Tim Holtz' 12 tags of 2015 - October

Tim Holtz's October tag for 2015 introduces his new Halloween dimensional dies. I've been eyeing them in the store but haven't broken down yet (it's bound to happen) but I tried to capture some of the elements he used in his tag with what I already have. I'm not totally satisfied with the "wrinkle-free" distress look for the background. Tim got beautiful splotches on his but mine worked out much more consistent. Since I don't have any of the dimensional dies I settled for his die cut heart which I inked and painted. It's popped up slightly to show the background tag colour. The rest of the embellishments are paint and rub-ons.

Materials:

• Distress inks: blueprint, hickory smoke
• #8 manila tags
• Dylusions paint
• Basic Grey rubons

May flowers

Sharing a few small projects that were inspired by the Mixed Media Monthly Challenge (May flowers).

A friend gave me a box full of chipboard shapes and included were about a dozen gift box shapes. I added gesso to 3 of them and used them as mini canvases. Although each turned out very different from the others, I actually used the same acrylic paint colours and many of the same stencils for each.

#1 Singing bird was finished off with one of Tim Holtz' birds and enamel musical notes.
#2 Friendship has hand-rolled flowers and a quote on friendship.
#3 Dandelions is my favourite as the white paint took on a silver sheen when added over black.

Acrylic paint - Dina Wakley - lime green, sky
Distress paint - Tim Holtz
Various stencils - Memory Box, TCW, Dyan Reaveley
Stamp - Tim Holtz - bird

You make my heart dance

Valentine's Day is coming and even though I have no one to celebrate with, I still made a Valentine's Day card. I just bought one of the new Dylusions stamp sets and couldn't help imagining pairing the legs with a heart.

I covered a die cut paper heart with crumpled tissue  and then stenciled over top with pearlescent paste. When I attached the legs, I cut the image apart so that the legs could be positioned more like a chorus line dancer. I love how flexible Dylusions stamps can be! To give the card motion, I added springs behind the heart and legs. The final touch was a slightly skewed background (again, to capture the idea of movement).

This was fun and simple to create and it just makes me smile.

Thank you to the following challenges for the inspiration:

• Mixed Media Card Challenge for the inspiration.
• Dies R Us Challenge - hearts
• Naughty or Nice Challenge - love/anti-love

The best things in life are not things

Yet another scrapbook layout featuring one of my beautiful nieces. This time the focus is my niece Alita - isn't she just beautiful?

I used up some stash (the papers are all from packs I had laying around) and also tried something new for a scrapbook page - lots & lots of layers. I found lots of inspiration for this page in the following challenges:

Stuck?! Sketches - sketch

CSI - Colour

My beautiful niece

My house isn't clean and my kids are going to run out of clean clothes any day now but I have been getting a lot of scrapbooking done... Today's layout is inspired by Scrap Our Stash Challenge and this month's page sketch. I've taken the sketch down to it's basic parts and made this page for my niece's most recent school picture. I used nothing but paper scraps (including the background paper which is a textured off-white) and the burlap ribbon and stickers are scraps too. The washi tapes have been in by stash for quite a while. The twist for the challenge is to use sequins and this was causing me some difficulty as I don't own any. But then I remembered a shirt of mine has a few sequins left on it. I'm not a sparkly person (in terms of clothing) so I had no qualms about removing the sequins and adding them to the heart on the layout. I used my Copic marker to make them black to mirror the black polka dots in the washi tape.

 Thanks for visiting my blog today.

A little bit of love

I'm working this coming weekend to bundle up Valentine's Day cards to donate to my local childrens' hospital (via Send A Smile 4 Kids - Canada). Here are 4 of the cards that I'll be including in the box.

I created these cards with scraps (cut into 1/4" strips and woven) and some leftover stickers. I really like how they worked out as there is lots of texture and with the kraft background these aren't too girly so could be given to a boy.

I'm entering these cards into the following challenge:

• Clear it Out Challenge - Valentine's Day / Flowers (2 of the patterned paper scraps had flowers in the design)

Breathe

Had a great day today with Jacqui as we spent hours playing with paint, paper and stencils. So nice to create just for the sake of creating. I finished off one journal page with my word of the year and am nearly done with a second page that I'll share later this week.

Materials:

• Dylusions Art Journal
• Gesso
• Dina Wakley paints
• generic acrylic paints
• TCW stencils - Flower Frenzy, Mini Dots
• Heidi Swapp stencil - Butterfly

I'm entering this journal page into a couple of challenges:

• DecoArt Create Dare - one word
• The Mixed Media Monthly Challenge - use something new to you (the flower frenzy stencil)
• The Mirror Crack'd - stencils