colouring challenge

The weekly Craft Barn challenge is a colouring challenge. We can use any type of pen or pencil, as I don't own any pens (yet) I used my inktense pencils.
I started by dry brushing green and pink on the page. 

Next I stamped flowers and leafs on some book text

and coloured these with the inktense pencils,

cut them out and glued them to the page.

I added a smaller flower stamp in between allover.
Wrote my quote The secret of being happy is accepting where you are in life and making the most out of every single day on a piece of tissuepaper and added that also to the page.

Thx for stopping by.

pink and butterflies

I am currently in the process of reorganizing my clear stamps. Because the system with a ringband and laminated sheets of paper on to which the stamps cling to isn't working for me, due to the fact that the stamps don't always cling anymore so they fall out of the folder. That's the reason why I didn't continue organizing this way and just put my stamps in a drawer, disasterious.
Now I'm going to try using CD cases instead. I am also making a catalogue of my stamps, so it is easy to browse and see what I have. After stamping I used a piece of paper to clean of my stamps, it is this scrap paper I used as basis for my calendar page for August. 

As the 2 prompts from the Craft Barn are pink and butterflies, I sprayed the page with a pink Dylusions ink spray (I need to restock as I'm running low)

Next I added some fern stencilling and completed it with some beautiful butterflies.

yes, I managed to finish this month way in time.

toilet roll mini book

If you have visited this spot before you probably already know that I like to use everyday materials. Well, what do we all have in abundance and just throw away, toilet rolls.

There are numerous tutorials on what to do with them and one that caught my eye was transforming them in a mini book.

This was such a cool idea I just had to give it a go.

First I flattened the rolls out and gessod the front, back and inside (only the first cm or so). I used homemade gesso (last time I used plaster but this gave a rough structure, so now I tried it with baby powder, much better and mmm the smell)

Next I applied a layer of ochre acrylic paint which I left to dry,

I toned it down with walnut DI and also distressed the edges.

Cut out rectangle pieces of pattern paper,

distressed the edges with the same walnut DI and glued them down.

Next I needed to make ‘spines’ for each page, I cut out small rectangles, used a decorative scissor for the edge and stamped a small flower on it.

I punched 2 holes in each roll/page and used 2 book rings to hold everything together.

The neat part about this book is that each page can hold a tag, so I made some tags out of the same patterned paper.

diamonds

For this weeks challenge over at the Craft Barn I started by stamping a diamond background stamp on a 10x15cm ICAD and coloring the white spaces in with my inktense pencils. This worked very relaxing and was even more fun because my son joined in. Next I cut a diamond shape and glued that down to my cardbase

I also glued down the left over pieces on another cardbase. There I just stamped Happy Birthday in it and done, looks great if I say so myself. 

The other card doesn't inspire me at all for the time being so I will let it rest till I figure out what to do with it, if you have any sugestions just leave them in the comment box down below.

July - turquoise and beach huts

This month's calendar challenge at the Craft Barn asks for turquoise and beach huts. So I started with a 12x12 turquoise paper, cut it in half and stamped 2 designs all over on each half. Fishes on the one and sea horses on the other, just wright for a beach theme, no? 

On one of the halfs I added some walnut DI to create another tone.
Then I cut strips of 2 cm wide and glued them alternating on a piece of paper. 

Again I cut strips of 2 cm wide (now cut in the other direction, so in the width) and glued them on my final page, this way I created a mosaic, the easy way.

Then the beach huts, that needed some thought as I do not own anything with an image of a beach hut.
So I thought about carving a stamp or making a stencil, but while searching images I came across a pattern of a beaded beach hut, so I took that design and created a beach hut with iron beads from my son. 

Now I only needed a fitting quote which I found after some searching:
A little sand between your toes helps to take away your woes.
Wrote it with the help of a lettering stencil, outlined it with a black marker and filled it with some white correction fluid.

Hopefully I manage to create the August page much quicker than this one.

Clean and Simple

Sounds easy, no? But I must say I had to think a bit because usually I work messy and use lots of layers. I took inspiration from Dawn over at The Craft Barn and used texture paste in combination with a stencil from TheCraftersWorkshop (TCW327S) on black cardstock. 

I used the 4 images, but one didn't come out crisp (I think the stencil is a  bit thorn) so I discarded that one.

I used a 12x12cm crème metallic card as base, glued the 8x8cm square in the middle and cut a frame out of the same black cardstock. Repeated this for all 3 patterns.

Nepal

This spread in my ARTicles book is about the devastating earthquake in Nepal.
I started this page then (so end of april) and only managed the other day to finish it. (ashamed)
I first painted a mountain landscape

on top of which I collaged (the thought behind this is that the small pieces actually resemble the broken country)

Next I emphasized the broken land even more by tearing up the page.

As a final element to the page I made some banners of flags, each flag is made with a different piece of tape (I seem to have a weak spot for tape, actually not only for tape when I think about it lol)