Paper Piecing Hugs

Hi everybody,

Jill here, and this week I’ve got some sweet & simple paper piecing...

...using Mama Elephant’s adorable In My Heart.

The In My Heart set is one of my all time favourite’s.  I think the artwork is so darling and delectable and there are some really kind and caring sentiments in there.  Oddly enough the little sprig of grass that comes in the set is one of those tiny stamps I reach for time and time again to help me build up scenes and has become invaluable to me!

 I stamped out one of the sweet little girls from the set three times onto watercolour card, and three times onto different patterned papers.  I coloured three of my wee lassies using my Zigs and cut leaving a slight white edge to imitate the look of die-cutting.  I then fussy cut the three little dresses from the patterned paper stamp outs, added a little detail with a white pen, and paper pieced over the top of my adorable girlies.

         

My backdrop is a rainbow made up of my trusty Zigs with a lot of water to help the colours blend.  My sentiment is from the same In My Heart set and is stamped and clear heat embossed to add definition and clarity.

I loved the clean and simple look of the design so decided to leave it there.

I really hope you like it, as always everything I used is linked below.

See you next week.

Jillx

      

Creating Faux Filters

Hi everybody,

Jill here, and this week, I'm creating my own faux photography filters...

Using Mama Elephant's Pix's Favourite's as my main focus.

I used to love creating this kind of sepia effect but hadn't tried it in ages so thought I'd give it another blast.

It's such a simple, yet effective technique.  You simply stamp your design out in a brown ink, and colour your images monochramaticially (is that a word?  You get what I mean...several tones of the same colour).  I used various brown Distress Inks and watercoloured my images, but you could use pens, or pencils, or whatever your favourite colouring medium is, to achieve the same look.  I also introduced an accent colour of pink to add a little warmth and help the heart to stand out.

I used My Favourite Things Geometric Grid to stamp onto my background and white heat embossed. I then brushed more of the same colour inks across it creating a matching wash, and used Lawn Fawn's Say Cheese die to frame to my coloured image.

I enjoyed this technique so much and really loved the result, I felt it looked like I'd put a cool vintage filter over my images, so decided to try out the same thing again but in black and white this time;  and here's where that took me...

I used Mama Elephant's In My Heart and Spring Garden to create my black and white design, and used the exact same technique, just using black and grey inks, again, with a splash of pink.  I've also seen a load of simple blue & white designs, like the look you get on crockery and bone china, and that looks awesome too, so maybe I'll give that a go next.  I was thinking you could try it in any colour and I bet the result would be really interesting...like your own personal Instagram for your cards :)

I really hope you like them, and as always, everything I used is linked below.

See you next week.

Jillx