Happy Mothers Day Mum

Here's the Mothers Day card I sent to Mum, and to Jeff's mum. Had some fun with the postage stamp punch from Stampin' Up, and shuffled through my stamp collection for all sorts of stamps that worked together.

And here's a close up of that cute little bird.

Thanks, Mums, for all you do for us!

Pretty, pretty stamp set

I bought these new stamps from Stampin Up, cos they are so pretty. And, to make them worth while, I had a go at using them straight away. As you must.

I've used a little masking, and favourite colours, and apart from that, not much in the way of clever tricks.

Confetti Flinger Card tutorial part 2

Now, where did we start? Oh, yes, at part 1 of the confetti flinging card tutorial. Here's the second and final part.

I've used the small tag punch from Stampin' Up, with some lightweight tracing paper. Lighter than this would be good too. As you'll see, you could use a simple square in place of the punch, but I enjoyed the shape

this made.

Punch out a nifty little tag from the tracing paper. Oops, the close up photo reveals that the punch didn't do a great job on this paper. Try punching a bit of regular paper at the same time - that should solve it. Crease it like so.

Now, you'll want some

shirring elastic. Some what? That's elastic that is very light, almost as light as

thread. It gets used to make those strapless sundresses with the stretchy bodices that

we all wore in the 70s. Well, maybe not you.

This stuff came from an op shop, but I guess they still make it... Hat elastic is out there, but it would be too thick.

Now cut a length of shirring elastic, about yay big. I'm showing you with my hands. Let's say 20cm, or eight inches. Or the length of the alphabet bit on y

our computer keyboard. Be a little

generous, you'll be trimming it off later.

Tie a knot in it to make one big loop. Loop it over your fingers three times to make a little triple loop. Loop it over the four notches you made.

Now, squish the box down, and let go. Does it spring up to the upright position? If yes, you are in luck. If it's a bit lazy, pull on the knot in the elastic, and move the knot. Well, untie it and tie it again tighter. Repeat until you have a box that springs happily to attention. Trim off any excess elastic, and wiggle it into the least visible spot.

Attach the little tracing paper tag to the box, like so. I've used double sided tape here. The unfolded end is towards you.

Make or get or recycle some confetti, and place it on the little tray.

Now, go and put on a dress. You may skip that step if you are a guy, or work in an industry where dresses are inappropriate. A cloth over your lap would work fine.

Arm the card. You may want to develop some kind of arming protocol. You know "All crew, arm card and crosscheck - OVER". To arm the card, squish it into the upright position, and close the card over the whole mechanism.

Now test the card. Pretend you are someone else who doesn't know this is a confetti flinger, and open the card with a happy smile. If you get confetti all over your lap

, things are going well. You may want to tighten the elastic a bit now that you see what you are up against.

Final step - decorate the front of the card. Make it HEAVY. Lots of layers, or some heavy layers. This will encourage the recipient to open it the right way. Don't forget it needs to be a horizontal design.

And after taking these photos, I tried out an alternative to the "notch". Here's a photo - I think it's an improvement. The elastic is threaded through, so it's a bit more work, but the result is prettier.

So there you go. I hope you like it! If you want to buy any of the Stampin' Up goodies mentioned, try my friend Chris. Or your local Stampin' Up person.

Where the envelope art is going to...

And here's the next installment of What I've Been Doing with Envelopes.

We'll start with a little tutorial on using business envelope windows as shrink plastic. First step, colour with some colour pencils (I've used Prismacolor here, and I've chosen light colours). If it looks like nothing's happening, you're doing fine.



Second step, stamp something nice on the plastic. Here I've used a big alphabet (the Big Deal alphabet from Stampin' Up). The ink here could certainly be something permanent like Stazon, but I'm just using Stampin Up black (that's a waterproof ink). Non waterproof ink will not work at all (so coloured Stampin' Up ink is out).

Yes, you could stamp first then colour - then you would probably HAVE to use a true permanent ink - otherwise it would run when you coloured near the lines. Of course, if you just stay away from the lines, you might manage it. I did, but I'm not going to recommend it as fun and safe for the kiddies.

Third step, cut out just the plasticky bit of the window. And heat it - with a heat tool (and tweezers so you don't blow it away) or in the oven (I used a bit of baking paper on top of my baking try to keep things neat. The shrinking happens in seconds. Sadly, so does the curling!

