I dream of rosette flowers....

 A late post from me this weekend after a very busy few days!  I can't believe it's Sunday evening already, where did the weekend go??

I have a rosette flower story to share with you today. After falling completely in love with the snowflake rosette Alterations die at Christmas, I was rather hankering after the less seasonal version so I could start putting that on lots of things too!

I had a voucher for the craft store so managed to pick it up at a reduced price, headed home to try it out on the Vagabond and poof! Disaster!  Smoke started coming out of the sides of the Vagabond and that was that!  The retailer was very good and collected it and replaced it with a new one but it did take a little while, which is a long while when you have a brand new die to play with (I haven't yet figured out how to run these long dies through the Cuttlebug, any tips anyone?) but at last it came back and here is my first play with the rosette flower.

I put the flower together as in this youtube tutorial and used some spray inks to colour it, accenting with some Distress Ink and a sponge applicator around the edges.

The background tag was coloured with Spring Distress Inks and Dusty Concord and then stamped with Indigoblu script, Stampers Anonymous harlequin pattern, Inkadinkado swirls and a word stamp from Andy Skinner (I just wanted the word 'Dreams' so covered the other words on the stamps with the flower). 

I embellished with some Studio FX chipboard swirls which I sprayed with blue spray ink and then distressed the edges in brown, and added a pearl pin and some brown twine to finish off.

Hope you had a great weekend and got some crafting in, I'll be aiming for some this week for sure!

Gayle xx

Say it with flowers!

Happy weekend to you all!  Hope you enjoyed your Easter break last weekend; I managed to fill my Easter week by meeting up with some wonderful friends and also got some much needed sorting done, so hopefully I'm better prepared for a busy time coming up :)

 I have a tag to share today using a set of Paperartsy background stamps I was lucky to pick up in the sale; I love doing backgrounds and I often have trouble covering them up with a main feature but I went for some embellishment on this tag with some small paper roses (made using die cuts from the Alterations tattered floral die).  The background colours are Distress Ink in shaded lilac, squeezed lemonade and peacock feathers with some ink splats in broken china and scattered straw Distress Stain.  The stamped images are black and coffee Archival and poppy red Impress Ink, with some overstamped script in picket fence Distress Stain.

You can also see a little strip of washi tape with the word 'faith' peeping out from behind the flowers at the bottom :)

You can find tutorials on how to make the paper roses online; I was taught how to make them by Hels Sheridan at a workshop so here's the link to her tutorial.

You can see the pieces I started out with here, stamped with script in coffee Archival Ink...

...and then coloured in Distress Ink (in dusty concord, peacock feathers and squeezed lemonade)...

...this is the rose assembled...

...which I then sprayed with a little black Dylusions Ink to grunge it up a bit.

Along with the flowers I added some brown cord, some Tim Holtz and 7gypsies tickets (torn and inked), some pearl hatpins, an Ideaology fragment with a piece of stamped manila card glued to the back (with my initial!) and some yellow baker's twine tying it onto the pin.

I finished up by inking the edges with dusty concord and frayed burlap Distress Ink and some black Archival, and by tying on some Basic Grey fibres I've had tucked away for ages; the colours seem to match really well!

Thank you for visiting us today, have a great weekend and hopefully we'll have some exciting news to share with you in the very near future so watch this space :)

Happy scrapping!

Gayle xx

Jubilee tag

Hello and a happy Sunday to all of you! Those of you in the UK (and quite possibly some of you elsewhere too) cant fail to have missed the Queen's Jubilee celebrations last weekend :-) thank you for the extra bank holidays your Highness!

There was plenty of red, white and blue to be seen adorning various parts of the country, and I thought I would share with you today my Jubilee-inspired tag - who could resist all that bunting?

I inked a manila tag with broken china Distress Stain and added patterning to the background by dabbing picket fence Distress Stain through a Creative Expressions mask and stamped some Inkadinkado flourishes. The bunting is a free stamp with this month's Craft Stamper magazine, painted with stripes using a paintbrush and fired brick Distress Stain, and then inked with old paper Distress Ink to match the die cut bird (which is from  the Tim Holtz Alterations caged bird die).

I cut a crown out of card and coloured it with gold Stickles, and painted the bird's legs and the branch with Glossy Accents.  The bunting is glued to a small piece of twine, and I added some lace ribbon.

I also have a post at The Stamp Attic today (here's a sneak peek!) using some of Andy Skinner's new stamps, would love for you to visit me there if you get time this weekend :-)

Thanks for stopping by, happy scrapping!

Gayle xx