I Grew a Flower Baby in a Pot! ~ an ATC painted for World Watercolour Month

When it said on the packet:  “Baby Seeds” – I thought it was referring to the size of the flowers which would grow.  I didn’t think I was supposed to take it literally!

Ah I’m joshing with you really.  I didn’t really grow a Baby in a Flower Pot!  I painted a baby growing in a flower-pot …  in ATC size, especially for World Watercolour Month.

an ATC sized painting for ~ #WorldWatercolorMonth

I got about half way through this and wasn’t entirely sure that it was coming out as well as I wanted it to.  I nearly gave up and started again.  Not sure what pushed me on, but I’m so glad that I did because I fell in love with this little scrap by the time I’d finished.

If you look carefully at the photo above, you can just see the pencil marking of the actual size for an ATC/ACEO ~ and that size is:  2.5″x 3.5″.  I tend to cut a piece of watercolour paper just a little bigger than that size so that I can hold onto the card and move it around, as I’m painting ~ without spoiling the painted image with a finger or thumb marks.

an Artists Trading Card sized watercolour painting, painted for  #WorldWatercolorMonth

I tried three different mounts on this little hand painted card and all three seemed to bring out different aspects of the card . . .

A Flower Baby Growing in a Pot ~  an ATC/ACEO painted in watercolours, especially for  #WorldWatercolorMonth

The green mount seems to pick out the two little green leaves growing from each side of the Baby.  Is she/he perhaps ….  a Fairy or Angel Baby?  Are the leaves in fact ….  wings?

But … I think my favourite mount colour, for me, has to be the creamy white mount:

A Flower Baby growing in a Flower Pot!   And ATC/ACEO hand painted  especially for #WorldWatercolorMonth

So … which mount do you prefer?  Blue?  Green?  White?  Or perhaps you prefer no mount at all.

Anyhoo ….  HAPPY SATURDAY!

I hope your day is sweet from morning till night, and that the Bluebird of Happiness flies over your house and leaves a little magic happy dust, sprinkled from its wings, over your home.

Whatever you’re doing today, do it with all of your heart, for that’s where your happiness lives.

Have a truly blessed Saturday my friends.

Bottoms Up! … in Mr. McGregor’s Garden.

I love making cards for people,  but ‘once in a blue moon’,  the card I made might not feel like it ‘fits’ the person I’d made it for. And that’s exactly what happened last week.

I made a card to say ‘thank you‘ to my blogging friend, Hannah (she of the wonderful hat pins), but somehow the card didn’t feel right to me.  There was nothing actually wrong with the card, but it didn’t seem to ‘fit’ the person I was making it for.  I wanted something which was fun.  Something with a smile.  One that sort of held a visual ‘squidge’ from me, sent in a card, over the miles.  So I decided that I’d have to start again.  I looked around my craft room for inspiration and my eyes rested upon a stamped image held in a big peg, at the back of my desk, and suddenly a  LIGHTBULB MOMENT  happened!  I knew the card to make.

Readers may remember an image I stamped last week, in Part One of the Guide(ish) to Stamping …  this is one of the images I stamped:-

I’d put that stamped image in one of those big fancy looking pegs which holds notes, receipts and ‘stuff’,   and I knew instantly that the card I needed to make was going to be made using that image of the Mommy Rabbit hugging and giving her baby a squidge.

Mr. McGregor’s Garden (from the wonderful  ‘Tales of …’   stories written by Beatrix Potter) popped into my mind as I looked at the rabbits hugging,   and that’s where the idea for the bit of fun I wanted the card to have, came from!

I got my air dry clay out  …  and made four flat backed plant pots and a little trowel to go with them.  The clay is white, so, when the pots and trowel were dry, I chose two colours of acrylic paint for the pots – but instead mixing them together to make one new colour, I kind of swirled them into each other, in a figure of 8 kind of swirling motion, so that when I picked up some paint on my brush, I picked up both of the colours at the same time, in a sort of smudges of each colour way, rather than just one colour.  What I was hoping to achieve was a set of pots which looked as if they were old;  pots that had been through the wars;  a little battered and looked like they really did belong in Mr. McGregor’s garden.

I wanted pots that looked old and a little bit battered.  Kind of like the ones in this photo.

