Love Letters

February is synonymous with Love, so I thought I would begin the month by spelling it out! 

I already had the “L”, “V", and “E”, wooden letters in my stash, but I didn’t have an “O” ! Luckily I was able to find a papier-mâché “O” it was a little larger than the other letters, but I crossed my fingers that it would work out ok.  

I painted the “L” and “V” with Grandmas Teacup paint, and outlined them using Poseidon Blue Luscious  which I had premixed with a little water.

I took some time deciding which stamps to use and I eventually decided that a nature theme would be nice using butterflies, flowers, birds etc. I stamped using a Versamarker ink pad and heat embossed the images in white.

Anemone and Daisy

Wild Poppy

I also embossed some butterflies onto card, and coloured them with the Indigoblu paints before fussy cutting them. I folded two of them in half, and stuck the folded sides together using sticky pads and adhered them onto the letters to look as if that had just landed onto them. I also laid one butterfly flat onto the "O" and "V" letters using pva glue.

I painted the “O ”and “E“ with Iced Gem paint, and outlined them using Pink Luscious which I had mixed with a little water.

I repeated the stamping and embossing as above, but also added the darling robin to the “O”, and fussy cut lots of the little flowers from the Wild Poppy set to add to the "E".

Mindfulness

Wishing you a lovely Valentines Day, at least us crafters can always create our own flowers to give ourselves on the day !

Soul Mate

Hello and a Happy New Year from Elizabeth. My first project for the year is using one of Kay's new Collectors Edition stamps, the Seahorse, which she designed especially for me.

Now sadly I managed to loose several photograph's as I swapped over onto my new laptop, so I do apologise.

Firstly I die cut a tag and covered it in the map paper and gave it a coat of White GeeSsoGood  before adding Glass Bead Gel and Mica Flakes, for texture.

I added a few large glass beads for more dimension. I had a scrap piece of inked card left over from making Christmas cards, which was just the right size and colour for stamping two of the Seahorses onto. After cutting them out I adhered them to the tag, so they were entwined.

I diluted some Verdigris and also Crushed Velvet Luscious and added the two colours all around the Glass Bead Gel, blending the edges so not to have any lines.

Finally I added sequins, some words from the Chit Chat Seasonal book with a frame drawn around, and a few black dots to tie the colours together.

Happy Crafting.
Elizabeth x

Christmas Moon Baubles

My Christmas creations are now in full swing, how are yours going? 

I picked up some inexpensive chipboard baubles at Ally Pally in September, and I thought it was about time I used them!

I prepared the chipboard baubles with a coat of white gesso which provides a good surface for the paints. To make a moon I cut a circle out of a masking sheet, and positioned it onto the bauble. I used diluted stroke of midnight and iced gem paints, and also some raspberry luscious. I swept them over the bauble. When dry I peeled back my  mask to reveal my Christmas moon. 

I used versamarker to stamp  the Stag Cliffhanger and heat embossed him in black.

I painted in some more details, and then flicked white paint over the scene to create a snowfall.

To add a silver top to the bauble, I first masked the top by wrapping around some masking tape , and swept on some flitterglu followed by some silver flakes from the winter dawn  megaflakes.

After removing the tape I used the all important scoochy foam to remove the excess and to polish it a little.

I hung my Christmas Moon Baubles up, but they could also go onto the front of a card or be used  as a gift tag for someone very special.

I hope you are having fun creating your Christmas/Winter decorations and cards with Indigoblu.

Stag Cliffhanger

Festive Ornaments

Hello,   Kay M here today with an experiment with the acrylic pours  Kay launched on Hochanda at the weekend.  You can still watch all her shows on Rewind at the Hochanda web site.   I had so much fun making samples for the shows and learnt a lot  in the process.   The great thing about acrylic pouring you never know how it's going to turn out!  Kay's  Go-Flow and Cell-u-Like formula's take the guesswork out of measuring all the elements and work with all  the IndigoBlu paints.       

Having done a few projects on flat surfaces I thought I'll have a go on some shapes, a few paper mache  ornaments from my stash.   Sue, from the  TV design team did a couple of lovely egg shaped ones as samples for Kay's shows.  

They were painted with Gee-Sso-Good white and set up over a foil tray.  

The  paints, the new Red Hot Chilli, Purple Rain, and Teal for Two  as well as Cinderella, Black Gee-Sso-Good and Gold Luscious pigment too  were mixed in shot glasses with out adding any water.  A few drops of Cell-u-like were added to three of the paints.   I had already made up white following the instructions that come to the Go-Flow and Cell-u-Like.

Each ornament was thickly painted with the white mixture then the colours were added to the top of each ornament one on top of another and letting them drop though each other and mingle. 

