Patchwork

The Paperartsy challenge is asking for paperpiecing... and I really enjoyed Keren Bakers post where she used different patchwork effects. I decided to go for squares :)

I started with an inky underpaper, these are spritzes and splatters of Brushos. There is a 1cm x 1cm grid on the paper, and I planned to maybe do 2x2 or 3x3 squares... but my card base needed a 11cm x 16 cm panel, and that just wouldn't turn into larger than 1x1 squares! I tried to be picky and choose my favourite little squares and started cutting them out. I cut a suitable panel from a neat piece of the same grid paper and glued the little squares on. To made it more like patchwork than mosaic I sewed over all the "seams" cutting the threads every time, because I wanted them to show. Once the panel was done I adhered it with double sided tape and sewed around the edges. I can almost not believe I managed a card without stamping, but somehow the diecut seemed better than a sentiment strip.

Moona

Working on the Art Journal Journey June challenge (maps) has been postponed do many times I was afraid I wouldn't get it done! Especially since I knew what I wanted to do and it kind of scared me. I luckily dared to start playing and was happy to get inspiration from the Viva Las VegaStamps challenge using their prompts (black, white, green, dots, circles, sketchy, script, doodles...) and stamps too, of course. The sister of our dog, Moona, was run over by a car in the beginning of June... we had spent a lot of time together and really thought our dogs could visit and enjoy each others company for years to come. So here's for Moona, we all miss her. Sniff.

I started by tearing a piece of a map of our home town. I was happy to find it possible to get our home and Moona's home on the same spread. Actually even the dogs' birthplace is there, but I didn't think of that while gessoing. I used both white and clear gesso with the aim to have the homes and the route between them showing through a bit more than the rest.

I have never done an image transfer before. I looked through a bunch of tutorials on different blogs and found that it works different for ink jet prints and toner photocopies and laser prints... I had printed a large picture at work with a machine that also works as a photocopy machine. I'm sure it isn't an ink jet, but I have no idea what technique options there are for the functions of colour printing. I decided to just do it: opted for gel medium, and tried a small piece first, you can see the green in the lower right corner above. At least something transfered, so I spread gel medium over the picture and burnished well... and then waited and peeked and waited again and after maybe five minutes I lifted the paper. The edges were ok, but the middle had quite a lot of paper left on it. You can see that about half the page stuck to the image, half came off. I continued by rubbing the surface while it still was wet, but found soon that I had colour coming off too.

I left the image to dry and continued some hours later, misting with water and gently rubbing the paper away. It rolled nicely, but at times the colour came off too, especially around the eyes... I coloured the white from next to the eyes with black and brown markers (didn't want her looking like a zombie), otherwise the worn and torn look is fine. If I should do something different, I would spread the gel medium further around the image (I tried to get just the dog), it would have been easy to cover the extra green with gesso, now I lost a part of her other ear. Fixing the eye (or eyebrow) really made a difference, she looks like herself!

I started doodling text on the left page. I used acrylic paint markers, micron pens and a charcoal pen. I forgot to take a picture, but I felt it was empty and decided to stamp. Guess how disturbing the result was?!? Horribly restless and not nice at all. I hated it... a mess, the stamped images bled on the gesso and the text just dissapeared. Besides I had to sleep overnight for the ink to dry before I could start covering the stamped images with gesso. Luckily the end result is very pleasing, I used white gesso, Fresco Finish Granny Smith and Dina Wakley Umber, blending a bit with a baby wipe.

I thought this was finished at this point... untill someone noticed I had the year wrong, we are running 2016! Luckily this was easily fixed, and I ended up using a few more stamps too. This time I used Stazon, and it gave nice crisp images :) While I was at it, I spread a layer of satin glaze over the transferred picture. Part of the leftover paper on top of the image went transparent (like tissuepaper does), so it became a bit more vivid in colour.

