"Meeresschätze" / "Treasures from the Sea"

I have been storing some driftwood for quite a long time now and after the oceanic stamp set from Artemio had arrived a few days ago an idea for a project to finally use them started to take shape in my mind.

This is the result, which I am going to enter to the challenges from Catered Crop "No Stress to Distress"-Challenge, the StampotiqueDesigners Color challenge and  Simon Says Stamp and Show 's Challenge "Inspired by Summer Distress" as the new Distress ink "Salty Ocean" turns out to be my new favourite...

 

It's a box, were I can store the driftwood which I covered with stamped tissue paper. And because one of the wood pieces looked like a handle, I made it a handle by screwing it onto the lid of the box. But first I gave this screw an aged look by dyeing it with AAI "rust". 

 Here is a picture of the most important materials used in this project: 

For a start I distressed the white washed driftwood pieces with Distress inks "salty ocean", "walnut stain" and "antique linen". 

 Letting these dry, I stamped the oceanic images from the really coooool Artemio stamp set with black archival ink onto a single layer of tissue paper and let these dry too.                                                                                                            

I crumpled up two sheets of ordinary white copy paper, inked the crumpled edges with "salty ocean" Distress ink and sprayed the sheets with water from the Mini Mister afterwards to let the colour bleed out a little. I also added some dashes of Glimmer Mist "Moonlight" and Maya Mist "Espresso brown", to create a beach-sandy impression. 

While letting this paper dry, I tore the stamped images from the tissue paper sheet and glued them onto the wood pieces using Art Podge. After finishing that, I had a lovely collection of "treasures" for my box:

In the meantime my self-coloured paper had dried and I cut the stripes with which to cover the outside of the oval box and lid, giving it one additional centimetre width to glue around the edges to the inside. For the upside of the lid I glued the lid directly onto the selfmade paper, cutting around the edges afterwards. Then I inked all of the edges using Distress ink "walnut stain". On the outside of the lid I stamped a "word border" saying "Ocean" in various languages with a darker blue colour.

On the outside of the bottom section I stamped a fish (using "salty ocean" again), "swimming" around the box and it's treasures inside. At last I made a tiny tag, saying "Treasures from the Sea" and fixed it with rough cord onto the handle of the lid and glued two more wood pieces to the right and the left of the center wood piece. 

As the inside of the box was already pale lilac, I sprayed some Glimmer Mist and Espresso brown to the inside, to give it some texture. Done!

Here are some close-ups which I hope you will enjoy:

Visit from a friend

Today a dear friend of mine was visiting with me after she had seen my ATC storage some weeks ago and had immediately been red-hot. She had asked me to help her on a project for her school materials she needed (as a teacher in chemistry) and wanted to look unique. So we had decided to do a small A5 folder for a start.

Most difficult part was the decision which stamps to use and which not.... soon she recognized that A5 was way too small to provide sufficient space for all the designs she found digging into my treasure boxes and wanted to use. "Sh**, there's another gorgeous one!" became the quote of the day. *gg
It was nearly the same with the design papers... 

In the meantime I covered the folder with dark brown kraft paper on the outside and for the insides she had chosen thin vellum, which I cut to size and inked around the edges and even the whole sheets, to sprinkle them with water to get the stained and worn effect she had so fallen in love with.

After glueing the papers onto out- and insides, the folder looked quite nice already. The four grey spots at the inside of the spine still have to be covered with brown permanent marker, (which I did not own but she has at home), to get a proper frame without interruption.

Of course I let my friend do all the punching and stamping and I have to admit: for her first time ever she did extraordinarily well! And it was a pleasure watching (and hearing) her rejoicing in it.

That's the result, which she will wrap in adhesive foil to protect the attached tags and pictures from being torn during transportation in her school bag:

And a look at the back:

And one closer look at the cleanup efforts after the whole event:

"Sea Life" - holiday feelings

First thing to do after I had arrived home from our holidays was to order a stamp set (at least one!) and some new colours ;)
There were a few on my personal wish list, but I found something new to my eyes: the lovely sea life stamp set from Artemio!

So of course I had to try it out at once!

This is the result:

Having found some weathered wood during our lovely holiday stay near the forests, the mountains and the lakeside, I felt I had to use it for a maritime themed project. The new "walnut stain" ink pad had to be broken in too! And of course the Maya Mist "Espresso Brown" I had decided to give a try.

For embellishments I chose to do three pendants fixed with rough cord - one was to be the small wood piece with the hole, and the others two stamped shells from the stamp set. I glued the cord between two paper layers of same size and shape. But first I stamped the backs of the shell size scraps with my favourite Tim Holtz script stamp, in the occasion they would turn over.

The edges of the tag were distressed with the blade edge of my carpet knife and inked with dark blue. As a finish I sprayed with Glimmer Mist "Moonlight" and Maya Mist "Espresso Brown".



















Hope you like my trip to the seaside! Hugs, die amelie xx

I entered this project to Craft a Scene's actual challenge "The great Outdoors" and to The Artistic Stampers Challenge "Holidays".

"Bad Moon Rising"

According to the challenge from Haunted Design House, "Bad Moon Rising", I made this card, which I would like to enter.
I also enter this project to the challenge at Inspiration Avenue
"Doorways and Windows".

The "bad moon rising" topic immediately evoked a picture in my imagination, even the story of an unsuccessful poor writer, staying in a quite dangerous neighbourhood due to his latest mission for the newspaper he is working for... strange things have occured during the last days and his mind is filled with fear and worry. He yet cannot grab exactly what has been going on here lately, but he is sure and can feel it down to his bones: it is something profoundly evil....

I wanted to show his writing desk with his typewriter on, being lit by the light of a "bad moon rising". Some red stains (could this be blood?!!) on the pale white of the table tell a story of horror and crime. As I am a huge fan of Crime Noir Comic Art, I wanted to make it look a little like that genre. So I needed pure white on a black surface. White stamping, painting or embossing would not deliver the results I had in mind, so I decided to cut out the shapes of white and black cardstock.

But first I created the "sight" through the window, which was going to be the inside of the card and be seen through a cut out window on the front. I lightly sprayed some white card with Glimmer Mist "Moonlight" (how suitable *gg), then stamped the image of a skull with embossing ink from Ranger and embossed with clear embossing powder. Only now I started to ink a pale blue-greenish moon, using a circle mask I cut from card, using both, the circle and the "surrounding" as masks - one for the moon and the other for the dark sky, which I inked with a rougher kitchen sponge to get some texture with distress inks "pumice stone" , "broken china" and darker blue stamping colour. I finished the background with a layer of black stamping ink "clouds". Then I stamped the house from my beloved Martha Stewart Halloween stamp set, in "Graphite Black" archival ink from Tsunekiko. It should be a spooky house on a dangerous spooky cliff, but I had no stamp for this, so I cut out a cliff-shape from a foam rubber mat and used that for a stamp, which worked out better than I had expected. Some additional bat silhouettes in front of the bad moon - done!


On the front cover I did some embossing with clear embossing powder, which I love as a textureal effect especially on black or dark grey card! The white areas had to be planned very thoroughly to match the window opening and the position of the bad moon. I stamped the tipewriter onto white card and after having decided about it's exact position, I marked the lines of the shadows with pencil and ruler, to match the moon's position and the lit areas on the window cross. The tipewriter and "desk" was glued onto the black card in one piece. At last I added a black velvet self-adhesive ribbon on the inside of the card, because the back of the front looked quite boring and missed some texture, but not too much not to detract from the main scene on the right page.Voila!

Hope, you have enjoyed your visit!!!

Hugs, die amelie!

"The Journey" - resist technique tag

Inspired by the challenge from FrillyandFunkie, "Can you resist?", I did this tag, finally using some of the Tim Holtz travel set stamps I have been storing for quite some time now...

As I love the resist techniques, because they beautifully "save" the background done before working over it as many times as you like, I just had to submit to this challenge and I am going to enter this tag to it. I also enter this tag to the challenge at "Try it on Tuesday", where "Travel" is called for.

I first inked the tag, cut from a single tone soft creamy coloured paper, with distress inks "spiced marmalade", "rusty hinge", "vintage photo" and "pumice stone" using the blending tool. Afterwards I sprinkled the surface with water to get the stainy look I love so much. When this had dried, I stamped the two hotel signs and the airplane with embossing ink and embossed the images with clear super fine embossing powder from Ranger.

After that step I added some more distress inks - especially to the areas, where I had stamped the images - to highten the contrast. I also added some texture by stamping the whole tag with maps and text. The "enjoy the journey"-quote is stamped onto a brown paperbag scrap, torn out and afterwards glued onto the tag. Finally I added the picture of the old airplane at the left top corner and the balloon, softly fading in the background of the airplane done in resist technique. The lace ribbon gives the whole thing some ground to stand on as I see it. Simple natural cord for the top - walah!

Here are some more close-ups!

Hope you enjoyed stopping by! Hugs, die amelie xx

"Kunstwerk" / "Piece of Art"

Hah, hah! I almost managed to do three weeks without anything crafty.... almost!

As our car was - as usual-  packed nearly up to it's roof when leaving for our three-weeks holiday to do some hiking, swiming, kajaking and relaxing at the lovely Austrian Attersee, I did not take any crafting materials with me (there simply wasn't any space left and I couldn't have decided what to take with me anyway ...or what to leave behind*gg). I only packed some felt tip pens, crayons and a white paperstash for my son, some scissors, tiny ruler, glue and the usual writing equipment as ballpen and pencil.

Our three weeks are nearly up (on Sunday exactly), but today I couldn't wait any longer and just had to do something crafty! An ATC seemed to be the only option, regarding my equipment.... or maybe it would be just some drawing.

Luckily my sister left me one of these (horrible) gossip glossy magazines, where I found an article about Jorge Gonzales, the trainee of Germany's Next Top Models. As I consider him to be the most beautiful person in the whole show (there are models there too, I was told...), I decided to draw a small portrait after a photograph in the magazine, using my favourite black ballpen from Pilot. As I am quite easily horrified by white paper, when it comes to more than some sketching, I used a brown paper page torn out from a cheap travel diary I bought at the beginning of our holiday (not to write in, but to use the pages *lol).

So here is the improvised equipment:

Having finished the small portrait, I came to the point where I recognized, I did not know what background I could do... no stamps, no inks, no gesso or design papers.... phhhhh! Then I remembered the coffee filters I bought for the holiday apartment.

Please, have a closer look at my favourite Pilot ballpoint and the inredibly cool coffee filters! *lol

First I scribbled some of the article's text onto the unbleached coffee filter paper (again using the black ballpen), to get some texture. I traced the edges with a brown felt tip pen, but I wasn't quite content with the outcome, as it looked quite boring. *hmpf

Something was missing and the whole thing looked too "clean". Then I remembered the filter paper experiments from school, where you drew some lines or spots on the filter paper with black felt tip pens and soaked that with water. The capillarity of the paper would divide the various colour-particles by their weight. The lighter ones would spread the farthest and one could see that some "black" colours were a cheap mixture of blues, greens, reds and many more.... (I hope, I remember that physical stuff right!). And that meant that they were not archival.

So I soaked the edges of the ATC with a wet kitchen sponge and voila!
The whole thing (at last!) began to look something in the direction of "cool". Encouraged by that small but crucial success I cut out Jorge's face and glued it onto the scribbled and "physically inked" filter paper, which I had cut to ATC format in the meantime.

I tore some scraps from the article about Jorge to add some more texture for variation.
I wanted to collage them onto the background, but there was still something missing. The contrast of the magazine paper pieces and the background was not intense enough. So I decided to colour the spaces where I wanted to glue the text-scraps onto with black and brown felt tip pen colour, leaving irregularly outlined traces of the pens' tips to build a kind of grungy frame around the scraps. But again - after glueing the scraps to their positions - that looked too hard-lined and did not go together well with the background and the sketch as smoothly as I had hoped.

Then I worked up the courage to soak the whole thing again with water, as I knew, the ballpen drewn portrait would stay intact, while the felt tip pen areas would bleed out. At least I hoped, that would be what would happen....

And it did! I am so happy with the outcome (mainly because it is my first ATC without any stamps or inks used and still I managed to get a somehow grungy look).

Besides: a beautiful man IS a piece of art, isn't he? :)

A last quick try before leaving for my holls

It has been some weeks now that altered book pages keep coming across my mind quite often.... but I never dared to give it a try.

But today - as we are leaving for three weeks tomorrow morning - I felt that I just HAD TO try, otherwise this would torment me for the next three weeks (being without my working desk and equipment), not knowing if I would have succeeded at altering a book or not...

I stumbled upon this old book yesterday in an antiques shop and it costed just two Euros. It has a greyish rough linen hardcover and has gothic print as it dates from 1913.

Here is the outcome of my first try:

(I am sorry that the photograph is of rather modest quality, but I had packed my camera already and my husband "saved" me by using the camera of his mobile phone)

I will display some close-ups when I have returned from my holidays in september! Hope to see you then!!! Wishes! die amelie xx

Proudly displaying...

...my latest "badge" at the right sidebar - "DragonsDreamBoat 3"!
So proud and happy I was chosen among the Top 3 with my "Considering Steampunk" tag I made in July (see here). Thank you, DragonsDream DT, for choosing this tag, which is also very special to me!

die amelie x x

Journaling ATC "treasured moments"

Noch rasch zwischen den Reisevorbereitungen ein wenig Zeit für eine ATC im Art Journaling Stil.

Inspiriert hat mich das "Time"-Challengethema auf dem "Vienna Impressions Inspirations" - Challenge-blog , wo ich das kleine Projekt noch einreichen werde.

*****

Found a little time between holiday preparations to create this ATC in art-journaling style.