyed crinkle ribbon. I also chose to add another Studio 490 Art Part, a piece of scallop trim.  I painted the scallop trim with Claudine Hellmuth’s Studio Paint, Traditional Tan, and afterwards highlighted areas with Frayed Burlap Distress Ink.  Lastly, I embellished the trim with some Martha Stewart Pearls in my stash.

I had difficulty locating an appropriate sized spool as Tim had used.  The ones I found were the closet match.  I think they are a tad large, but I thought they would still work.. To cut the spool in half, I used my fiancé’s vice grip and hacksaw. It took more muscle and effort than I thought it would. Afterwards, I sanded the backside of the spool, and inked the front side of the spool with a bit of Frayed Burlap Distress Ink so that the spool was not so stark and new looking.  I then wrapped some thread around the spool and inserted a threaded needle for added detail.

Regarding the flowers, I could only find Prima flowers without stems. Because they were similar in size, I decided to purchase them and add my own stems using a fine gauge floral wire.  I used my needle tool to create a hole in the bottom of each flower, applied a small dollop of Glossy Accents, inserted wire and set aside each flower to dry.  I then busted out my Melting Pot for the very FIRST time.  For some reason, I have always been a bit intimidated by it for some unknown reason. I used it without any problems, but did learn that I should have held the flowers until they cooled so that I did not end up with a dollop of UTEE on my flower.  OOPS!!..lesson learned.  No biggie, I turned the flowers accordingly and wrapped them into a cluster and attached them to the spool with hot glue.  Afterwards, I attached the spool to the tag with additional hot glue to ensure that the heavy spool would adhere to the tag.

Lastly, like Tim did, I made an oval tag using a sewing image from his paper stash and attached the cash key tag to the hanger using a small jump ring.  Overall, I really like how my variation of his tag turned out.

I have to confess, that in the end, I did not adhere the embellishments to tag 1, and I kind of abandoned tag 1 altogether. I felt really bad, but I really preferred the dimension that I created with my variation.  Making the tags were fun, I learned a lot, and overcame my intimidations toward the Ranger Melting Pot.  Thank you for stopping by today. Behind the scenes, I am in the process of working on my Compendium of Curiosities week 6 entry and will be back later this week to show you what I came up with. Have a great day everyone! See you soon!

Michelle

Good morning.  Today, I completed my Iris note card this morning as promised yesterday.  It turned out better than I originally envisioned.

Iris Note Card

The embossed Iris image is from I Brake For Stamps and is stamped onto Inkessentials Specialty Stamping Paper. I then water colored the Iris with various colors of the Tim Holtz Distress Markers.  This was my first coloring attempt using markers for a focal point stamped image.  I am overall pleased with my results.

For the card’s mat, I used a piece of Ten Seconds Studio art metal cut to the size of my desired embossing folder.  The embossing folder I used is Fleur De Lis by Darice.  Afterwards, I lightly sanded the metal to highlight the embossed image.  I then die cut the embossed metal sheet with Tim Holtz’s Mover and Shapers Die: Mini Baroque.  Next, I used pop dots on the backside of the metal sheet and adhered the metal mat onto the focal image sheet creating a shadowbox frame.  I liked the effect this created.  I then continued to add addtional card mats to the card front and to the card’s interior.

Lastly, I dyed a piece of Vanilla Stampin Up seam binding ribbon using Dusty Concord Distress Stain for the bow before adhering  my bow offset at the bottom right hand corner of the card.

I hope you enjoyed my card today.  We have some company coming later for dinner and tomorrow kicks off my first official day of vacation. I am going to try and continue to post in the coming week, though it may not be daily.  Thank you for stopping by and I hope that you will come back again soon.

Good Evening blog readers.  How was your Saturday? It was another steamy one here; heavy storms and hail just passed through our area.  I guess more storms are expected to redevelop around midnight.  My original project for today was to make an iris themed thank you card for a dear friend whom recently gave me a surprise gift. The iris is one of her favorite flowers.

As I was in the process of picking out paper for my card, the doorbell rang.  Our mail carrier had a package for me from Overstock.com. I recently took advantage of a free shipping offer and ordered additional punches for more varieties of paper blossoms.  Overstock’s prices were fabulous and the free shipping was an added incentive since punches cost a lot to ship due to their weight.  Several of my newest punches were used for today’s featured paper blossoms, the iris.

Iris 'Paperie'

These iris were pretty simple to make.  To begin, I gathered all my necessary punches:

Punch A Bunch Mega Lily Petals

Punch A Punch Mega Giant Dahlia Petals

Punch A Bunch Small Sprig Leaves Punch

Punch A Bunch Mega Elongated Leaves Punch

McGill Paper Blossoms Punch: Medium Snowflake Punch

Next, I selected my card stock and then proceeded to punch out the necessary quantity of flower parts. I then used various colors of Tim Holtz Distress Inks and Markers to add depth and features to my flower parts.  Afterwards, I used my McGill Molding Mat and Tools to mold the flower parts and then assembled them using Crafter’s Pick Ultimate Glue and set them aside to dry.

