Watercolour Card and Embossing

Hi wonderful crafty people!!

Georgie here with you today and I thought I'd share another watercolour style card.

I'm quite heavily into mixed media so it is nice to shake up the routine a little.

 For this card, I heat embossed with black. This helps to contain the colour, really useful if you are new to this technique and worry about running over the lines with colour.

The stamps used for this is from Floral Fantasy, including the sentiment. I took it from part of one of the sayings. 

You need about four colours,  in varying amount of strengths, but apply roughly, only considering slightly the areas of shadow as a whole. But don't get bogged down with detail.

Don't be afraid to go 'sketchy' with the paint brush to create shade variation, like the leaves here.

And I just love enamel dots on projects like these, they add a sense of fun!

Have a lovely day,

Georgie

xx

April Showers Bring May Flowers

Hello Everyone and Welcome! Ksenija is here today and I am sharing a project featuring the Floral Fantasy stamp set from the latest IndigoBlu release.

Today's post demonstrates a one-layer card made with masking and ink blending techniques.

I started with stamping lilacs in Archival black ink down to a card base and then stamping the same image down to masking paper and fussy cutting it out. Using masking tape I masked off the edges of the card keeping a rectangular opening. Following this step I covered the previously stamped lilacs image with a mask.

Moving from the lower part of the opening to the upper I blended in various Distress inks. Then I removed all the masks and stamped down the sentiment in black dye ink.

I love the detailed image of the lilacs in this set and a little butterfly sitting on the top of the bunch. I felt that it did not need any additional embellishment, so gorgeous this image was.

Thanks so much for stopping by!

IndigoBlu Supplies used:
Floral Fantasy Stamp Set

IndigoBlu 5th Birthday Celebrations and Open Day

IndigoBlu will celebrate it's 5th birthday in May and we are planning a party!

On Monday 30th May you are all invited to our HQ at Ebor Court in Retford between 10am and 4pm.

In the onsite shop there will be 20% discounts, special offers and even a free gift to the first 50 people through the door.

There will be demonstrations throughout the day from our designers Kay Halliwell-sutton, Elizabeth Robinson and Jenny Marples.

And of course no party is complete without tea and cake!

Make a date in your diaries and we'll see you there.

Jewellery Box

Hello, it's Solange Marques here. Today I'll share with you another project with the amazing IndigoBlu products!

This time I made a jewellery box:

First of all, I covered  IndigoBlu Square wooden jewellery box using IndigoBlu GeeSso Good!White. Then I painted the outside of the box using IndigoBlu English Cottage Artist's Acrylic Paint Metallic Copper 

The next step was apply Kroma Crackle  on the sides of the box:

On the top of the box I glued some chipboards and I applied IndigoBlu Mega flakes Copper Kettle.
After I applied  a little of IndigoBlu GeesSo Good! White on some places of the gears chipboards.

To finish it I applied IndigoBlu Slap It on Matte

I hope you enjoyed it !

Happy Creating!

Inspiration from Solange Marques, Ksenija Rizova and Georgie Connelly

Today we are excited to share some fabulous inspiration from four of our International Design Team. Follow the links to their blogs to find out more about how their projects came together;

Solange Marques

Ksenija Rizova

Georgie Connelly

Thank you ladies for all your beautiful creations. We can't wait to see more!

April Challenge - Spring is in the Air

Hi everyone,

The Indigoblu challenge is here again, this month our theme is 'Spring is in the Air'.  We'd like to see anything Spring like, colours, stamps, paints etc, as long as you use Indigoblu stamps in your work.

We also have on offer a fabulous prize of Indigoblu stamps of your choice as follows:

As always, you have 3 options to choose from:

1:   2 Large stamp plates (A5)

or
2:   4 Small stamp plates (A6)

or

3:   1 Large and 2 small plates

There’s also the Winner’s Badge, and one for the Top 3, to display proudly on your blog, and the WINNER of the challenge will also be invited to do a GUEST SPOT on a future Challenge Launch post. That’s right, your work will be on the Challenge Blog alongside the Design Team!

Also the Top Three each month (chosen by our lovely DT) will all be invited to do an inspiration piece to be included on the new reminder post that now goes live mid challenge. So, if you’d like a chance to be featured on the IndigoBlu Challenge Blog get those stamps out and get creating!

You’ll find all the information on how to enter the challenge,  the rules (don’t worry, there’s not that many) and get to meet the Design Team in the tabs on the sidebar.

Our random winner of the March challenge, 'Yellow, pink & green', is:    

Congratulations Jannet, we will be in touch shortly to arrange your prize.  Our Top 3, who get a Guest Designer spot, as picked by the DT are:

1.  Mac Nature
2.  Sue Ralph
3.  IsleofCrafty

Congratulations all, we will be in touch shortly.

