20 cards in a Scrappy flash

Just a show

I have been lost in real life recently - sorry for neglecting you!

Hi there guys

I am so grateful to be back here in blogland one piece after a whirlwind of life-storms.  But I am still here, relieved to be standing again and getting back to what I love doing CRAFTING!!!!    I do have some exciting news that I will be able to share with you later on this month.  Its all very exciting and I hope I have neglected you all too much that you havent written me off already so that when I do share the big adventure you will still be here to love it as much as I am loving it right now.

Now onto sadder news.  This last Saturday, the legendary South African Maestro Christian (Bunny) Ashley-Botha - retired director of the World renowned Drakensberg Boys Choir, passed on in his home after a long struggle with illness.  I was very fortunate to have known this epic man personally through his son with whom I had had a close relationship with, with whom you might be familiar with as my multiple references to him by my little nickname "the chairman". He was such a beautiful man.  He was so open and warm and full of love.  I loved him dearly and will miss his beautiful energy.  In addition to that, he was a musical genius and he touched so many lives.  I will miss dear uncle Bunny and cherish him in my heart forever.

I so wanted to send messages of hope and comfort and acknowledgement to his family, who stood steadfastly with him as he battled his illness.  I saw such a pure example of love and devotion to him by them. I didnt want to send just ordinary sympathy cards, because I felt that was too impersonal for a family that became my sort of other family for a while.  

What I eventually did was create personal cards that spoke my heart to some message that I wanted to share, and sent a personal letter in each one.  I wanted to share these with you.  

tincanhandmade.blogspot.com

tincanhandmade.blogspot.com

tincanhandmade.blogspot.com

12 Tags of 2014 – October

Well it’s October and time for another Tim tag….and it is truly scary because here in good ol’South Africa - Halloween is a non-event. 
Our kids dont trick or treat, I wear crazy outfits everyday and the only horrifying thing about the 31st of October every year is that we realize that Christmas is around the bend and we should have started saving earlier for that huge Christmas splurge. 
So to keep myself locally relevant – my big trick for this month is that I am going to pass on the all the Boo, pumpkins and Ghoulery , but treat you to my reinterpretation inspired by the October Tim Tag…..see what I am doing there huh with the trick and treat and all of that? I have kept the key design elements and techniques and adapted them to fit my needs.



Here below is my method of madness.
– the /ink/paint spatter. 


We dont have the distress spray stains in South Africa yet so I had to come up with a new plan – I soaked a regular paint brush in Distress Ink Refill Ink and used the Distress Spray Tool to “spray splotch” the ink onto the background.

- the texture paste & stamped, masked elements.





















I used the eye from the Stamper’s Anonymous Oddities Collection,a pastel gel pen to colour in the iris and the Victorian Velvet Pen to colour in skin.  You can’t really see it all that well in this picture but I used a dark purple metallic gel pen to give the eye some eyeliner too.  the  and the Eyechart stencil.  I felt like the stencilled paste needed a little more contrast against the hectic splotch background there so I rubbed some metallic tarnished brass Distress Stain on it, then I sprinkled some embossing powder on that and heat set.  Finally I took a black pen and outlined the embossed bits to create the illusion of a shadow.

- the pumpkin bit
I played around with the stamped eye image again and cut it out etc – but it looked well psycho, like a carved out eye on a ransom note or something. I hated that – yeah I am my own hater!  In the meantime I was experimenting with the bottle dies again.  I wanted to create a vintagey handblown glass looking bottle for some other project and I was spreading on Clear PVC Cement on a bottle acetate die-cut and loving the effect.  It suddenly dawned on me that I could frame the eye in the vintage bottle.  To create the blue glass effect – I squirted some alcohol ink on the craft sheet and using the waterbrush, I coloured the reverse side of the bottle die-cut.  I dripped some plain old alcohol into the coloured bits to give it more of a uneven effect like the way light catches old glass. I glossy accented on top of the dried PVC Cement bits.
- the boo part
 



















Those Alpha-tiles were not available yet here as well.  So my fix was to cut scrabble like tiles from board and stamp my sentiment.  I didn’t have a tiny numbers stamp-font so I wrote in the letter values for the scrabble tiles.




- the tinsel ,trinkets and the trim


I liked the look of the stripy tag hang on the original tag so I substituted the baker’s twine in for the tinsel bit.  See those trinkets there on Tim’s tags?  I thought it would be in-theme to substitute that with a rolled up eye-chart.  I had bought those tiny acrylic versions that Stamper’s Anonymous once put out and it had a tiny version of the eyechart stamp in one of those collections.  I did do Monocle thingie with the eye rub-on, and attached it to the top an all but it looked lame and too busy at that point, so I detached it and left the tag as it is.

Sneak-Peak: I’m a GUEST DESIGNER for “Our Creative Corner” this month!!!

I have been so excited about this for so long and I am even more than excited to finally be able to direct you over to Our Creative Corner“ where I have had the excellent honour of being invited to be the guest designer this month.

creatification

\krē-ˈā-tə-fə-ˈkā-shən\

Verbal Noun

-Contraction of Creative  and Gratification

-The process of being completely gratified through licentious creativity

-Excessive indulgence in creative enterprises eliciting a state of extreme bliss and satisfaction



I have got to say that I had the most amount of creatification I have ever had with this project!!!  For you to get some of your own “creatification” on, pop on over to Our Creative Corner by clicking here – and you will find instructions for all my personal techniques for creating the special effects and elements I used on this project. 

