SO VERY SHABBY CHIC!

I am just loving these very shabby chic and delicious makes by Flo.....

Beautifully distressed and layered using our swirly frames and images from Life's Journey 2 as well as elements from a few stamps including CI-294. The luscious texture was created using paste and a couple of Dinky Stencils. All very nice indeed!

I also have some very nice tags to show you, firstly lots of tags, inspired by Flo (last blog post), and made carefully by Coco with CI-466 and CI-468...

Then a couple of tags by lovely Sylvie....

....again using CI-466, and also CI-469 and more.  Loving the rusty elements too on the second tag. Thanks for sharing ladies (links to their blogs on the right hand side).

Back again soon folks,

Jean x

p.s. Forgot to mention that we will be on our usual stand at Port Sunlight next Saturday.  Have you got your ticket? We look forward to seeing you there! x

p.p.s. We will be releasing new stamps at the show as well, and will have some very nice special offers to share!!!

BRIGHT, COLOURFUL AND VERY CHEERFUL....

Hello Lovelies, and thanks for checking in with us today.  I have some very bright and cheerful makes to show you below, so even if the sun isn't shining with you at the moment, here we have a lovely burst of colour and sunshine to brighten even the dullest of days!

Firstly I have a big thanks to send to Christine of Craftyfield, for so kindly sharing her scene with us recently (you may have seen it on Facebook?!).  This is exactly the sort of scene I was thinking of when we designed the 'Build a Landscape' series of stamps (new additions coming soon).

Christine used several CI stamps to create the above including CI-460 and CI-449.

The next make is truly bright and delightfully colourful and is by Sylvie, one of our lovely teamies..

Sylvie has used CI-372 by Alice Palace in the above card.

My next card is by Helen, who is a serious lover of colour, and she made this card with one of our more recently released stamps CI-466 featuring a spray of flowers..

Loving her background with Brushos and CI-468 and more.

Here is another make from Helen, with another one of the newer stamps CI-467, used to form lots of colourful rows of cottages - just gorgeous!!

.. And my final burst of colour today is from Flo, and again features the floral spray above, but this time split across two corners of her very pretty tag..

.. CI-468 again appears in the background.  Which reminds me that I have just received a fabulous box full of handmade delights from Flo.  More about that later!

Thanks everyone, and hope you all have a very lovely weekend out there, and lots of thanks too for your very sweet and kind comments always.

Back soon,

Jean x

FLO AND MASKING, AND OTHER BITS AND PIECES....

If you are on the CI mailing list for newsletters you will have recently received a step by step by Flo on masking techniques.  Hopefully you enjoyed it and found it useful.  We also put the relevant stamps on special offer for a week.  Here is the card Flo made and wrote steps about:

I love the 'Alice' theme here, and this is an earlier card Flo made with a similar theme and a few different stamps as well:

The stamps appearing above are on offer within the pages of the Sale section Here, and will be removed from this section at the end of this week.  If you don't receive our newsletters already, you can sign up to get them on our Homepage (towards the bottom of the page).  You will then get to know all about the offers and new stamps and stuff by email on a regular basis, so do join in the fun.

On a different note we will be back on Hochanda early next month - yay (more info to follow)!  Lesley made a rather lovely card on our last Hochanda show, and I had a play with the same technique myself.  It involved kraft card and a white paint background, simple but very effective.  I decorated a nice cheap sketchbook from Hobbycraft and created a couple of cards:

Stamps used in the above include CI-460, CI-209, CI-468,  CI-391, and CI-440.

My final makes this evening are another book cover design by Flo, and a card by Willy, both featuring stamps from our most recent issue, CI-466 and CI-467:

Love both of these makes!!

Thanks for viewing, and leaving comments, and I will be back soon,

Jean x

COCO'S CREATIVE CANVASSES.....

Corinne has been very creative recently and has designed these two terrific canvasses, which I thought were certainly worthy of their own blog post tonight.  She has used many CI stamps on them, and I will link to some of them after I show you the photos she has taken of her canvasses.  Firstly a photo of the two canvasses together.....

..... followed by individuals and close ups....

Some of the stamps you can see here are CI-416 'Feathered Friends', a new stamp CI-467 'Build a Landscape', CI-453 'Tree Trio' and an older stamp CI-202 'Hare Amongst the Trees'.

Some stamps used in the other canvas are CI-209 'Winter Trees' and CI-287 'Birds on a Wire', along with one of our very useful stencils 'Birds in Flight'.

If you decided to create a similar canvas of your own it is often less daunting to divide the canvas up as Coco has done and create smaller scenes within, and using similar colours and themes in each 'scene' and repeating some of the stamps will help bring it all together.  Stamping onto white tissue paper, fussy cutting and then gluing the tissue to the canvas overcomes the problem of stamping directly onto the stretched canvas.  When varnished the tissue itself can become almost invisible.  Also consider taking your images around the edges of your canvas too to complete the picture.

Check out more of Coco's lovely work on her blog.

Bye for now,
Back soon,

Jean x