While the paint on the pots dried,  I worked on the stamped image.  It was stamped on snow white card, but I wanted it to sort of suggest that we were peeping and looking at a tender, private moment of the mummy and baby rabbit having a cuddle together (or as my Grandson calls it … “a tuddle.”).  I blended two tones of browns using Memento stamp pads, (one a soft caramel brown and then went in again using a deeper brown colour),  and blended them  around the sides of the card which the image was stamped on so that it drew your eye ‘into’ the image and make you feel that you’re looking through or ‘into’ something … A port-hole?  A window?  Nooo… you’re looking down a rabbit hole of course!

if you scroll up and compare it to the original stamped image on white card, you can see the difference.

Next …  making rabbit bottoms!  (There’s a phrase you don’t hear every day!)  I wanted to do three different sizes of rabbit bottoms,  (ok, this is making me giggle now.  ‘Making Rabbit Bottoms’ … that’s what I should have called this post! LOL)  … and in three different colours.  I didn’t want to do the accepted tan, brown, black or white which you would normally see as colours of rabbits, but wanted to play up the ‘fun‘ so made rabbit bottoms in unexpected colours.  I had to trim down the purple woollen pom-pom for the middle rabbit … and that, I’m tellin’ you, is easier said than done!

Twice I cut through the little bits of wool in the middle which holds the whole pom-pom together!,  (talentless or uselessness on my part I fear), and at this point I had just ONE purple pom-pom left  so the pressure was on!  I had to try really hard to not cut through this last one!  By now my desk was covered in bits of purple woolly fluff, and tons of tiny purple wool fibres floating in the air.  Nightmare!  It was stuck to my hands, to my face, to my eyelashes.  It was going up my nose (and making me sneeze) and . . .  My clothes looked like I was a purple bunny murderer!

But …  I got there in the end … in a fashion.  lol  🙂

I added bunny feet in contrasting colours – dotting on ‘toes’ using some fine liners,  and then adding tails made from fibres of the same coloured felt I’d used for their feet – (just cut up a bit of felt into tiny little bits, then chop them as much as you can with tiny snips until eventually they give in and become fluff).  However … the little yellow bunny on the end … her tail was easy to make.  I had enough purple fluff to make purple bunny tails for all the rabbits of the world!

I chose some pretty pink with cream dots background paper from my stash – which began life as a 12″x 12″ sheet, and I trimmed it to size.   It was already slightly vintaged, so all I had to do to it was add some light(ish) caramel brown ink, but with its toes dabbling in a terracotta colour, into the outer edges of the paper.  I added this same paper to the inside of the card too, to carry the colours through the card.

I fixed the bunny bottoms to the pots, and added the pots to the card.  To finish the card off … I added the sentiment, and voila!  A smiley, fun card for my blogging friend.  It was just as I wanted.  Something to say ‘thank you’, and send warm smiles, and a squidge, through the post. 

My blog friend has received the card, so I can now share it with you without spoiling the surprise.

I don’t think I’ve missed anything …  but if I have please do ask about what you need to know, – by just putting your ‘want’ into a comment. I promise I’ll reply.

(Incase you’re new to the blog here: you can post a comment really easily – simply click the little speech bubble at the head of this post – just to the right hand side of the title – and that will take you directly to the comments)

Aaanyhoo  …  Happy Monday, and Happy 1st of August!   When it gets to August my thoughts always turn to …. the dreaded C word.

Yes, you guessed correctly   … Christmas!

But … I shall stop right now  (as the Spice Girls once famously sang)  because before the C word can be dealt with I have a birthday to deal with… or rather …. a couple or so birthdays – so I should concentrate on those first.  (Apart from the one birthday … I never send a card for that particular birthday girls special day because .. well because it’s me and my birthday.  LOL.   Ha!  just when you began to think I was being mean to someone!) LOL  🙂

Well that’s me done and dusted so I shall shut up  –  and you can stop your bottom from going numb.  🙂  ….  are you singing that Spice Girls song now?  “Stop right now, thank you very much, I need someone with a human touch.  Hey you, always on the run better slow it down baby, better have some fun.”.  Well if you weren’t, I bet you are now.  [cackling laugh heard through the corridors]. ut ohhhhh….  I’ve given you an ear worm!  If it gets too annoying start singing the ‘Happy Birthday to you’ song … over and over until you forget to sing it.  And .. if that ear worm comes back, simply repeat the singing of the Happy Birthday song.  Eventually it will push off and leave your brain song free!

