Marbling

Yes, I'm still alive.

The Sproggit and I had a go at marbling, I have to say that even though I only have a short post about it we really were quite obsessed about it and produced at least a hundred pieces of beautiful paper over a week or so trying different techniques. The example below was our first attempt. We watched plenty of tutorials on You Tube this one is our favourite, its quite long but the end result is pretty amazing.

Anyway, here is our first one, I had a kit which I bought years ago, I dont think it cost much, maybe ten pound. It came with water thickener and a few inks in a nice box. The only downside to paper marbling is that to get the best water you need to mix the solution the night before.

We didnt flick the ink into the water at first, we just let it drip in. We added more and more ink until the surface was pretty much covered.

 As you can see, the colours we got in our kit were full on but we later experimented with kids poster paint mixed with a bit of water to make it drippy. That worked well especially with the flicky method.

 Nextly we got a cocktail stick and had fun dragging the ink around. flower shapes are easily made by pulling the ink into the centre. This effect works best when you keep putting the ink inside the previous drip to form rings.

Here is our finished piece. Yes. this really is our first try. Now you can see why we ditched the camera and just got stuck in. Much fun was had.

Paper love

I started crafting many moons ago, It began with paper crafting, and has led to too many other crafts to mention. But things have come full circle and I am rediscovering my love of paper crafting.

After some very heavy hinting I got a BIG SHOT for christmas. Here it is if you are not familiar: Take a look! Its an amazing bit of kit.

I have been having fun with vintage books recently so decided to put the leftover bits through the machine, along with my never ending supply of parcel paper. Here is what I came up with.

I added some vintage buttons with embroidery thread. 

They are available in my shop.

An old friend....

I used to do a lot of stamping a few years ago, then became tired of paper crafts, so my rubber stamps got put away. These past couple of months I have been playing around with printing and so I ventured into the loft to retrieve my stamps, most are no longer my style but i did have fun with a butterfly one, using blank parcel tags and handmade paper, I made some simple and pretty things for my shop.Here is a link to the paper craft:- http://www.etsy.com/shop/ChilliPeppa?section_id=10543040 

I will be doing more of this kind of crafting as I got to spend some time with my little girl, we had lots of fun apart from an exploding bottle of glitter glue but we wont go into that.

All wrapped up.

My Dad turned sixty recently and we have made him a gift (can't say what yet but I will do a post about it once he has received it!) and I decided to make him some hand stamped wrapping paper, I have a giant roll of brown parcel type paper which was begging to be jazzed up a bit.

I based my design on some vintage oven ware I found in a charity shop, I cut it from my new best friend lino and set about making an offset repeated pattern. Once finished I hung it up at my curtainless window and let it dry before the cat jumped on it. I cant wait to pick up my Dads gift and get it all wrapped up.