Recent Projects

Do you ever have so many ideas swirling about in your head that you don't know how to sort them all out? I often feel so frustrated by all the craft techniques, products, YouTubes, etc. that I see, that I become immobilized. Today I just had thaw my brain freeze, hit the craft room, and dive into my stash to crank out a few cards for friends.

My good friend recently lost her father who had been bed-ridden for several years, so I used a new fiber to frame the front of her sympathy card. I love the look of images stamped in white, but have yet to find a great white ink that is vivid. I ended up using a white paint dauber to get the image to stand out.

Two others have recently been hospitalized and undergone surgery, and I made two totally different style get well cards for them. This cheery card uses Stickles to add a bit of glitter.

The second get well card is more my style which is vintage grunge. I used a combination of embossing and stamping on the background paper and added an embossed leaf made from foil tape treated with black acrylic paint and two Rub 'n Buff colors. 

Lately I have been obsessed with photo realistic rubber stamps. I have several vintage collections from Oxford Impressions and a few stamps from Stampsmith. It takes a lot of experimenting with inks, paper, and technique for the stamped images to truly look like photos. After achieving a variety of results with the stamps, I made an "family" album to showcase them.

One of my favorite go-to techniques is embossing brown paper (from a grocery bag), then applying Distress Inks to achieve a leather look. The center plate, binding, and corners are copper card stock treated with Black Soot Distress Ink. 

These are (stamped) photos of my "faux family".

 This is the only Tim Holtz stamp that I used:

For the back cover I used large eyelets threaded with lace seam binding (colored with Black Soot Distress Ink).