INKY FINGERS

 This was the first book I made this year, in my quest to explore different ways of adding pages or bindings. I've made 4 since then...😊 but this is my favourite so far. I played with gluing pages back to back, using my favourite mixed media cardstock, which is quite thick. It worked beautifully, until I decided to add a little 'spine' to the cover, so that they'd fit better... it was very slightly too wide, so the back page and the cover split the pages a little on the fold. I still love the book, so I haven't attempted to fix it, although I did cover the spine with washi tape, inked to blend with the background.  It's a slimline format, which I love, and a nice change from the square/rectangular ones I've been making. Can you see the cracks? Such a shame because the thicker card works so much better.

 Hello bloggers! Happy Sunday! and wow! We have more sunshine 😁It may still be cold, especially if not in the sun, but it feels so bright and spring like - it's so uplifting. There are flowers everywhere - what a joy! I finished off a couple of things I was doing this week and decided to make two into journal pages for my 'planner journal'. I love these dies because I can die cut the binding side but make the page any size I like - plus I already had some great planner page dies and they all work really well together.

Aren't these stamps (Art by Marlene) fun? Everything Marlene does is BRIGHT, so I had to follow suit. Her t-shirt is actually lime green and white but it scanned as aqua for some reason...??? It's an A5 page.

This is another one I began last year and finished off this week... I've used it before, but this time I'd cut around the top edge so that I could add it to any b/g - don't know why I ended up putting it back on white!

And a very simple one...The image is stamped and clear embossed, then I added colour in the darker parts of the flower and drew them out with water, hoping to create paler colour, but there's so little card remaining after embossing that it doesn't really show up. Nice, bold image, though. This is a 6" x 6" card.

I've just finished and photographed another book, so I thought I'd better post the first one I made after Christmas, when I hadn't been able to stamp for a month or so... but I'll put it in a separate post. 

Hello!

I finished another little minibook yesterday, with a different way of adding pages. I noticed this method when watching a video of Marlene's new products, which included a little book die. It's very nice and makes it easy to make a book, but it's also very simple, so I thought I'd try it on standard pages. This way you can make it any size, too 😁 so it's more versatile doing your own.

Here's the book cover, with the closure in place, and without it. The one on the left is a scan, the other a photo to show that the inks are lighter than they appear in the scans. I just stencilled the backgrounds with Brilliance White inks, for speed.

 

 

 I've been making minibooks again, playing around with different ways of adding pages, with mixed results. These are two 'empty' books, made to add pages to. I used this Aall and Create stamp on the smooshed die cut cover, stamping and cutting out the bottles and the flower heads twice, to make them stand out. The one on the right is the back cover. Sometimes it's just a shame to add anything to a smooshed Oxide background because the ink effects are so beautiful 😊 

 

 I got a new laptop at Christmas - notebook to be precise - so I've just been transferring some of my files across. This is the start of the clearout of what's left from last year! 

I KNOW I'm doing a lot of JK stuff lately but I love them! This one's just a journal page, unfinished - or is it?  I haven't yet decided which of my journals it will go into, which is why I haven't trimmed it - though it may fit into the one I just made, which I'll show you another day. These are digital images.

This one was just to use up some of the images lying around. I'd had the colours in my head for a couple of days when I made it. I like the way they work together.

This one - shock horror! - isn't made with JK images 😊

Happy New Year!!!

How ridiculous is it to be wishing you all a happy new year on 6 February - but it's my first post since 2020, so I really do want to start this year's blogging in the right way. Hope you haven't forgotten or given up on me!

I'm sorry I haven't been around until now - in all honesty, I wasn't able to sit at my table for long enough to do much after Christmas, so I did an odd bit of  watercolouring as and when I was able - and coloured some stamped images now and again. Then, after a course of antibiotics for a very painful kidney infection, I'm chuffed that I can now sit for longer - yay! I can play 😁

I set the monthly Mingle theme for KCUK on 1st and chose MONOCHROME...whose idea was that? I was actually wanting to do Black and White, because I always find that it kickstarts my creativity when it's decided to go on holiday 😉 but I opened it up to include any colour - along with black and white, of course. I also decided to challenge the girls to make a minibook. I've really enjoyed making them lately and know a lot of them love to make them, too. So, I decided to combine the two and make a very simple book - a concertina - but to make it in monochrome. 

Disaster #1

I decided on greens - because there are so many to choose from in the Distress range - and because it's a fresh, lifegiving colour. That led to me choosing one of my favourite stamping themes - leaves 😁 (It's also a way of pulling me away from my current Janet Klein and Tracy Easson obsessions!)  I pulled out my SU leaves for a change, with Cracked Pistachio, Lucky Clover and Pine Needles Distress Oxides and set to work sponging and stamping. I loved the result. But the whole project was a catalogue of disasters 😖 

I folded an A4 sheet of card into 3, leaving a small edge, which I thought I may use as a closure, so I left it. But I inked the reverse of the concertina on one panel, thinking I would use it as a 'cover'. When I came to use it, I'd stamped it upside down 😟 - it didn't matter until I added the words, but I forgot to check. So, I decided to add another panel to the small edge 'tab', but when I did, I didn't attach it very well, and left a sliver of very sticky adhesive from the d/s tape that I couldn't get rid of. I had the bright idea of adding green washi tape, so I did, inking it up to blend it in more. The next mistake was not using enough water with my white paint when I splattered, creating very unsightly thick BLOBS of white paint - yeuck! I tried to brush some into the background, but it was very fast drying and just wouldn't blend at all...but the water from my brush oxidised the ink a little bit TOO much - along with the heavy water splatters that had already done that. Wetting the inks inside the stamped images had also oxidised the inks, but that added more tone to them and was intentional. 

So here's the result...Front and 4th panels