I am not going to tell you exactly what the project is – ‘cos that will just spoil the surprise now, wouldn’t it? 

Here are a few more teasers though….



Check it out over at Our Creative Corner and tell me whether you guessed at what it is …..and whether you liked it:

Tim Holtz 12 Tags of 2014 - September

Well it was a creative weekend – not only did I get the August tag done but I also managed to do the September tag all in one go. 

Tim Holtz challenged us to bust out those alcohol inks and do some ghost stencilling, die-cutting and stamping (cos it it is STAMPTEMBER). 

Y’all know how I like clutter and mess though on my tags – so to try and keep my tag simple and unclutterd was a little bit of task for me.  Eventually I compromised – and allowed myself to ghost stencil a coloured background.  But I did colour everything – because life is colourful.

What I was hoping to convey in this tag was the idea that in life you can have all the things you want, all the the dreams you want to live, all the time you want, love you want, peace you want if you bring your own fulfilment into being.

From the Tim Tag – instead of the “Frenzy of Butterflies” I used the “Tattered Florals” Strip Die. I wanted it to look like a hand releasing a shower of flowers, the idea ofcourse being that you bring your own flowers to your life.


When I did the tag background, I was sad to have to embellish it because I thought it was great by itself. I created the background by multi-layering the ghosting technique – as per usual – I couldnt just stick to one colour.

I loved making the background for the flowers.  Tim is right – glossy cardstock and alcohol based inks are the bomb!! I sloshed alcohol based ink in many, many different colours all over a strip of the glossy stuff. I smooshed it all together and then when that dried I layered more ink over that and let it run all over. Check out this awesomely cool effect it had going over here.

I used the tattered florals strip die to cut out some florals – arranged them so that they look like a hand releasing a cascading shower of blooms and then I glossy accented the hek out of those. To add a bit of dimension – I glued on flat-back pearls on the flowers. 

RETRO Tim Holtz 12 Tags of 2014– August

                                                                                            
Disclaimer:  I didn't make it in time for Tim Holtz in August because I was busy with another exciting project that I will tell you about on the 11th of this month!

I did promise myself this that I would commit to make a tag for every month of 2014 – so I decided to go ahead and make one retroactively.

If I am submitting to the Holtz Collection, I try to stay within the Tim Holtz / Ranger line of products,stamps, trinkets and dies.  That challenges me to be original in the interpretation and arrangement of something familiar and well-known to his global fan-base.  I gotta tell ya though, while it’s lovely to rework the theme with my existing stash of Holtz’ings, the pressure gets cranked up. I always kinda think – it’s like taking a famous symphony and then putting your own touch on it, this is an extremely high-risk enterprise!!!  The devotees hold you to high standard so to deliver a half-holtzed attempt is something akin to sacrilege right? 

So since I didn't make the TH Blog deadline, I decided that I was just going to go a little nuts and use the layout and the technique somewhat but I would branch out of the Holtz collection and give myself the creative freedom to go where my eye and heart was leading.  On the right is the result boldly titled “Dreamer of dreams”.

Recently, I have been wondering about consciousness, forms of  knowing, seeing with different forms of vision.  I have become very taken with the quest to see how much more of the experience of consciousness we can experience.

I am so grateful to a few people in my life but particularly to my first husband  - “Bear, the Fire-starter” as well as my “Chairman Mau” who have both steered me in directions that got me to this point where I feel like I am slowly being delivered into a realm of consciousness that I didn’t know I could exist within.  

I am grateful that I finally have awakening to the idea that to be conscious is to love, to feel connected, and to embrace the dreams that exist inside my inner world that I have always been ashamed to acknowledge existing inside there.

I am thankful that I have the opportunity to express my inner vision through this medium of collage or mixed media art.  I have always loved the Holtz style because it resonates with how my mind projects my thoughts, feelings, experiences, memories on its internal canvas. There is something intimately familiar in his style that reminds me of how my mind sees, interprets and organises the world.  My dreams are vivid, in colour and a little all jumbled together in a wondrous, whimsical medley of sights and sounds superimposing themselves on existing memories and feelings.  I love that I can express the incredibleness of it somewhat through the medium of art.

Tim Holtz 12 Tags of 2014 - JULY

I know that I have been neglecting this blog a while. 

Sometimes life moves so slowly and then times like these I can barely catch my breath.  I still havent caught up on y'all's lovely comments from the last post, last month.  I need to get my groove on - I know.

I am going to plead super busyness and not and not do a step-by-step this month, of how I made this tag for the July edition of 12 tags, but I might just add some close ups of detail.  

Found out that I can emboss acetate with my thick stencils in my cuttlebug with the grey embossing mat! A + B + Rubber mat + acetate + stencil + B. This is actually a giraffe print pattern but I think on acetate it looks like water!

Loved making this bottle - I wanted it to look like there was an old treasure map in the bottle - Intense UTEE'ing took place here. I cut a triangle of cork lining for the bottle, I didnt use the die - just cut a triangle, it was faster and less hassle than pulling all my stuff out again.

The sand mix didn't turn out as nicely as I wanted but that is probably because I didnt want to use up all my glorious glossy accents on the sand mix so I tried to substitute white glue in.....Tim always knows better!