Our winner from last month, Mo, has joined us as Guest Designer this month and created this beautiful piece for us:

Mo had this to say:
I was very excited to have been asked by Nikki over at Indigoblu to complete a Guest design piece as inspiration for their new challenge theme "Spring is in the Air".  As a child my brother and I took part in the annual May Queen festival and I remember we always had our photo taken in front of the Lilac tree in the garden as it was in full bloom in May. For me this theme was great as this gave me a chance to play with yet more new goodies in my collection the Floral Fantasy stamp and 12 x 12 papers, both of which include a lovely lilac branch in the design. For more details please visit my blog http://almocraft.blogspot.co.uk/.

Wow! What a gorgeous piece by Mo, and here are our inspirational DT for you:

Giovanna

Rachel

Maxine

Lydia

Claire

Kay

Nikki K

Cheremane

Emmy

Wenda

Julie

A huge thank you to our amazing team, and the lovely Mo for her Guest DT piece, I'm sure you will agree they are all fantastic!

You can join in our challenge HERE, we'd love to see what you create. The entries we see every month are truly inspirational.

Best Wishes,

The Indigoblu Challenge DT

& Guest Designer Mo.

An InLinkz Link-up

Inspiration from Jenny Marples, Candy Rosenberg, Beck Beattie and Kay Molyneux

Today we are excited to share some fabulous inspiration from four of our International Design Team. Follow the links to their blogs to find out more about how their projects came together;

Jenny Marples

Candy Rosenberg

Beck Beattie

Kay Molyneux

Thank you ladies for all your beautiful creations. We can't wait to see more!

Inspiration from Marie Johansson, Elizabeth Robinson and Monika Januszewska

Today we are excited to share some fabulous inspiration from four of our International Design Team. Follow the links to their blogs to find out more about how their projects came together;

Marie Johansson

Elizabeth Robinson

Monika Januszewska

Thank you ladies for all your beautiful creations. We can't wait to see more!

Paint Effect Lantern

Hello and welcome, it's Kay here. Today I would like to share a paint and Mega Flakes experiment; I used it to upgrade a cheap lantern to look like weathered metal, replacing the glass with handmade paper treated with Diamond Resin as it gives a lovely translucent effect.

One of the great advantages of Mega Flakes is the large size of the flakes - hence their name! - but even Mega Flakes do break down eventually and become unusable (until now!) This is what I used on the lantern along with the fabulous new Metallic Paints. 

The glass panels, base and handle were removed. A piece of Phat Foam was loaded with FlitterGlu and applied all over the lantern body, base and handle. The broken down Stainless Steel Mega Flake was used to cover FlitterGlu and buffed up with a Scoochy, at this point it didn't seem to matter if the flakes are a little lumpy as it added to the effect. A little Raven Black Paint was dabbed over the flake using a sponge, when dry a little Kingfisher Blue was then applied similarly and when that was dry Pheasant Bronze was dabbed over both with a sponge. This process was repeated until I was happy with the result, a final light sponging with Snow White was then applied to highlight.

The replacement glass panels were cut to the same size from handmade mulberry paper, a butterfly from the Floral Fantasy stamp set was inked with StazOn and stamped 4 times without re-inking on each panel. The paper panels were placed on a craft mat, 10ml of each Diamond Resin part was made up to the instructions on the packaging and sponged over all 4 panels and left for 8 hours. I found that the panels needed an extra coating of Diamond Resin, I applied this and left them to cure for 3 days.

I put the lantern back together and was very happy with the result, hope you also like the effect and will be making you own experiments soon!

Until next time, happy creating,  Kay M x

IndigoBlu Red Rubber stamps in two ways with Beck BT

Hi Everyone, it's Beck Beattie here today to share with you a scrapbook page using some of the fun new IndigoBlu red rubber stamps! I adore all the designs so much and love the versatility of them!

For my page I wanted to use them in two different ways, one as a subtle background effect and the other as a strong design element.

Products Used:

IndigoBlu Red Rubber Nature I A5 stamp set

IndigoBlu Red Rubber Word Blocks #1 A5 stamp set

Gee Sso Good Gesso black

The process:

• I created a watercolour background for my page first.  

• I then stamped the 'LOVE' panel as part of my page design with permanent black ink.  I did some continuous stamping to create a strip of stamping in the design.

• Next I took the clouds from the Nature 1 set and using a light blue ink stamped them into the background to add some added interest to the page

• After I added my paper and embellishments I finished the page with a little watered down Gee Soo Good Gesso in Black used to add splatter to the page.  

All the above elements work well to support and accent the most important part of the page - the photo!  

I hope you enjoyed my share today and I've inspired you to do some home decorating of your own.

Happy Creating!

xxxBeck BT