Venetian Carnival Mask - Thursday 30th January

Hello Friends,

Hoping you are well and getting lots of craft time this week! Thank you for visiting and commenting on my blog. Yesterday was a card with quite a bit of colour, I love colour and when Hels Sheridan set the  theme of 'orange' for this week's Sunday Stampers I was really pleased - Spiced Marmalade is one of my favourite distress inks and I got to use it in abundance! I love the browns, oranges etc, which is why autumn is also one of my favourite card making times of the year - and seasons.

Today however it's back to monotone and another Zentangle inspired card made as an example for the ladies at our class tonight, the second of our Zentangle workshops. I've been making a lot of examples over the past few weeks and I do confess that the ones where I've added colour are my favourite - but that's just a personal thing, I always feel the need for colour! For work I wear a black sweatshirt or polo shirt with our logo on it, so with it I wear black trousers..but I always have to at least add some colourful earrings!

For our class we are providing an assortment of dreamweaver stencils for the group to use. Stencils are brilliant to use as a base for Zentangle designs and there are several books available that show you how to achieve lovely results using them - I have several more cards to post over the next few weeks that use stencils.

However, you can of course draw your own designs (I'm working on one at the moment), use masks, rubber stamps -anything suitable - and for this 

card I drew around a Spellbinders Venetian Mask die for  the basic outline.     

 

Before starting my tangle design, I partitioned areas of the mask by drawing  'strings' between two areas. This gives you a guideline in which to draw each different pattern (or leave blank). The strings can be anything you like - swirls, zig-zags or just lines.

For the background to the easel I used the 'Venetian' M-Bossability and die cut the image using Labels 17 and the 'outside the box' method to allow the 'feathers' to hang over the side.

I  shaded some areas of the design with pencil and used some black ribbon through a ribbon buckle die to the side of the image and added some gems and black and white hat pins.

For the base I drew a tangle design around the edge and added a sentiment (stamp by Indigo Blu) as the stopper with a diamante brad.

Apologies for the close up photo above, I haven't added pink gems in an effort to add some colour - I was wearing a red sweatshirt when I took the photo and somehow got a bounce of light back on this one!

Off to work now for a morning of the one thing I really don't like about my job! Sitting in a meeting all morning, when all I am thinking about it what I could be making better use of my time doing back at the office (or even better in the craft room)!

I'll be back tomorrow with that Zentangle inspired card that has a bit of a twist to it!

Thanks so  much for stopping by and have a great day all!

I am entering this card in 

Country View  Crafts current challenge with the theme of

"Monochromatic"  

-http://countryviewchallenges.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/read-on-for-this-months-theme.html

Love and Hugs,

Carole X

Sunday Stampers Week 216 - Thursday 2nd August

'Maschera Carnevale d'Oro'


Good Morning Friends,


It's been a lovely few 'girly' days spent with my cousin visiting this week, she caught the train back to Swansea last night and I'm back to work today, for just one day this week, I have a workshop tonight  and Tom also has tomorrow off as it's his birthday this week, so to make up for lost crafting hours during the day and knowing there were at least 2 projects I had to complete, I was up very very late last night crafting away in my little room!

The theme for this week's Sunday Stampers is 'Gold' and I did say in my post on Hel's blog that this week's effort was going to be something I could make very quickly. I had an idea in my head to go Venetian again and wanted to use the new mask die I have from Spellbinders, so I made the teeniest canvas (3.5ins x 3ins)....so here is my  Golden Carnival Mask...doesn't that sound better in Italian? :)

I painted the canvas with gold acrylic paint and when dry I stamped around the edges and sides with a Venetian Mask stamp, by Debbi Moore using Antique Linen distress ink. Then I  took some white card, painted that with gold acrylic and when dry, sanded it to 'antique' it a  little. I then inked up the same mask stamp with Antique Linen again and stamped randomly down one side of the card, so that it just shows through the mask. To finish I tore the card to again give the antique look - I also inked the edges but it doesn't show at all in the photo!


The mask die is gorgeous, I had been wishing Spellbinders would bring out such a die for so long, so when they did it was 'Oh Wow!' for me!! I really am looking forward to using this die with microbeads, but don't have any in gold, so I used wet glue and dipped it in rich gold glitter. I don't often use lots of glitter, but somehow dipping this in a plastic kitchen container that I keep my gold glitter in, seemed the right thing to do when the plain white mask I sunk in there came out looking very opulent :)


To finish off I added some feathers, ribbons (disappointed that these were the only ones thin enough I could find) and a few red gems.


Thanks for stopping by!
Carole X


This is my contribution to Sunday Stampers week  - Gold

http://pinkleart.blogspot.co.uk