Alison's Crafting Peace!

Hello and welcome to Magpieheaven. It's been so very hectic with moving my mum into her new flat that when I saw Alison's guest designer piece for Paper Artsy it really appealed to me. Click here to discover how she creates some crafting peace with two exquisitely beautiful tags. They are just perfection! The wonderful images on the Paper Artsy Urban snapshots stamps that she used so effectively were a revelation to me, but as yet I don't have any of these. I plan to - Christmas list definitely! I loved the sentiments that she used so well. What I do have, though, are a selection of my favourite Paper Artsy Fresco paints, some Wendy Vecchi archival ink and lots of distress inks. I decided to play along with the very talented Alison and I should like to link my work to the Paper Artsy Challenge this week.

Here are the colours I decided to work with. I went for my favourites - browns, blues and greens! Alison's background was just lovely, so I selected one of my Crafters' Workshop stencils and had a good old play with Frescos and distress inks over two tags I cut with a Tim Holtz die out of Smoothy Card! I discovered just by chance how great Honeydew is as a base for all the other colours; I really loved the blend. Spritzing and flicking was lots of fun too and I found that this created a misted look that reminded me of this time of year as autumn dissolves gently into winter. This transition between the seasons became the theme of the tags, which evolved into a 'moving house' card for my mum. I had the Paper Artsy, Ink and the Dog alphabet plate that Alison used, but I had cut it into individual letters and numbers so I randomly stamped some of these in Snowflake on my tags.

My backgrounds reminded me of frost fronds on the window-pane. For a little more interest I stamped the sentiment from the Ink and the Dog Petals, plate 3 across the tags in Wendy Vecchi Fern Green. I did not have an arch like Alison, but I had an idea I had wanted to put into practice for a while, to die-cut another shape into the centre of a die-cut. I chose Tim Holtz Tattered Leaves and die-cut a Spell-binders keyhole into two Crackle Glazed leaves to symbolise the key to a new start in a new home. Then I stuck my tags onto a concertina card I made using my Crafters Companion multi-board. A while back I bought some ribbon with a design of winter trees on it so I edged my card with this.

I clear embossed the sentiment and used Stampendous, shabby blue Frantage and a pearl to accent it. The card was coming to symbolise the idea that winter has its own beauty and that seeds are sleeping under ground ready to form the trees of tomorrow. This is a period of settling in for mum, a kind of winter, but I hope that well before spring she will feel really and truly at home. Let's hope we are sewing lots of seeds of happiness!

I used the distress inks to stain some seam binding. I was quite pleased with the blend of distress inks and Frescos that I used on the background of the white card too. I also embossed the Petals sentiment onto this and sponged over it.

I also had some lovely hand-made paper given me by my dear crafting friend and Magpie Cousin, Dianne. This is such a subtle shade and has little leaves embedded in it. I thought it would go perfectly with my theme so I used it for another background to my concertina card.

I used the same background technique and added the lovely door from Mini 94, embossed and edged with Treasure Gold White Fire. I also used some White Fire to edge my leaves.

Sadly my mum has Macular Degeneration so she finds it very difficult to see, but she likes to look at pictures through her magnifying glass and - with patience - she can see quite a bit of detail. I am hoping she will like this card to wish her all the very best of happiness in her new home. I do hope that all the disruption caused by the recent storm is being sorted over at Paper Artsy HQ and that this has not caused too much stress! Thank you for stopping by today and thank you, Alison for your inspiration and the reminder of the peace there is to be found in crafting and creating!