May today bring you warm smiles, happy moments and, remember to  . . .  have a memory making moment at some point today.

Sending you ‘tuddles’ and squidges ….

 

 

 

Sunday Arrivals!

 On Platform 1:  A Beautiful BOY!   

  On Platform 2:  A Gorgeous GIRL!  

Two beautiful new souls to cherish and love!

On reading one of the blogs I follow, I found out that one the writers of a blog, who had been MIA (Missing In Action) for a couple of weeks,  had a very good reason for being away from her computer:  She’d had a baby! A beautiful, baby girl!  After congratulations had been said I thought that it would be a lovely thing to make a baby card for the mommy and her new bundle of love and scrumptiousness, so I sat at my desk and gave it a bit of thought.

The first thought I came up with was that if I was going to make a card for a new baby girl, then to be totally fair, I should also make one for a little boy too.  So here I am again, sharing (this time) two cards for the price of one!

I decided on Beatrix Potter –  Beatrix holds a big place in my heart – so made two very different cards, but around the same ‘theme’.

Firstly –  Just arrived  –  On platform 1:   A New Baby Boy.

Made on a 6″x6″ white, pre-scored & folded card by Papermania.  I love their cardstock – 300gsm weight – so it will take practically anything you ask it to.  The backing paper is from a range of Beatrix Potter papers & toppers which I actually got free with a magazine over a year ago, and hadn’t used at all (I think, because I loved them so much,  I wanted to keep them!)  When I went through the papers I fell instantly in love with this backing paper and knew it was going to be the basis of the New Baby Boy card.

The Gingham Check card which I used to mat and layer behind the Hunca Munca, cradling her baby, topper, is from a range by Anna Marie Designs.

I added the fabulous ‘New Baby‘  duckling tag and then chose some ribbon to match the card.  In the photographs the ribbon for some reason looks lighter than it is in real life.  I think it’s possibly the way the flash on the camera caught the satin of the ribbon and washed out the colour a little.  Little blue bow applied to the top left hand corner.  I then added a strip along the bottom of the card of Potter paper ribbon, and then resting just along the top of that I added a blue blossom twig (again by Anna Marie Designs)  to represent a branch, to which I knew I wanted to add a little metal, antiqued bird house (which has a baby bird perched up on the roof – which you sadly can’t quite see  properly in the photo).

The bird house has a hanging loop on top which was too ‘tough’  for me to snip off with my jewellery tools, so I added a tiny bit of ribbon through the loop and tucked the ends under the New Baby topper, gluing them in place with a dab of Anita’s all-purpose.

Of course – me being me, I had to take the decoration into the inside of the card….

I added a pale blue insert to which I added a matching blue ribbon at the top of the page, and at the bottom I added a tiny topper which had daisies, grass and leaves on it, and it just finished off the card nicely.

~ ~ ~  Just arrived on Platform 2:  ~ ~ ~

A Gorgeous Baby Girl

The new baby girl who began my thought of making a baby card was born on the 9th July 2014 and her name is Alea Francesca.  (You’ll find a link to the momma’s blog at the bottom of the page).

Because I had Alea in mind, I felt as if I ‘knew’ who I was making this card for and ….  well I just went to town on the whole girliness!

Again made on a 6″x6″ 300gsm card, by Papermania.  To which I added a 6×6″ piece of pink with white polka dots card (by Anna Marie Designs).   I added a small paper doily (Dovecraft) – which I actually stuck to the card with foam tape, as I wanted it to be raised slightly from the card so that I could add flowers which where kind of tucked under the doily.

I’d already chosen the topper that I wanted to use – Mrs. Rabbit and her baby bunnies – but I wanted to give it a little more importance – so chose a frame from a selection by Trimcraft (their Santoro range).  I cut some pink, gingham check card (Anna Marie Designs) to fit the back of the frame exactly, and mounted the topper onto that then fixed it to the frame using Anita’s all-purpose glue.

The addition of the ‘Congratulations’ gave the card it’s sentiment.

Then it was time to fix some flowers.  All the flowers you see are all paper flowers.  I’ve had them all for  . . .  – ohhh,   yonks!  I use paper flowers all the time so used to buy a pack of them every time I did any crafty shopping, consequently I don’t currently have to ever buy any – and probably won’t for a while!  But paper flowers are pretty much generic so any you have would likely work if you’re hoping to make a card ‘like’ this one for yourself.

