/* */ Beulah Bee

April 23, 2018

Marigold


I've made a greeting card to thank the hostess for a party my husband and I were invited to over the weekend.

It's nothing out of the ordinary but I used a few less common techniques that I thought would be fun to share.

The main ingredients are the Flower Garden stamp set, a page from the Etcetera paper stash, some Tissue Tape, and a Dot Fade stencil (Tim Holtz).


I stamped then embossed the flower, tinted it with Distress inks then used super-cheap kid's construction paper as blotting paper and a hot craft iron to remove the embossing. Newsprint also works great for this technique. To learn more about this process, see this post.


I know there are a set of die-cuts available for this stamp set but mine was cut-out by hand using an Exacto knife and self-healing cutting mat.


Here's a tip you might find useful: Cut as close to the image as you can but don't worry about the irregular edges. Then go back and make the tiny cuts later and you'll find it a lot less intimidating.


And finally I'll share a tip I've blogged about in the past (see this post) that helps you decide where to crop your scrapbook paper when designing a layout.

This template is nothing more than a sheet of transparency that I made lines on with a permanent marker. I put masking tape around the edges to mask the background. I lay this template over my paper and move it around until I find a spot that I like and mark the corners with a pencil dot to guide my cutting lines.

This week's theme at Simon's Monday Challenge Blog is "Flower Power" so I'm linking up. I haven't made a card in ever so long and it was such a pleasure that I plan to make some more for this week's challenge (I have lots of flower stamps 😉).

April 20, 2018

Lemony Snicket

doo·dle ˈ/ do͞odl /
verb: 
scribble absentmindedly "he was only doodling in the margin"
noun: 
a rough drawing made absentmindedly

There's not much doodling here. It's a stretch for linking to Simon's Monday Challenge Blog this week but perhaps it counts that the first step I took was to make a border of circles around the tag.


The chair was stamped (Claudine Hellmuth) and then I drew the table. The globe and the hot air balloon were stamped (Tim Holtz Tiny Things); the books, shelves, windows, wall and floor were drawn.

I would argue that drawing and doodling are not the same. But if you consider the definition, I guess this was absentminded in the sense that I have no idea where the idea came from but once I decided to add the books, I thought the quote by Lemony Snicket was a good fit.

April 15, 2018

The Phoenix


Just under the wire today, linking up to Simon's Monday Challenge Blog--this week's theme is Mythology.

My idea came from the namesake of my current residence and a little research turned up an interesting story of how the city got it's name, who knew dipsomania played a part in it.

In mythology the Phoenix represents rebirth which is exactly what I did with the wooden support for this piece which was originally an Idea-ology burlap panel (6" x 4").

I removed the burlap, applied an image transfer and then colored it with paint and inks and also stamped some text in the background (Stamper's Anonymous Ledger Script).


The technique was similar to this project which became a favorite of mine and I thought I'd have another go at it. I appreciate how it's possible to take advantage of the brown of the support board and convert the positives shapes into negative ones.