A New Toy!

I am a very lucky girl, look what my lovely Husband bought for me, the Brother Scanncut Machine.

I must admit originally I thought it was just another machine on the market and what was the point of it?  Then I got to watching Julie Fei Fan Balzer demonstrate the machine making and designing some of her stencils and that caught my attention.  Create and Craft were also showing the machine at the time and all the tricks you could do with it.

As I watched more of the ideas and what you could actually do with the machine I finally got to "I want one!" but they are very expensive.  Luckily my friend wanted to sell hers so after thinking it over for a while, last Sunday I became the proud owner of one.  I did of course have to contact her straight away and get it straight away once I had decided!  My new addition is now called Bertie!

As soon as I got it home I had to have a play to see what it could do, cutting out the various shapes and words etc, then I moved on to finding free SVG files and using the Brother Scanncut Canvas to design with.

Of course this was the first thing I had to cut out!

I found this file to cut the Birthday Card and made this for my friend.

Bertie came to Bristol Scrappers with me yesterday, and I put him to work cutting out titles and pages for my scrapbook pages.  I designed the pages first on Canvas and then cut them at class from a USB stick.

These are the finished pages: -

I thought today I would have a go at the direct cut, I stamped one of the Stampotique images onto white card, scanned it into the machine and cut them out!  Within a minute I had two perfectly cut images, even cutting the wispy hair, I am very impressed with that feature, no more scissor cutting tricky stamps!!!

The cut out stamps

Even cutting the hair!

Two perfectly cut stamps.

The cut out section.

Huge thank you for my new machine, I am so far very impressed with what it can do and think I will be using this quite a lot!!

Good Bye Stamp Attic

This is a sad post, on Sunday I went to the last ever class held at the Stamp Attic in Wantage as Wendy and Colin are retiring and who better to take the last class with than Kate Crane.

The day was all about Stampotique, making backgrounds using paint with a brayer, dylusions ink sprays and distress ink pads and course lots of stencils and stamps had to be used basically getting very messy!

We used the backgrounds to make hangings, journal pages, cards, bookmarks or ATC's then used Kate's new Stampotique stamps and many other Stampotiques for the main image.

I made a small hanging and a tag hanging....

Thank you Kate for another lovely class and thank you Stamp Attic and Wendy and Colin for all the great classes you have held over the years and the wonderful shop you always kept stocked with all those goodies, we shall miss you terribly (although my bank account won't!!!)

National Scrapbooking Day

As National Scrapbooking Day coincided with our Bristol Scrappers Crop I felt I should do some pages, getting into the flow I finished 6 pages.  I usually look on line for inspiration that I can 'scrap lift' and came across a layout that would go well with one of my photo's.  When the day was finished Amy looked at my layouts and said I did one like that, I showed her the photo I was working from and it was her layout I had found on the web, just proves you don't need to search the web, just check out what your friend's are doing and pinch their ideas!!!!

My finished pages from the day ....

Thank you Amy for the inspiration!

 Happy Scrapping (or scrap lifting!!).

Swapsies

Do you get together with friends and swap papers?  Talking to my friend Mell online, she was saying she didn't have anyone close to get together with, she suggested we do a Gelli paper swap.  We did a little pile of papers each and posted them, I received mine today and love, love, love all of them.

They were all wrapped up in this lovely file ..

Full of yummy papers ...

This is the full pile I received ...

and Charlie inspecting all of them!

I was inspired! I had to dash off to my craft house and use them!  Cutting parts and using some to stamp onto, these are the finished pages in my mini Moleskine journal ....

Stamped birdie onto the Gelli Paper

Stamped Flower on Gelli Paper

Circles cut from the Gelli Paper

Collage Gelli Papers and stamped bird

Thanks Mell for all your lovely papers, hope you like the one's I have posted to you.

Why not get together with friends and get some happy post!

It's Dina time again!

One of the best things about having a Birthday in March is that I get to go on Dina's classes at Art from the Heart!  I had three classes for my Birthday, Art Journal Folio, Random by Design and Awesome Acrylics.

Day one started off with a blank Tim Holtz Idealogy folio, after adding lots of paint and stencils with a bit of Dina magic you end up with a fab folio filled with pages of journalling and images, all in a days work!

Day two was all about random, I arrived at the class with my brand spanking new Dylusions journal in hand, what's the first thing Dina says "rip four pages out of your journal"!!  After some muttering that I had a new journal I ripped them out and covered them in gesso ready for the random by design day.

Day three was all about techniques, reverse stenciling and masking, image transfer, using Vaseline as a resist, dripping paint, glazing plus others, I found this day very useful, especially for when you are stuck for something to do, just refer back to these techniques to jump start creativity.

This weekend has inspired me to try and create more in my journal and use different techniques. Here are a few of my pages completed since the weekend.  Some of the pages below are using the new Dylusions paints.

Thanks Dina for another fun and inspirational weekend.