November's Stamping with Clarity Shows

It's my favourite weekend of the month again.  Barbara Gray is on my telly!   As always the shows have been fab and Barbara's demos, and the other members of the Design Team's cards, have got me all inspired.

I'm still pretty new to all this and trying to work out the best way to do things.  The telly weekend is obviously the main focus of the Clarity month, but if I post all my cards today I will have nothing to blog for the rest of the month.  On the other hand I realise that people want to see the samples; I know I love to see everyone else's.  So I thought I'd post a group shot of my cards today, then I can do individual posts on them throughout the month.

I hope you like them.

By the way, I was excited to see that I'm nearly up to 50 followers!  It's so nice to know that I'm not talking to myself.  Thank you.

Lynne
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Clarity Meadow Dance Card Lavina Style

Here's another card made with my favourite Clarity Meadow Dance stamps.  I saw a project in Craft Stamper by Tracey Dutton from Lavinia Stamps and this is what I made from it.  I love the mixture of colours.

The tutorial is also on her blog, here.  She uses one of her stamps called Harietta.

The little star cluster is by Lavinia and the words are from an old Joanna Sheen set of dress stamps.  All of the others are from Claritystamps.

Well that was short and to the point!

It's nearly time for the next In the Classroom with Barbara Gray show on Create and Craft tomorrow.  I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else has made.  I'll be back tomorrow to show you what I've been up to.

Lynne
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Halloween Tag Book Instructions

I had a question yesterday about how I'd made the Halloween tag book so here is how I folded it.

1.  Start with a square of double side paper.  I think I trimmed mine down to 10" x 10".

   The red pen lines are just there so you can see where to fold.  Do not draw them on yours.

2. Decide which pattern you want on the outside and fold in half.  A Hougie board is handy for this if you have one, but as it's only paper you're folding it's not necessary.  Turn the paper 90° and fold again.

3. Fold in the corners.

4. Fold the pointy bit up.  "Pointy bit" being a technical term.  :-)

5.  Repeat this for however many pages you want.  Punch some holes along the folded edge and you can now assemble it into a book using book rings, ribbon, or a binding machine and fill it with your tags.

I hope that makes sense.  If it doesn't just let me know.

Lynne

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Halloween Tag Book

It's a good excuse for me to post a cute photo of Maya looking scary in her witches hat.  I am sure there are plenty of spells she would have liked to cast on me for making her wear it!

No Mayas were harmed in the taking of this photo.  She did however enjoy the vast quantity of tripe stick bribes it took to get it.  If you look really closely you can see the dribble on the hat where she'd been running around the garden with it in her mouth!!!!!!!!

I guess I'd better get back to craft.

I usually take part in a Halloween card swap, but I didn't really have the time this year, so I thought I'd share my favourite Halloween make from two years ago.

It's a folded book bound together with my Cinch.  The papers are by K & Co. This included a sheet full of words which were perfect for the bottom of the tags. The stamped images are mainly digi stamps that were a brilliant free gift from Simply Cards and Papercraft magazine. They had some similar ones this year in issue 102.  The Claritystamps' Moon Shadow also appears.  The haunted house behind the witch is by Chocolate Baroque.

I probably got a bit carried away with the photos but I had such fun making it I wanted to capture it all.

                 

It was all wrapped up in a matching box.

Happy Halloween,

Lynne & Maya
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Clarity Meadow Dance Poppy Card

This is the last of my cards from October's Claritystamp shows on Create and Craft.  It's also my favourite.

It combines two of my favourite Clarity stamps - Meadow Dance and the Poppies.

I started off by cutting an oval on my Cameo.  Then I stamped the poppies into place to create the foreground.  I masked off a couple of the poppies next to the girl with a ball, so that the Meadow Dance stamp would appear behind them.  It looked a bit odd though as the stamp ended suddenly.  I thought it would be a nightmare to mask them all off, so I finished the image off with a black pen.  I just varied the height of my colouring so that it looked like the stamp continued right across.

I really like the contrast of bright red poppies and mat with the bright yellow of the sun and the black silhouette stamp.  They're so appropriate for this time of year too.

Now I'm looking forward to November's shows that are on Create and Craft TV next weekend.  I've just about finished my cards and today's task is to photograph them all.  That's always a bit of a challenge!

I still have the cards that I made for the German shows to share too, so they will be appearing soon.

Lynne
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Gatefold Clarity Meadow Dance Card

I really liked the gatefold card I did with these stamps for the the German shows, so I thought I do a similar one for the UK.

This time I made it bigger.  

Instead of putting the sun (Spellbinders Persian Accents die) on the front, like I did last time, I put it inside and cut the card so it could still be seen when it was closed.   I cut the card on my Cameo by scanning in a cut out image of the die and creating an offset around it.  I then cut it in half and welded one to each side.

It doesn't really show on the photo but there is some green grass mixed in with the black at the front.  I did this to make it tie in with the green trees in the background but looking at it now I think it might have been better if I'd done all of the stamping in black.

What do you think?

Lynne

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Gilded Maple Leaves Card

Here's the other card I made with the beautiful Maple Leaf stamps by Clarity.

Unlike the other one, which went really smoothly, this one gave me a lot of trouble!  I had a vision of a country scene with gilded leaves falling across it, but I just couldn't get it to work.

For the first couple of attempts I tried a cottage scene with green grass and a blue sky.  It looked pretty but when I applied the gilding flaked leaves it was far too busy.

In the end I decided to go really simple with both the scene and colour.  I think this worked a lot better.

The silhouette stamps are stamped with Coffee Archival ink. The scene is done with Espresso Adirondack ink.  I just added a tiny bit of Mountain Rose to the sky.

To apply the gilding flakes I used the fabulous Flitter Glu by IndigoBlu.  You just use it like you would an ink pad and then you put the flakes on the sticky stamped image.  When you've buffed of the excess you're left with beautiful gilded leaves.

Lynne
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