Gothic Arch - Winter

I seem to have trouble getting my Gothic Arches done before the very last day of each theme - I started it late last night but got too tired to finish it. The theme this week is "Winter" and of course it is the middle of summer here and where I live, summers are VERY hot so it was quite nice to think cold and frosty. I have never experienced snow but I love the idea (at least in romantic dreamy terms - not sure I would handle the inconvenience and resulting slush very well!).

I have used a nice very softly coloured and patterned white, lime and blue scrapbook paper as my background and then stamped all over it with text, postmark and snowflake images from the Winter Snow Oxford Impressions stamp plate. I've used beautiful (at least to me they are!) lime and blue chalk inks for the stamping. The very "rugged up" little boy and girl are from the same stamp plate. The black strip is the trimming off a piece of cardstock that I am recycling - the binder holes are an interesting pattern. I also added some leftover white snowflake eyelets that I had bought ages ago for a specific project.

Because I used semi gloss paper for the photograph stamps, my scanner did horrible things to the image so I have photographed it. I find it much harder to get accurate colour using my camera but this is pretty close to the real thing.

Gothic Arch - Friends (& New Stamps!)

I am only just going to make the deadline for this week's Gothic Arch theme of "friends". It was a relaxing way to start my creative day - nice decorative paper, some stamping (favourite text and swirl stamps using ink and that wonderfully rich coloured Neopaque Turquoise paint) and a black and white decoupage image that I have coloured with diluted Antique Linen Distress Ink. It was a bit fiddly to cut out though - I really like straightforward images without those little gap bits!

On Friday I received the new Oxford Impressions stamp plate - Winter Snow (pictured above and with uncut rubber below). As with all of Suzanne's plates, this one is wonderful - full of interesting images with a great mix of large and small, photo images and text with a nice sprinkling of versatile detail stamps. While it is a Christmas themed plate there are heaps of images that I can see I will be using all year round. I've cut them out this morning and I am hoping to get some time to use them this afternoon. Audrey Hernandez who is also on the OI Design Team received hers a bit sooner than me so if you want to look at some beautiful pieces she has made with these stamps, check out her blog. Her blog is always beautiful and well worth regular visits!

Gothic Arch - Birds

I've missed the last two Gothic Arch themes so I was determined to make one for this week's theme of "Birds" before the next theme is announced tomorrow!

Once again this is made mostly with images from Oxford Impressions although there are some others in the background, including one of my favourite calligraphy images from Alphabetique. Colouring is Adirondack Colour Washes and Moon Shadow Mists and I have used the beautiful Versafine Spanish Moss and Adirondack Butterscotch ink pads for the background stamping. I have included two scans of my arch as I am amazed how much difference the background paper I have used on the scanner makes to the look of the actual arch!! The green paper really has a dulling effect compared to the orange painted canvas.

And now back to working on my giant jigsaw pieces!

Gothic Arch - Let's Party!

The theme for this week's Gothic Arch Challenge is "Let's Party". Today is the last day I could participate as the theme changes tonight. So I made a big effort yesterday afternoon to put my thinking hat on and to come up with an idea as I had been stumped by this one all week!

I decided to use some of my fabulous cowgirl stamps from Oxford Impressions and to create a page around the words "Even Cowgirls get the Blues". It was actually good fun to make and I even dug out my scallop edge scissors from the tin they have been living in for the last several years, along with all the other fancy edge scissors that I don't seem to use anymore.

So let's party!!