I used a short poem-like text that I once copied from a funeral announcement. It's from Eeva Kilpi, a Finnish poet and though it doesn't translate very well wor for word, the idea is approximately

don't say that life is short

say: what a special experience

since it is not at all a question of length

but of experiencing the here and now 

Dogs are known to live in the moment, they don't worry about the past or daydream about the future. Yes, our dog does miss her sister when we do something where Moona would generally have come along (like going to swim the other day), but otherwise she doesn't really think about it, I'm sure. The mourning part is left for us humans, and I guess we'll gradually get even with it. I didn't have to shed tears making this page now, if I had tried a couple of weeks ago, I probably would have. And I'm super happy with the result, this spread will be cherished :)

A Little Birdie

Here's another card for the customer creations challenge at Designs by Ryn with a Brusho background  done with ink jet photo paper. The colour of the Brusho is mostly Purple, perhaps some Rose Red too.

I stamped the hummingbird (from Designs by Ryn) and the sentiment (from Tim Holtz) on the same cheap ink jet photo paper that I used for the background. I love how the photo paper captures every little detail of the images (though colouring it would be a challenge, the photo paper absorbs all colour immediately, no fixing afterwards!) I didn't want to add colour, because I found the plain image very effective, so I just fussy cut and mounted the white pieces on low foam tape for a bit of dimension.

K is for Kukkakaviokuono

The Craft Barn alpha/dictionary challenge for K was a difficult one. I'm on holiday, but haven't had time to get this done before the last minute, and there weren't many suitable animals in my wildlife encyclopedia. As before I wanted to choose something I'd never heard of before and preferably something with a name that didn't give a clue of what kind of animal it happened to be. This is the flower-faced bat, in Finnish the name is "flowerhoofnose". I learned that hoof-nosed bats (the English term is leaf-nosed) are a large group of insect eating bats. All have some sort of skin ornament on their nose, and this is a rare species with a flowerlike ornament that has layered petals. (No one knows what function the ornament has :) )

For the background I dug out a piece of ink jet photo paper coloured with grey Brushos. I added some texture paste with a star stencil for interest. That is my dusky night, and the rest ended up quite simple. Here's the back of the card, the encyclopedia didn't have much to say about these! The k and harlequin stamp are from Rubber Dance.

The previous cards for this challenge can be found under the following links... still quite a long way to go! And the letters have been picked according to the Finnish names of the animals:)

a (pinecone fish)

b (bananaquit)
c
d (dugong)
e
f (falanouc)
g (gundi)
h
i
j (jamaican tody)
k (flower-faced bat)
l (flying dragon)
m
n
o
p
q (quelea)
r (rathbuni's salamander)
s (surucucu)
t (talapoin)
u
v
w
x
y

z

Fabric

The Paperartsy challenge is asking for projects with fabric. I wanted to try gelliprinting on fabric, and decided to try Liz Borers tip about using glaze with infusions inspired me to try gelliprinting with them. Here's the card I made, and below it some experiments...

My first idea was to use gesso as a base for the print. Once the gesso was dry, I brayered satin glaze on my small 3,5x5 inch gelli plate and one by one added and brayered Infusions (Golden Sands, Sunset Beach and The Sage). Here's what it looked like before printing. The walnut crystals kind of attached to the brayer and the colours are quite vibrant. I have my gelli plate on an acrylic block, so I actually stamped with the gelli (making it easy to place where I wanted it) and flipped over to rub the fabric properly into the colour.

The gesso turned out to have some cracks in it, and the result was quite uneven. Actually the gesso didn't go all the way to the edges, so you can see how nice the narrow strip on the left and right are. I had some colour left on the plate so I took a ghost print on ink jet photo paper (there happened to be a piece lying on my desk). Proved to be a mistake... the print is fine, but I chipped my gelli plate RIPPING it from the paper, it really stuck hard! So no photo paper with gelli plates!

I made a new print in the same way with just plain fabric, and it was much nicer than with the gesso (though I'm not throwing that out, I'll just use it for something else...). The Glaze resisted the surface of the gelli plate and started to peel into empty spots, but I like the effect. I stamped with the birds and branches stamp from HP 1009 and Archival ink in Jet Black. Some lines got fixed with a black Micron pen, I'm guessing my ink pad isn't juicy enough!

The rustic colours of the Infusions fit nicely with a kraft card base. It's a bit rainy here and that makes it difficult to take proper photos :) I added a panel of white card behind the fabric, because the linen is a bit translucent. As usual, I decorated the envelope too, just some simple stamping with Versamark. I'm feeling a bit sorry I didn't bother to check what surface I was stamping on, as you can see, parts of the stamp aren't showing. Perhaps I'll remember next time...

