Manicstamper goes East

Being a cardmaking tutor I often get asked where I get my inspiration from to come up with new card designs all the time. The short answer is that I don't know. Much of the time they just happen which is good because if they didn't......I'd be out of a job.

The longer answer....and the one that most people want to hear is that sometimes I lack imagination to use materials that I already have to produce something new and then an explanation of how I overcome this.

What works for me is sorting and tidying.........and it works just about every time.

So I'll get up in the morning and think that I maybe don't feel like making cards today but will decide to tidy my paper storage or sort through one of my jars of ribbons and what happens is that two pieces of paper will be lying on the desk that I would never have chosen to put together but somehow they work. Or I'll discover a length of ribbon buried at the bottom of a jar that I had completely forgotten.

Whatever........it gets my creative juices flowing and off I go for a few more weeks until the 'I don't wanna's' hit me again.

I had a touch of it this morning as I was up until the early hours and didn't get much sleep so I decided to attack the drawer where I keep all my experimental background pieces and have a really good sort out.

I came across a pack full of pieces of card that I had used for some bleaching experiments last year. Fed up of just stamping and then painting with bleach or just stamping with bleach I decided to try applying the bleach with different tools to see what effects I could produce.

A lot of the pieces had been lightly sponged with neat bleach and looked really nice so for todays card I used two of the sponged pieces in a slightly unusual combination of colours for this Oriental card made using stamps from TandaStamps Far East Set 3.

The burgundy card bleached beautifully to give the mottled effect and the yellow card started it's life as a lovely olive green.

I repeat stamped the text stamp onto the burgundy card using Versamark and then embossed in gold and then used the same to stamp the image onto the yellow card.

The image was then bleached some more until the card became a smoother yellow.

Both were mounted onto black card and then attached to the card. The yellow layer is on foam pads.

The black strips are cut from leftover card and attached with DS tape.

Well I think I am going to have a slightly earlier night tonight as tomorrow is the start of my big spring clean and I am off upstairs armed with bin bags and a grim determination to declutter and clear up some jobs that have needed doing for a while........like getting rid of the box full of a 1970's DIY part work that hubby collected and has never even looked at which is why to this day his solution for any DIY job is a hammer and a six inch nail........bless him.

Bye for now

Sheila-x-