Here's my sample after shrinking - wow, the letters changed! Oh, wait, no, I just swapped samples. Stay with me, same method. See how intense the coloured pencil is now. And see how the piece is a bit curled up - it would be nice to get it flat. Back in the oven for a few moments, and we'll whack it flat with any flat utensil (this wood mounted stamp will work).

Ahem.

And then there are no more photos of THOSE two samples, because they both curled up so very badly they became molten puddles of recycled mush.

So here's one I prepared earlier...

This is my little book, made of mat board and envelope paper, and shrunken window. The book is called "ImPOSTers". See what I did there? That's one of them puns. Well, kind of. I thought I might fill the book with faux postage.











And here's the other complete book I made. This was the one where I stamped on the front cover, and tried to hasten the drying with my heat tool, only to see it curl into a hideous mess ... which is when I realised I had shrink plastic.














The pages inside both books are all patterened inside-of-envelopes. So pretty, as you can imagine.

And in real life : Ouch, ouch, eye-hurting! Yes, after imagining how inspiring my all-patterned art journal was going to be, I can only look at it for a few minutes before my eyes go all fuzzy!

Help! Somebody give me a kick!

Well, I have an important craft project to work towards... the Stampin' Up convention is on in Sydney in about two weeks, and I want to make swaps (a big bundle of cards, all the same, to swap with other demonstrators). They need to be fun and cool, and better than anyone else's (which is saying a lot, so I generally don't worry about that last one).

Problem is, I can't seem to get started on this rather serious task. I've been into the craft room regularly.

So far, I've:




Added to my small painted canvas...


















...contributed to world Peas...
















And introduced Bunky the Art Sparrow to the new bird punch that everyone loves so much. He wasn't impressed.




Which is great, but I'm still no closer to making 30 or more smart and swappable cards. Can somebody give me a sudden burst of inspiration?

My usual technique is to flip the dictionary open, and let the word my eyes fall on guide me. You're allowed a few goes if you don't like your word, but no rigging it!

So if YOU could send me a word, I'd be very appreciative.

Out trawling for old stamps again

I recently got my hands on an 11 year old Stampin' Up stamp set - it's just gorgeous! All I've done so far is stamp the images on white card, but I'm enjoying them so much, I thought I'd share. This is "Marvellous Morning Glory", a set that was never released in Australia, but that really deserves to have a comeback!

The light purple and dark purple are two different stamps, and so are the light and dark green - you lay one on top of the other to get that offset printed look. So nice!

Second Hand stamps - a cautionary tale

I had a super day at the local trash and treasure market recently - a handful of great Lego (including a shark!) for 50c, some old cookbooks, and even two excellent rubber stamps.

But now I have a caution about second hand stamps!

The stamps were not expensive ($1 for both I think) so that's not the issue. They were both caked with old ink, but, being the owner of a Stampin Scrub stamp cleaner (hint: I'll sell you one), I wasn't worried.

The butterfly stamp was covered with blue ink - it must have been pigment ink. It cleaned up a treat - take a look! Still a bit of blue in the crevices, but we'll cope. And after cleaning, it stamps well - see?













The other stamp was an equally pretty bee stamp. I may already have that particular stamp (!), but who can go past a really nice bee - I could give it away at stamp club and be really pleased with myself. The bee stamp was caked with ink too - this time gold pigment ink (most likely Encore, which was widely available here at around the time these stamps were being sold new).



I scrubbed and scrubbed, and got this stamp looking reasonable too. But this is what it looked like stamped :

The image is just not complete - and this was my best try! The rubber felt a bit funny to me too - hard, and not "rubbery". I investigated a bit more, and here's what I found:

Horrible cracks all over the rubber! Argh! There's no repairing that!

So here's the cautionary message : metallic ink (of that brand, anyway) seems to damage your stamps if left on the rubber for a long time. So - clean your stamps!!!

The coffee fix

This is what happens when you book a catered function and don't offer coffee. The event was Stampin' Up regionals in Melbourne yesterday. SU don't do coffee, but most of their demonstrators do. The foyer coffee shop probably sold about 100 coffees (so they were punching the air). But if each of us spent a few minutes in line, that's hours of stamping time lost!

