May DoCrafts Samples...

    Well, good morning to you! I hope you're having better weather wherever you are - I'm more than fed up with being rained on every time I go outside - this must be our annual monsoon season come early this year. It usually waits until the kids break up for their summer holidays, so we're a few weeks ahead of that and hopefully that should mean we get our soaking out of the way and will return to beautiful sunshine as soon as possible. Not to worry, rain in summertime means time for guilt free crafting and I had lots of ladies attend my most recent demo because that's the thing to do of a wet Saturday afternoon. So here's some samples I made using the box of products from the previous post...

    This is actually one of my favourites for it's sheer simplicity. The glasses and lemons are cut from an Xcut mini die. They have had the cut away inner part coloured in with Artiste watercolour pens which I gave a coating of Anita's 3d Clear Gloss. I used the gloss to make some droplets too. The sentiment has been stamped  with alphas from the DoCrafts Wedding range and the pinata paper is just some yellow paper chopped into with scissors - a technique I love doing!

Here's a nice close up of the detail!

Lots of touchy feely texture!

    Next up – a few samples of cards using the brand new Metallics range. Here I used the Metallic Elements Capsule A4 Ultimate Paper Pack. As always, this pack is rammed full of papers, vellums, alphabet stickers and die cut elements. The vellum is gorgeous and so unusual - it's quite heavy/thick for a vellum and looks fab when run through an embossing folder like this one here which has been through an Xcut Dogtooth embossing folder. That foiling really catches the light and brings lots of texture to make the most of your backgrounds - I love it!

I've colourised the embossed polka dot paper with a gold inkpad. 

    These papers are really striking with lots of high contrast shine, especially when used alongside some mirri board. The ones with a white background can be coloured up too - they are lovely and smooth and take an ink pad nicely. I tried a gold ink pad which had a subtle effect knocking the contrast back a bit. You could try any colour - I'm not done experimenting yet... 

    Next – more Metallics, this time combined with a new Xcut die... called 1920s Dancers!

A twisted easel card

The simple monotone palette of the Metallics works great with the art deco flavour of this die.

This card is made by die cutting with cream coloured card stock – I used the brand new Xcut Couple in Heart die and gently coloured parts of the diecut with a small ink pad which gives a soft blurry pop of colour and draws your eye to different areas.

Here's Gorjuss!!!!!! 

There's a new range of Gorjuss stamps just been released – here are the two I got to play with...

Gorjuss is off on her hols here and is enjoying wearing here pretty sailor bathing suit. There's a lot more detail on this stamp but as she's in an aperture and stamped on the inside of the card, it's cut that lovely detail off. She is actually sitting on a rock with her feet in a little pool of water and has little fishies swimming round her tootsies!. This is the only sample I had time to make as we got our kits only a week ahead of our demos and I really didn't have a lot of time to experiment. I'm sure I'll revisit her though - she too cute not to!

Here's Gorjuss floating Up and Away combined with a vellum foil background from the Metallics pack. I kept this stamped image simple, using copper embossing powder for the image and colouring with a pale brown watercolour pen adding a pop of yellow on the her dress, the balloon and sentiment. She's adorable!

Finally one last card...  I used the large floral number dies for this one. The "sweet" bit was made from mini alphabet dies released last year. Those little alphabet dies are so useful and a great size for cards!

I hope you enjoy the samples here today and if you have recently purchased any of the products used I hope you find some inspiration here! Thankyou for popping by!

Happy crafting everyone,

Love Jak xxx

Another demo done!

Hi everyone, hope you are all feeling crafty today! I'm still buzzing from my latest demo for DoCrafts! This time we had a different kind of demo and instead of introducing crafters to our latest products we actually focused more on techniques - these being of a distressing and inky, painty nature. It was such good fun to go back and rediscover these techniques using the DoCrafts inks and paints, my only handicap being that there was no facility/power for speeding up drying times with my heat gun but my ladies were very patient and loved having a go at getting their crafty hands dirty too.

Lots of goodies to play with!

These paints are great quality with lots of pigment

So lets start with some marbling....

Once I'd nailed the natural looking black and white stuff I drifted towards a more colourful approach...heehee! This is such an easy technique to do and if you don't like the way things are going you can lightly brush out or dab over with a bit more paint! I took a piece of the natural black and white version and incorporated it into a card featuring one of the DoCrafts Gorjuss stamps and some debossed vellum.

She's such a cutie

Here's that piece of marbling in the background. The card has also been embellished with the X- cut Woodland Flourishes die set which I've found to be pretty versatile as it seems to go well with lots of different styles of cards. 

Next up was a bit of crackle painting...

You will need: Coloured cardstock, loads of PVAglue - the cheaper, the better, and acrylic paint - any colour - just make sure it contrasts with the colour of the background cardstock you are using.

It crackles as if by magic!

Now, I don't mind admitting that this took me quite a few goes before it worked but that was to do with me being an idiot rather than how difficult it was to do. I would say, the main thing to remember here is to work quickly, be messy with the bog standard pva glue and don't be tempted do go back and overwork your paint. One sweep of paint on top of the glue is all you need. I sort of imagine it as just sitting on top of the glue. Now, in an ideal world a quick zap of the heat gun doesn't go amiss at this stage but it really isn't essential as science/physics or some kind of sorcery takes effect and the paint starts to pull away from the slower drying pva underneath. Once dried this makes an interesting background for a card too! 

Gorjuss again!

Doesn't that crackle work well with a bit of Gorjuss? I love that this card worked well combining the crackle, distressy feel with the dark and mysterious Gorjuss girl! I used an inky technique for the stamped picture frame that contains Gorjuss, which leads us nicely on to the next technique which is:- ink spritzing and distressing.

Springtime colours

Now this is one style that's usually more associated with Tim Holtz distressing inks but I wanted to try giving it a go with the DoCrafts Artiste ink pads as these are water based inks too so work in exactly the same way. Start with your lightest colour ink first, pat down on a craft sheet or glass cutting mat - even a sheet of acetate would work here, spritz with a bit of water and start dabbing the card around in the ink. I guess you could add as many layers of colour here as you like but I would stop at three. Why? I don't know - other than the main principle of colour mixing which says mixing three secondary colours together makes brown ( I know yellow is a primary. I'm just trying to illustrate a point here...)  This is one of those rare times where less is more and if you want to stamp an image over the colours you've mixed then you don't want to make them too dark or muddy! Here's a close up of all that beautiful inky spritzing!

Inky spritzing overstamped with a brown pigment ink

Of course, the real beauty here is that no two cards will ever be the same! Fabsy!!!

Ok, so there are quite a few cards I have to let you see but I'm going to wind this post up for today as duty calls (pesky kids eh!)!!!

Thanks for coming  by for a look - I'll get those other cards up here ASAP!

Jak xxxx