In the meantime, I made the flower stems out of 18 gauge wire double thickness and wrapped with florist tape.  I used a crimping pliers to bend the very tip over slightly to enable me to attach the flower head later to the stem.  By this time, my flowers were dry and ready to be attached to their stems.

I prefer to use a hot glue gun as it holds moments after the glue is placed.  I used my glue gun and attached the flower heads to their stems and did some last and final shaping before I set them into a jar. That’s it! Overall, the Iris were pretty easy and straight forward to make compared to the fussiness of other flowers I have made in the past.

Thank you so much for stopping by and I do hope that you will come back tomorrow as I hope to show you my originally planned iris themed thank you card.  See you again soon.

Michelle

Good evening.  I met my goal today of making graduations cards. I have several friends kids graduating this year and felt inspired to make my own cards.  My featured card today was inspired by a card that I came across on the Splitcoast Stampers gallery under graduation. I liked the pop up and interactive element of  this style of card. I saw several other variations of this card and one of the pictures included a link to a tutorial on how to make the card base. Click here for the tutorial.

Exterior of Graduation Card

Interior of Graduation Card

Supplies I used:

Spring Card Tutorial from Splitcoast Stampers

Scor Pal Score Board

Stampin Up Go Graduate Digital Brush Set

Stampin Up Word Play Stamp Set

Embroidery Floss

Jumbo Brad

To start, I used black cardstock and followed the tutorial for making the folds for the spring card.  Instead of folding the card to spring up, I instead folded it such so that the sides tucked in instead of allowing the card to spring up. This allowed me additional interior real estate to place a pocket for a money gift or the graduate.

Afterwards, I added decorative paper to the cap’s top. I then fumbled through Photoshop Elements to alter and print my digital image of the feet.  This was quite the experience as I have never used a digital stamp before.  I then adhered my digital images to the bottom front panel of the card.

After competing the exterior of the card minus the tassel, I felt the interior of the card looked a bit plain.  After a bit of thinking, I decided to cut additional squares of decorative paper for the top area and formed a pocket by adhering a half square of plain black cardstock over the decorative cardstock.  This will provide me a place to tuck in a money gift for the graduate. I then decided to add another sentiment element just above the feet image.

All that was left now was the finishing touch, the tassel.  Today’s card is for my girlfriend’s daughter whose school colors are green and gold.  I decided to use gold embroidery floss for the tassel.  As I was attaching the tassel to the brad, I wish I had little numbers “12″ on hand to add to the tassel. Instead, I die cut numbers from Chip Block, a Tim Holtz decorative strip die and adhered them along the side of the cap.

The completed card measures approximately 5 1/2x 5 1/2 and will require a special size envelope and additional postage.

I apologize in advance if something does not make sense in this post.  Somehow in the middle of writing and previewing the post, my auto save feature failed and I had to start over, thus writing this post has consumed over 4 hours. Argh!  Please feel free to email me or post any comments or questions you may have.  Thank you for stopping by and I hope that you will come back again soon.

Michelle

Hello blog friends! I hope your day is going well.  My day started ultra early today about 2:45am when my dog decided that he wanted to go outside.  Once I am up, I am not someone who can go back to bed.  So today with an extra cup of coffee in tow, I am writing this post early and making the best of my early rising.

Today’s post features two sets of ATC cards that I made from Donna Downey’s 2011 ATC card kit of the month club. Each kit included specialty supplies other than ink and adhesive, etc. as well as instructions to make each ATC.  I purchased all 12 kits, but thus far only have completed two (not good). I am unsure why I have only completed two months, as each kit can be assembled in just a few short  hours.  Perhaps, it is due to my unfamiliarity of ATC’s and their purpose in general? For those unfamiliar with the term, ATC stands for Artist Trading Card.  ATC”s typically measure 2 1/2X 3 1/2.  Many online forums and Yahoo groups host various ATC themed swaps.  Each kit or swap typically has an associated theme and Donna Downey’s ATC kits were no exception as shown below.

Completed June 2011 ATC Club Kit From Donna Downey

Completed September 2011 ATC Club Kit From Donna Downey

I have found that since I have started to blog my creations, this has inspired me to complete several of my unfinished projects.  It is now in writing that I will in fact complete the remaining 10 months of ATC kits I have awaiting completion and will post them here as each kit is completed. Thanks for stopping by and I hope that you come back again soon.

Michelle