D'ya think I'm analysing this too much? Probably, but I do like a nice coffee around 10.30 every day.

Anyway, that was the only grumble, and there's pretty pictures on my Altered Penguin blog if you want to have a look.

Fathers Day Treats

Last week I had a fun time getting organised for the Fathers Day Stall at school. An easy fundraiser, we help the kids get a small gift for Dad, at a pocket money price. Obviously, we use every shopping trick we can think of to get value for money. And by buying in bulk, we actually do raise funds for the school too. Nice, eh?

I was wanting to show off our cleverness, but I couldn't show any photos til after the big day - of course!

So this is what 96 Choo-Choo train cards looks like. I stamped them all myself, because I realised that job involved a lot of drying time (I was of course using odd bits of recycled card, so the ink wasn't drying as beautifully as it does on proper stamping cardstock).

My helpers from the P&C came over for an evening, and finished them all off with me. We punched with a square punch and added a square chocolate - which exactly fitted the 1-and-3/8 inch square! Then we clipped on a pen (that's the actual gift), and a quick staple held it shut. Could have been more glamorous, for sure, but we were making 96! So that was our $1 gift.

The chocolates come from Wallies Lollies in Box Hill - they did a great job of getting the right chocolates in for me, so I've got to thank them with a free plug. And at $10 for a kilo - whoa, that's great!









Here's me running my little shop - actually, I had so much help on the day, I just jollied it all along. That's supervising!

And it would be remiss of me not to mention that you can buy these pretty stamps, the inks, and that handy punch, from your local Stampin' Up dealer (who might just be me).

Pretty ATCs

I spent part of Sunday making some ATCs. Why not? I had been trying to make some cards with just Stampin' Up stuff (that's good business, that is) but I was frustrated. Then I realised there is NO requirement to do any such thing. Sure, if I'm making a card I intend to use as a sample, or in some way to represent Stampin' Up, it needs to be constructed of all SU products, but when it's just me playing, hey, I can use anything.

Since I stamp mainly for mental health, that's a useful thing to realise.

So I went to an old favourite starter technique - cover some card with pretty paper (in this case, wrapping paper), add a strip of text paper (my good old dictionary), then gesso thinly over the whole thing. That's the background. The gesso pales out the background papers, allowing a foreground image to show through. It also provides useful "tooth" for colouring media attach to. That is, you can draw or paint on it. Or stamp. Don't worry about trimming the ends off until later.






Here's an ATC I made in that session - I stamped and coloured onto the OTHER side of a piece of yellow vellum, tore it out and attached it with eyelets. Then I stamped the same stamp in SU Old Olive onto the card, and sponged the edges. That stamp is from the SU Fifth Avenue Floral set, a real favourite these days.














Same technique, different stamp (but it is from the same set!).

I'm still using that "cut out one word from the dictionary" technique, as you can see. Still not over it!

Have you ever wondered...

... what a 48 page exercise book would look like if you cut the pages into 4.5 cm squares? Thought you had! Here's what it would look like.

Thank you.

Oh, wait, you want to know WHY I'm doing this? Well, it's all to do with Paperific! As a newbie Stampin' Up! Demonstrator, I'm jumping in headlong with both feet. I'm spending all day Sunday at the show, alternating between chatting to people, selling showbags and other goodies, taking orders for our excellent show specials, sitting down demonstrating, and running make-n-takes. The nice thing is, each of us is deciding on our own demo topic, and our own make-n-take. I've worked out a neat, cool and fun little thing I can make, and it involves little squares of exercise book.

If you want to read more about the Paperific adventure, see my new Stampin' Up! blog - it's called Altered Penguin. If you are local to me, and in need of a demonstrator of your own, you should pop yourself on my mailing list. It's fairly painless.

Altered Penguin???

Altered what? Well, penguin, of course. That's him over there.

I had to create a little mascot for my NEW BLOG. Yes, another one, but this one's serious.

I've signed up as a Stampin' Up demonstrator, a pretty painless deal, since I am a keen customer anyway. I'm going to be showing off like mad at the craft shows (starting with Paperific in just two weeks). So of course, I needed a new blog. Maybe you should go and look - it's here. There should be tons of goodies there. Eventually.