Laura Rumble - Crafter

 Happy Tuesday!  It's time for a new colour swatch at CC&S ... It's a beautiful colour palette and one I tend to be drawn to often as a lover of all things green and being partial to a bit of peach, specifically Nectar from C9.   I've added a touch of stencilling in the background and layered up three butterflies on top.  A simple stamped sentiment (W Plus 9) underneath finishes it off nicely. You know I love a chance to play with my extensive thread collection and it's not a surprise that I had a perfect match to my inks.  The thread is simply wrapped around the middle of the butterfly with the loose ends acting as antennas. I hope you'll join us at CAS Colours and Sketches for this beautiful colour combo!

Sometimes packaging is just too good to throw out in the recycling! At least it is for me as a crafter... The colours on this chocolate bar wrapper from Dormouse Chocolates was just the perfect ombre of palest yellow to rich sunset orange with a whole lot of perfect peachiness in between, and a really good weight of cardstock, too.  It demanded to be reused on a layout! I paired it with Simon Says Stamp's Garden Greetings stamp set and some stencilling with oxide inks in the background.  I love the softness of the colours, stencilling and vellum against the starkness of the bold black stamping. I used the text on the chocolate wrapper to make a found poem about my boy Theo.  It kind of has a double meaning as Theo is short for Theobroma; Theobroma Cacao is the name of the cocoa plant that chocolate is made from.  Yep, budgie boy is named after chocolate!  Two of my most treasured things are birds and chocolate!! I always say I'm rubbish with words.  The col...

I'm excited to have joined the team at CAS Colours and Sketches .  This is my first make for them and it is a colour challenge. I struggled to find an exact match for the berry burst shade but Pinkfresh's Regal Kiss was a good enough match.  I also went with Hydrangea, Spruce Tips and Lush Forest, all from Pinkfresh's ink line.  If green is in a colour swatch I immediately go to leaves and I fancied pulling out my Alex Syberia florals so that was an easy decision.   Keeping it CAS I stamped off the edge of the card base and embossed in white for a subtle look.  I then used the coordinating stencils to ink blend.  As I was blending rather than stamping my colours are a touch on the softer side.   Then I decided my greeting would go smack bang across the middle of my image.  Perhaps controversial?  Why place it over the prettiness?  I don't know really, I just like the closeness of everything design-wise. Come over and join us at CAS Colo...

 OK, so it's been a slow few weeks thanks to my health, but I have a few triangle creations to share with you.   Triangle stencilling with an old design from Skull and Cross Buns. Gulls from Heffy Doodle.   A kind-of sort-of take on the sketch in my last post... but I went off piste of course.  This is very much a bits and bobs layout; papers from all sorts, random stickers and embellishments, perhaps the most used brand is Pretty Little Studio, but mainly a total mish-mash.   Where are the triangles, I hear you ask.  All the patterned paper in this layout has some form of triangular pattern on it.  Also, got a few of those triangle 'dots' used! I am very pleased with this card... a triangular corner shaker pocket on a card.  There's a bunch of Bitty Bontanicals die cuts from Trinity and a simple embossed greeting using a Heffy Doodle stamp. This was an experiment where my measurements went a little awry.  The striped segments and glitter seg...

 Hello!  Here's my take on December's Stick It Down sketch...     I'm a fan of this sketch (if I can say that about my own sketch?!) as it is so versatile.   I have switched the circles out for tags.  I reckon the design will work for the majority of shapes - I quite fancy having a go with stars.  The challenge would be finding a photo that would crop well.   I have been enjoying my advent calendar this month.  I've got a couple of mini blending brushes which I was keen to try out.  I pulled out a Skull and Cross Buns stencil and a few Pinkfresh inks and had some pastel fun for the background.  Wanting to carry on play with the blending brushes I coloured up a few white tags too.  My attempts at ombre blending were iffy but I'm pleased with them nonetheless. I added detailing to the tags and background using a couple of Jen Schow stamp sets and a grey ink.  I thought black ink would be too harsh with the pastel colour pale...

Wrapping up the Hochanda blog posts with these... I do love some stencilled wrapping paper and I was delighted to discover I could stencil ribbon too.  I  used an old neon ink from Hero and heat set as I went to stop the ink from spreading. And finally a shaker bauble with bells on! Hands up who wants a christmas tree full of shaker baubles this year?  Meeee!!!

 Here are a few tags I created using Skull and Cross Buns products featured in today's HOCHANDA programme. I also used the baubles stamps set to make a string of bunting and a single hanging ornament.  Just one more post to come later and that'll round off the oversharing!!

Here are the three layouts I created using Skull and Cross Buns products that you can buy from Hochanda today... Big polka dots and the Christmas Sweater stencils are firm favourites with me. "Funny" story about the above layout... M.E. brain fog has been kicking my butt recently.  I decided that I needed to show that the 6x6 stencils can be used repeatedly to fill a 12x12 page.  I decided the best way was clear glitter paste on a white background - yes, my style but... that was never going to show on TV.  So I decided to save it I would mist over the top of it.  The paste would resist the ink.  Well, yes it would resist it but it still needed to be wiped off the paste before it dried - which I failed to do.  I ended up cleaning each section of glitter paste one by one with a wet cotton bud. Sigh! Still to come today are tags and gift wrap ideas...

 Skull and Cross Buns are back on Hochanda today.  Here are a few of the card samples I created...   I have to say this Christmas Sweater stencil is a big favourite of mine.  I'll be sharing more samples in the following posts - I've got lots to share!!

Stick It Down are sponsored by Handipaper this month.  I bought these cute dinos from them a few months back and this was the perfect opportunity to play... Here's the sketch we are working to this month... I cut the dinos on some striped papers from Pretty Little Studio.  The stencil and stamp are from Skull and Cross Buns. This was the layout of mistakes... I miss-stencilled, the washi tape holding the stencil tore the cardstock and I dropped an ink pad face down on the page!  Everything is fixable in scrapping though.  The title covered the stencilled oops; the washi covers the tear; the inky mess was torn off and led to the orange strip at the bottom which I ended up loving. Googly eyes.  Yep, we need to start a thing.  Let's get googly eyes trending in scrapbooking! I also have a second layout inspired by the sketch and using a Handipaper cut file (along with a border cut file that I made.) I've used mainly my Quirky...