Under the Sea

Playing with brushos on ink jet photo paper gave me a bundle of cool backgrounds. I'm posting for the Designs by Ryn June Customer Creations challenge with this card. This background has a variety of green and blue Brushos. Part have been sprinkled on dry paper and spritzed with water, part have been dropped in disolved form from other pieces of paper that I was colouring, some crystals have been sprinkled into the puddle on the paper... worth trying!

The background was so cool I wanted to keep the other elements simple. I stamped the origami turtle (Designs by Ryn) and text (Tim Holtz) and left them plain white, just some low foam tape underneath.

Paskis #322

Paskiksessa on tällä kertaa värihaaste, jossa pyydetään keltaista, oranssia ja punaista. Korttini tausta löytyi kokeilulaatikosta: leikin taannoin Brusho-pigmenttijauheilla ja Lidlistä ostetulla sikahalvalla mustesuihkutulostimen valokuvapaperilla. Kaikilla muilla alustoilla värien intensiivisyys häviää paperin kuivuessa, mutta valokuvapaperi toistaa koko väri-iloittelun!

Tekstileima on norjalaiselta Rubber Dancelta, ja se on leimattu samalle valokuvapaperille. Kokeilujeni perusteella Versafine oli paras muste tähän, ja leiman yksityiskohdat näkyvät viivatarkasti. Pienet puutähdet on päällystetty parilla kerroksella keltaista kohojauhetta, tähän värimaailmaan sopivia valmiita koristeita kun ei sattunut olemaan. Jos satut Rubber Dancen verkkokauppaan leimaostoksille, saat kassalla 15% alennusta koodilla kristiina2016.

Sunshine + Rain = Rainbows

We've been having some adorable summer weather recently, sunshine together with rain! I made a happy rainbow card for the CASology challenge (sunshine). Rubber Dance Art Stamps are sponsoring the challenge this week and I've used their Alphabet Uno stamps for my card. It says "congrats" in Finnish, six times. There is a piece of thick corrugated card in between the stamped panel and the purple card I used as a background, I like the way it gives dimension and air to the card, though the effect doesn't really show in the picture.

I made some measurements on a piece of watercolour card, to mark six spaces for the stamping. Luckily the u and n are so alike, this is easily stamped! The card has a textured surface, so I used a black micron pen to fill in the lines where they weren't clear, coloured in rainbow colours using Inktense pencils and finished with a touch of Wink of Stella glitter.

I actually managed to catch the shimmer of the glitter! Once in a lifetime... 

Colouring...

I love to look at all the beautiful colouring books that are available, and I've been avoiding buying them since I have quite enough to do as is! But having the need to do some colouring, I decided to stamp myself some images for cards, and I'm posting this one for the Country View challenge (Crackle).

I started by stamping some "o" letters from this alphabet set onto card bases. What happened to the one on the right you can see here, the one on the left I coloured rather slowly and thoroughly with my Faber Castell Polychromos pencils. No solvent, just lots of layers of colour, trying to create some shade and dimension. I love the way the patterns pop after a layer of Crackle Accents. Super simple!

T is for Talapoin

The Craft Barn alpha challenge is asking for t. I'm working in the last minute with all sorts of things popping up (though I have been on holiday for a week now!). I checked through the index of my wildlife encyclopedia, found a few t-names that didn't give me a clue as to what sort of an animal they might be. Some were too big for these cards, but luckily one was this lovely little monkey. The smallest of all old world monkeys, the body being around 10-15 inches.

Talapoins live in jungles and mangrove swamps, allways near water... So I picked one of my ink jet photo paper experiments for the background. This is with Paperartsy Infusion in Sage. I love the wet marble look it gives! I recommend trying photo paper with Infusions or Brushos, the effects are quite interesting, I just diluted the crystals on my craft sheet and dipped the paper into it. It's as if the paper takes a photo of the puddle :) Here is the back of the card. These little monkeys live in small groups and eat plants, insects and whatever grubs they can find on land and in water.