With Easter coming up fast, my mind has turned to the decorating and as the theme this month is Pastels I thought how cute it would be if I decorated some eggs with stamped flowers. Of course there were two problems to overcome, the first was the crazy curved surface and my eggs are plastic so no direct heat embossing allowed!!

The answer to both these problems was to stamp and emboss onto tissue paper.


I roughly cut out the flower border, it doesn't have to be so precise as the tissue becomes almost invisible later.


I glued the tissue paper on with gel medium.


I found it easier to smooth it down with my finger than a paintbrush.


I also covered another egg with gel medium and added Sparkles glitter.


Go wild and alter some eggs this Easter.

Jaine x

I had intended to create a very different blog post to the one I ended up with, but thanks to a bit of lateral thinking I came upon a happy surprise!


This is the foiled card I made first, very pretty in its own right. Stamped with a Pink and Main stamp called You Can Fly and foiled in Silver Foil. I could easily have left it there, but I looked at the little pile of discarded foils ( I do keep every scrap - like you do!) and the butterfly die and had one of those light bulb moments.


What if I took a piece of double sided sticky sheet, die cut the butterfly from it and applied the bits of foil randomly over the sticky surface?


As there were so many little bits in odd shapes, it created a crazy abstract pattern with the foils. I was liking it more and more.


I added another colour, simply pressing the foil down onto the sticky surface and pulling up. Just like a wax strip! Enough said!!


I kept on going, filling in the spaces until I could feel no more sticky. I was thrilled with the res…

I love playing with textures and creating cards with textured elements is very satisfiying. 
I had a piece of corrugated card on my craft table which was left over from another project and wondered how it would look if I embossed over the top of it. I lightly went over with a little gesso, almost dry brushing it on, to give it a slightly worn finish before cutting out the heart. I then tapped my Embossing pad over the top to catch the ridges and embossed in a lovely dark pinky/red shade of powder called Primary Pink Robin. 

I also embossed a larger heart in Metalline Red which I chose to use on my card front adding a die cut word from Pretty Pink Posh, embossed with the new Black Magic which is in the shops soon. I love the slightly grungy look the heart has especially with the gesso peeking out from underneath.

Why not have a go for yourself, it's great fun and brings out the texture superbly!

Jaine

It's October already and Autumn has well and truly kicked in. Here we still have sunshine but with the chilly nights and shorter days, the trees are showing their Autumn colours. I love this season for crafting as the colours are so rich and inspiration is everywhere.


For this project I cut some leaves on what I had to hand which just happened to be this Kraft cardstock. I wanted to work with Embossing Glitter but was unsure how well the glitter would hold up againsed the dark Kraft background but I was very pleasantly surprised.


I did find that some of the more translucent colours such as Sand Dunes, seen below, came out totally different on the Kraft than on plain white. You can see the contrast between the two is quite stark.


However, some of them came out better than I imagined. Hot Gossip on the right became a gorgeous, rich dark copper colour and Mermaid Tails on the left lost alot of the blue colour to leave only the gold flecks showing. 


 The results were so pretty, now …

I am a big fan of abstract art and use it alot in my journals and on cards. This card might take a little time to make but it's loads of fun and worth the effort.


I've a set of nesting circle dies and used this to cut different sizes with holes. If you don't have circles you could try with any other shapes like squares or hearts for example.


On a piece of watercolour paper I used my embossing pen to make marks covering it with Opaque bright white powder. I also used a stippling brush and an embossing pad to make some bigger patches.

 With the marks embossed I added patches of watercolour and when this was dry I went over with a fine liner adding marks and words.


I embossed the circles in different colours of powders which was a good opportunity to play with lots of different colours together. I double embossed the bigger ones to get a deeper colour. On a couple of the circles double embossing made the powder separate as it was heated a second time. I don't actuall…

It's that time again when school's out and you might be looking for a thank you card for a teacher, helper or child minder maybe. This card is incredibly easy and looks so stylish and chic with a little behemian touch.
I took just two large flower stamps and stamped right on the edge of a piece of card. I overlapped them slightly making the design look more like a whole.


I embossed with my embossing glitters and love the shine it gives.


I cut the thanks from card and covered that too with embossing glitter and added that to my card front.
To finish I mounted the card onto some mirror card and used some 3D pads to mount that onto the card blank. Just to give it a little more shine I added a few spots of glitter glue in a matching turquoise.
Jaine x

Oh my goodness this is my first blog post as a member of the WOW team and I have to say I'm absolutely thrilled to be here. It's very nerve-wracking to be delivering my first official post but at the same time I'm so very excited.
Let me introduce myself, I'm Jaine and I'm hoping to help inspire you with my own way of creating and my own style.
One thing I absolutely love in my work is texture. The inspiration for the background to this card  came when I was looking for a gift in a local flower shop and spotted a gorgeous embossed metal box with copper foiling over the embossing. The texture and shiny copper was gorgeous. It was quite distressed and not totally perfect which I also found beautiful. I held the image in my mind until I could try out something similar at home.



For the background to my card base I used texture paste and a stencil to create the raised design. Once that was dry I painted it over with two colours of acrylic paint blending them into one …