To the bigger flowers I added a button for a centre and sprinkled a tiny amount of glitter dust so that it would stick to the glue which popped up through the button holes.  To the smaller Blossom flowers which had no ‘centre’, I added a teeny flat-back pearl in a colour which matched or complimented the colour of the flower (flat back pearls by Anita’s – the Gemstone Pearl Wheel).  Other blossoms came with their own stamen centre.

The pink and white popcorn type of flowers (look above the Congratulations topper – just above the blossoms there) are by Anna Marie Designs.

Then came the butterflies.  With all those flowers there just HAD to be butterflies!

I’ve had a big bag of plain coloured butterflies in my stash for about 8 years and never used even one of them.  I don’t know where I got them from or why,  and I actually put them in a box to go to the charity shop, along with a few other crafty things which I wasn’t using.  However, I got them back out again because I wanted paper butterflies for this card.  So I chose colours and sizes and then stamped a butterfly on top of the card shape in order to give them the correct butterfly markings.  I creased and folded them a little to give them ‘flight’, and then used Anita’s 3D Clear Gloss to give them all a glossy coating – as if I’d clear embossed them a couple of times (only without the pitting which you can sometimes get by doing that).  

I couldn’t catch this glossy coating properly in a photograph.  I either got ‘white out’ – where you couldn’t see the butterfly at all, or nothing.  So you’ll just have to imagine a photo of the whole card showing the butterflies with their glossy shine!   But I did manage a ‘montage’ of the butterflies from the gazillion I took while I was trying to capture one whole ‘good’ photo – so this montage kind of shows that the butterflies did have this lovely glossy accent.

The addition of some really lovely warm, rosy pink ribbon and a little antiqued, metal bird house completed the front of the card.

Inside … I just simply added one tiny thing …

…  a silver star, right at the top of the pink insert.  Is it because the new baby is a star?  Is it a wish star?  It’s a star which will have meaning to the new mummy and daddy – and to the baby as she grows up and looks back over her baby cards.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, are the two arrivals at Platforms 1 and 2, today.  Not by train, you understand.  No no.  As is the tradition in all new babies, they came by Stork – naturally!  😀

Thank you so much for reading, looking and for visiting,  but before you stop reading:   can I just please just give you a link to the blog I referred to up in my post above – so that you can see the wonderful new life which is the little girl who started off my thinking of Baby Cards.

Please click to visit the blog and … if you can …  leave a comment of congratulations for the new mommy.  After all – we all love acknowledgements on something we’ve done which we’ve worked on, and I can think of no finer thing in life than a new baby, which someone has worked extremely hard on producing (and then some!)  and can think of no better thing on which to receive congratulations.

http://artatzazuta.wordpress.com/2014/07/18/celebrating-life-2/

Thank you SO much for taking the time out of your day to come and visit.  I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your kindness, your support and your friendship.  For those of you who follow me – thank you.   For those who don’t but are visiting:  Click to ‘Follow Me’!  What have you got to lose?  You won’t be sent loads of rubbish or spam.  You’ll just get an email to let you know when I’ve made a post on my blog  so that you don’t miss amything.  No spam.  Nothing which asks you your date of birth or even your location!   All you have to do is put your email address into the space provided so that the system knows who to send the email to.

Have a truly, blessed Sunday all. 

Sending you love, smiles and joy ~

Your Family just Grew . . .

Your FAMILY just grew by Two Feet! ~ made by Cobwebs ~

A 7″ x 6″ plain white card, which with the addition of one grey/blue(ish) lacy patterned card, to which was stitched a warm biscuit coloured dotty card and then added a printed photograph (printed on cardstock) which I’d digitally played around with courtesy of Photoshop, – just to soften and fuzzy up the picture a little – and with the help of a bit of seam binding ribbon, a little lace and finally a round, metal bound velum tag … voila!  One pretty New Handmade Baby Card.

I love to stitch onto cards as it gives the kind of loving touch that nothing else can match, and on Baby cards, that loving touch goes a long way.

The photograph above was taken with a flash, and the result of that was the white card was emphasised and looks ‘glow white’!    But the picture below was taken without a flash, hence the dark shadows at the bottom of the picture.  Tsk tsk .. I wish I was better at taking photos.  <sigh>

Your FAMILY just grew by Two Feet! ~ made by Cobwebs ~

Have a blessed and peace filled day!