  They were left to dry.    They were then given two coats of Glossy Slap-It-On mixed with a pinch of Unicorn Sparkles. 

And when dry beads and tassel's were added.  It was interesting to see how each one was different when the same paint colours were used.

There was still a fair amount of paint left so I did a dirty pour on to an A5 canvas painted with black Gee-Sso-Good using all the remaining paints, added a little water to each of them to get a good pour, and the white base.

Check in to the shared blog on the 19th November to see how it turned out!  

Until then, take care Kay M x

Christmas is coming....

Morning All,

Carolyn here with you today. I've been creative as long as I can remember and my interest in card making began over 10 years ago. I attended a local craft workshop weekly and it snowballed from there. Being involved with Indigoblu has broadened my horizons and I also enjoy mixed media too.

I made this card whilst creating my samples for Kay's Christmas ODS recently.

Firstly I created the background with Blue Luscious and added a few splatters.

I stamped the sentiment from the Christmas Wreath stamp set in dark blue.

The snowflakes were stamped with the blue Luscious onto shrink plastic and fussy cut. These were then blasted with the heat gun to shrink them.

The pale blue matt layer was a piece of white card that I'd painted with the blue Luscious.

 To finish the card this was then mounted onto a dark blue card blank

Thank you for joining me today

Carolyn

xx

Small but Beautiful

Hello,   Kay M here and I'm sharing a card I've made with the fabulous new Christmas Wreath stamp set.   The wreath is a great size and looks wonderful when filling a square card but I wanted to see it what it would look like on shrink film.  I wasn't disappointed - loved it and decided to use it as a main image for a card.

The wreath was stamped with a grey StazOn ink onto Matte Shrink Film from GrafixArt and coloured in with colouring pencils, being careful not to add too much colour as it intensifies as it shrinks.   I used a heat tool to shrink but an oven could also be used- it's less scary!   The sentiment was stamped, cut out and shrunk too.

The background was stamped using the snowflakes from theChristmas Wreath set  with Snow White Metallic paint, when dry, Festive Berries Distress ink was sponged over.  The shrunk wreath was backed with a sheet of  Dura-Lar Matte, from GrafixArt, stamped using one of my favourite Christmas stamps- Snowflake Lace, with FlitterGlu and covered with Porcelain Luscious Powders.  I attached this to the background with a little spray adhesive.  Both these stamps look wonderful together.  

To finish the card the wreath and sentiment attached with silicon glue.    

This card could be also be a winter birthday card with a change of sentiment.

Hope you have enjoyed this project.

Take care,  Kay M x

Dictionary Butterfly

It is Cec here and today I am bringing you a clean and simple card that I am calling Dictionary Butterfly.

I started by scanning the page in a dictionary that had the definition for Butterfly on it - look closely and you can see it down on the bottom right.  I inserted the image into a new document in Word  and scaled it to the size I wanted to cut it for my background (Click on the image and then on Format to get the size so you can change if desired).  Next I added the Butterfly text at the top making sure that my image was centred on the page first.  This is simple to do by making sure that the image is behind text (Right Click on Image after you insert it then click Wrap Text then click Behind Text).

The next step was to stamp one half of the Big Butterfly with Versamark and then emboss it with Ebony embossing powder.

I painted the butterfly using some IndigoBlu Metallic paints - Kingfisher Blue, Aladdin and Sleeping Beauty.  Then I took a fluffy brush and went over the whole butterfly with Silver Luscious powder.  This not only added wonderful shimmer to the butterfly but served to make the colours look a little more blended.

I adhered the panel to my card blank and then created a computer generated sentiment that I mounted on some purple card stock and added to the card with dimensional foam strips.

There you have my easy, peasy card.  I hope this inspires you to create with some of the wonderful metallic paints from IndigoBlu.

VideoTutorial: Altered Weekly Planner Cover

Hello to everyone, Giovanna here, and today my story and my artwork is all about friendship and cats.
When I moved to Milan, last year, I met a wonderful person, that later she became a true friend, that opened her house to me for a couple of weeks. She has also two wonderful furry friends, a large ginger cat and a sweet mackerel cat. At the beginning of 2017 I was again struggling with personal issues, and she came to rescue me, again. Now that I leaving Milan to come back home, I made a little gift for her, featuring, obviously, cats. Ok, we are a couple of crazy cat ladies, no way.
She daily use a weekly planner on her desk with a plastic cover, so I redo it a little bit. Hope she likes it!

Here's the video tutorial, you can apply this technique to any no-porous surface, like plastic or metal or glass.

Let me introduce you those little fellows, Leo and Pippa (Birba for friends):

And yes, he is so darn big!

Materials I used: