Bottle Caps - Squishy-Wishy

Backtracking - 20th June 2008

Bottlecaps - themed swap for UKATC this month, so I couldn't resist having a play and taking part, so I bought a bottle cap image sheet from www.digitalcollagesheets.com which of course fitted perfectly in my bottle caps, which I had squished with my Wizard aka Merlin.

All the backgrounds were done on canvas, being such a canvas freaky at the mo, what else would I use?! Kept them pretty plain and simple, only using one or two colours of acrylic paints, stamping one of my new-ish Paperartsy border stamps on the left hand side. Then I simply added a little bit of mulberry paper across the bottom, and created an embellishment using the bottle tops, images, a teeny pearl flower, diamond glaze, and some good old wire and beads!

Now, they needed a finishing touch. Something... I don't know what! I was going over to see my Freaky Deaky Friendie and after much conflab, she gave me 3 words from a sheet of doo-dads she had, in very cool colours and they matched perfectly. I have now added these to my list of must-haves!

Thank you Freaky Deaky Friendie :)

Gingham Galore

Backtracking - 19th June 2008

Here we go again - another all night crafting session! This time gingham, a themed swap on UKATC for June. After recovering from the fact that Mumsy had *thrown out some scraps of material including gingham*, and a trip to John Lewis to buy some more, I was finally able to get going on these ones. Yeah!

My backgrounds were created from my scraps box - I call it Scrapheap Challenge, but I doubt I am the first person to make a background from scraps! Maybe mine are slightly different in the fact that I randomly stamped a scissor image over the top, added a layer of tulle netting, and went sew-crazy with my mini sewing machine to create random stitching over the top.

I stamped and cut out an 4 images of a dressmaker's stand, 1 for each ATC, and proceeded to dress each in a different style skirt (created more by luck than judgement (!!!) by folding and pleating circles of gingham). Used ribbon to create a kind of gingham top (very low cut!) and finished the actual outfit with a pearl buckle threaded through gingham ribbon, and some teeny weeny flower sequins.

I used Merlin (my dear old Wizard) to die-cut flowers from gingham, adding one as a finish touch, along with a teeny weeny pearl for the centres, and a smattering of beads in one corner. And as is my current trend, chose one ATC to keep for me, and here it is:

Doing The Oriental

Backtracking - 16th-17th June

OK, I admit it, I am not a huge fan of Oriental, it has never appealed to me, but after doing a jiggy swap earlier this year, when I had two (*two* !!!) pieces to alter in the Oriental style, I found myself being drawn more towards Eastern images and colours and artefacts, so when a swap came up on UKATC for Oriental ATCs, I jumped right in!

First came backgrounds... and I spied with my little eye some bag ties that I have been hoarding for a while, and wondered... what would happen if I cut them down slightly, glued them onto an ATC and then stuck some faux washi paper over them? This is what happens!

Rather jolly like that effect, and with the direct to paper inking on the backing card, and on some chinese script paper that I glued at the very bottom, I was chuffed with the result. Oh, where did the spots come in?! Well, the paper was in my scraps box and the colours seemed to just match, so I went with it... bit unconventional for Oriental I must admit.

Had downloaded from http://www.digitalcollagesheets.com/ a bottle cap image sheet, so printed off a few to use the Oriental lady image, which I glued into a squished bottle cap (thank you Merlin - that is what I call my Wizard die-cutting machine by the way!)

Finishing touches? Wire and beads, a word, some german scrap and voila - I did the Oriental (and it wasn't painful at all!)