Me and my shadow

Hello ladies! It's Tracie here with you again.

Have you ever rediscovered a product that you'd forgotten about? That happened to me recently with the wonderful Hero Arts shadow inks.

Many moons ago in my card-making days I used to use them a lot, then they just seemed to disappear from the market, or maybe I wasn't shopping in the right places!!

Well the good news is, the shop now has a fantastic range of colours available and my love of them has been reawakened!

So, what, I hear you ask, is so special about shadow inks?
Well I'm glad you asked!!
I just love the subtlety of them, they are so much softer than normal ink pads and so you can create beautiful backgrounds that don't overpower the rest of your layout and of course, as suggested by their name, they are great for creating shadows and adding depth!

My first layout showcases a couple of photos of me and my other half with the flowers my son and daughter in law bought us as a 'Thank you' for all our help with their wedding last year.

I punched a few circles out of the Amy Tan pal paper from the plus one range and used the negative as a mask to ink through to create a shadow

My second layout is my stepson with my gorgeous grandson.

Again I used the plus one range from American crafts. I used a template and of course my shadow ink to mark out a circle of dots ready to position my gems, to represent the roller coaster in the photo.

and finally a layout about the kittens that I found myself fostering last year!

this time I used the shadow ink to stamp a couple of cameras, although this particular stamp is no longer available in the shop there are a few really good alternatives here!

So, if you haven't tried them already, I hope I have given you some incentive to give shadow inks a go?!
But, if you get as addicted to them as I am, I refuse to take any responsibility!
'See' you soon

A Twinkling Halloween

If you're itching to get your Christmas lights out (I know its waaayyyy too early!), I've found the perfect project to give you the excuse.  Halloween Lanterns!

Its a really straight forward, but effective project, all you need are a stack of clear plastic cups (from the party-ware section in supermarkets), your scrapbooking papers, your usual embellishments and your creativity.  

Firstly, cut with your craft knife, a cross in the bottom of each cup, this is where you will poke the lights through - they will hold.

This is the trickiest part of the project, gradually roll the cup along a piece of paper tracing the movement with a pencil at the top or bottom end of the cup, then carefully roll back again tracing with a pencil at the opposite end.  Once you have a long enough piece, join the sides and cut out.  This will be your template to use to cut out the pieces for each cup, from your chosen paper.  I've used Basic Grey's Persimmon range.

After covering each cup, you can then decorate and embellish as you wish, its as simple as that.  I have inked the edges of each piece of paper, used a ribbler on some.  Covered the edges with trims and borders.

And then hang!

Thanks for looking and keep checking back, the girls have some fab projects coming up.

More ideas for masks...

When I read that Sarah and Lianne were on their way to CHA in the summer, I hoped (and requested!) that they would order some of the Crafter's Workshop templates for the shop.  My wish came true and as soon as they hit the store, I popped some in my basket for this month's blog work.

I love how you can create your own backgrounds with masks by just using some mist or ink, but I also wanted to explore the effects created by using different media and also going beyond backgrounds and finding other ways to incorporate the patterns into my pages.

The three masks that I worked with were:

Tile Texture

Chickenwire

Chickenwire Reversed

Layout 1: Say Cheese

I firstly took the chickenwire template and very lightly inked, with a black distress ink, through the template onto my background paper.  I did have a bit of a practise first on a scrap though, to work out how much pressure and ink to apply to create such a subtle effect.

Using the same template, I decided to try embossing a die cut shape to make my own embellishment.  So with an asterisk shape which I cut from kraft card, I stamped with a watermark ink and sprinkled with aqua Zing! embossing powder (details of all products can be found at the end of this post). 

This created a pattern on the shape which coordinated perfectly with the Echo Park papers that I had picked out for the layout.

The completed layout which documents how difficult it is to get the 'perfect' photo of my three children as they get older:

Layout 2: Feed the Chickens

The chickenwire templates also inspired me to make an embellishment.  Using the Reversed Chickenwire template, I painted through the template with some brown acrylic paint onto a piece of kraft cardstock.  With the paint, I  could make some areas darker and thicker than others and add some texture/lines with the brush as I applied it.  Using my die cutting machine, I designed a tag shape with a chicken shape placed in the centre of it.  I then laid the tag with the negative chicken-shape over the painted card, moving it around until I was happy with the pattern showing through.  If you look closely you will see that I tried to find a join in the lines to fit where the eye should be.

My children love to feed the chickens at a farm that we often stay at in Wales and this tag made the perfect embellishment for my layout all about how much they began by just feeding the chickens but on our most recent visit, actually went right into their house to find freshly laid eggs for breakfast.

Layout 3: The Big Ones

Whilst making my chicken tag, I also cut out some people tags too.  I experimented with using a watermark ink through the Tile Texture template both on top of the people shapes and also onto some scrap kraft card.

I heat embossed after covering with a layer of pale blue and pale pink embossing powder.

Whilst the embossing powder was still hot and a liquid, I sprinkled some aqua onto the blue and some dark pink on to the pale pink before heating again to set both colours.  This created a mottled effect as shown below.

I've kept the embossed people for another project, but for my last layout, I used the pattern on the kraft card to back the cut out people-banner tag shapes.

Not wanting to waste any of the embossed pattern that I had made, I also used a Martha Stewart pinked circle punch to make some small embellishments to keep for another time too.

 

The blue boy and pink tags feature as embellishments on this final page.  I repeated the banner shapes across the centre of the page with strips of the patterned paper.  I took this photo of Evie and Oliver a few weeks ago on Evie's birthday.  I love how happy they look together and made a page about how close they are and how much Oliver needs his big sister now that he has started 'big school'.  They're now collectively known at home as 'the big ones'.

I hope that I've given you some ideas for using masks/templates in some different ways on your layouts or other projects.  As ever, thank you for reading.

My products: