desperatehousewifecraft

November 15, 2018
by desperatehousewifecraft 3 Comments

Thanks a Latte

Hi everyone, its Gwendolyn here, back to remind you to join us in this month’s challenge where the theme is “Give Thanks”. Link up your cards here and maybe win a $15 voucher to the a2z Scrapbooking store, AND if you use any Hero Arts or Sugartree products, there is a bonus prize!

I made a very simple card today, using a digital stamp from Sugartree Stamps called “Hug in a Mug”, which you can immediately download as soon as you purchase it at the a2z Scrapbooking Etsy store. It has 5 different coffee cup images and 8 sentiments! Don’t forget to use my code Gwendolyn15 to get a 15% discount on all purchases $25 and over!

I first water-coloured my background on 300g watercolour paper using Ecoline liquid watercolours as I wanted a very vibrant look. I wet the paper thoroughly and just dropped in the colours of paints I wanted. While it was drying, I prepared my print file on my computer by inserting the image I wanted and duplicated it all over my page. I also prepared the sentiment I needed by just printing it on a white piece of paper and die-cutting it with Sue Wilson’s stitched rectangle dies. I then printed my coffee file on the dried water-coloured panel.

I cut it into size with Sue Wilson’s stitched rectangle die and adhered it onto one side of a white card base and added the sentiment. So, very simple and easy to recreate! I hope you’ve been inspired by my card to join us in this months “Give Thanks” challenge and I look forward to seeing your cards in the line up!

Thanks for stopping by and have a great creative day!

Are you on social media? We are! Please join us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook? so you don’t miss any fun promotions or new challenge announcements!

Please join us in this month’s “Give Thanks” challenge. As you know, we’ve changed our rules a bit and participants are no longer required to use Hero Arts products to enter our challenges. Each month we feature a ‘Digi of the Month’ which will be the prize offered to our randomly-chosen challenge winner from our Hero Arts store. Our current monthly challenge can always be found in the menu bar, and runs from the 1st to last day of the month

The a2z scrapbooking store carries a wide variety of Hero Arts products! Get discounted new releases, sales, grab bags & more. Proceeds from our store benefit Celiac & Behcets disease foundations. Use my discount code Gwendolyn15 to get 15% off your purchase of $25 or more. If you’re looking for a Hero Arts product you don’t see in store, use the Request Custom Order button from with-in the shop

October 25, 2018
by desperatehousewifecraft 4 Comments

Spooky Neighbourhood Hero Arts

Hi everyone, its Gwendolyn back today to share a spooky Halloween Party invitation card I made to inspire you to join our current challenge “Frightfully Fun” here. For today’s card, I’m using Hero Arts Paper Layering Neighbourhood die again, which you can find in the a2z Scrapbooking store. The paper layering dies allow you to cut normally, giving a pop-up style of cut, and then, after folding or curling the cut edges, the image reveals itself, giving a 3-D dimensional look to your paper.

In my last post here, I gave a very colourful look to this diecut, but in today’s card, I’m going to show you how you can give a textured spooky look to it in a very simple way. I first water-coloured a piece of 300g watercolour paper, using Brusho’s black paint powders. When the paint was still wet, I pressed a piece of cling wrap, which I had crumpled up beforehand, on the water-coloured panel. Once it dried completely, I removed the cling wrap and there you have a wonderfully textured card base.

I then used this to cut my Hero Arts Neighbourhood die and added the diecut onto an orange card base from the Hero Arts Sunshine Mix folded cards set. I coloured in the moon with my Derwent Graphik acrylic ink pens and on top of that, added some red watercolour to create a bloody moon. My sentiment strip was also water-coloured with Hero Arts Watercolor dot palette by Daniel Smith and I wrote in “You’re Invited” with my yellow Derwent pens again, as its the only pens I have that really stand out against any dark water-colouring.

Well I hope you enjoyed the way I created my card and that you’ll be inspired to make a Frightfully Fun card for our challenge! And if you’re anywhere near Ulm, in Germany on the 31st of October, you’re invited to our Halloween party… if you dare!

Thanks for stopping by and have a great creative day!

Are you on social media? We are! Please join us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook? so you don’t miss any fun promotions or new challenge announcements!

Please join us in this month’s “Frightfully Fun” challenge. As you know, we’ve changed our rules a bit and participants are no longer required to use Hero Arts products to enter our challenges. Each month we feature a ‘Digi of the Month’ which will be the prize offered to our randomly-chosen challenge winner from our Hero Arts store. Our current monthly challenge can always be found in the menu bar, and runs from the 1st to last day of the month

October 23, 2018
by desperatehousewifecraft 4 Comments

Hero Arts Paper Layering die

Hi all, its Gwendolyn here on the a2z Scrapbooking blog today to share a card I made using the Hero Arts Paper Layering Neighbourhood die, which you can find in the a2z Scrapbooking store. The paper layering dies allow you to cut normally, giving a pop-up style of cut, and then, after folding or curling the cut edges, the image reveals itself, giving a 3-D dimensional look to your paper. So for this die, once cut, you have a choice to leave it flat or bend the edges of each building so that they would be vertical, which is really cool!

Today’s card would have been really quick and easy to make as I used a scrap of a watercolour exercise to colour my diecu. But I decided to cut each individual building and mount some of them on foam adhesive to give some dimension, instead of having the buildings stand straight as it’s not so convenient for mailing. So that took abit of time but I love the result!

For the sentiments, I used 2 different ones from the Hero Arts Color Layering Poppy stamp set and I stamped them with Hero Arts Charcoal ink, writing in the “&” by hand. I added a blue border & added some acrylic ink splatters with my Derwent graphic line painters to finish the card.

Well I hope you liked how I used the Hero Arts Paper Layering Neighbourhood die and that it will inspire you to play with them too! You can get them at the a2z Scrapbooking store. Thanks for stopping by and have a great creative day!

Are you on social media? We are! Please join us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook? so you don’t miss any fun promotions or new challenge announcements!

October 15, 2018
by desperatehousewifecraft 6 Comments

Hero Arts Winter Forest Halloween card

Hi all! I’m back after a month long forced break as I went back to France for a week to work but had to stay for a month! I didn’t have any of my craft supplies with me and my withdrawal systems were so severe I had to drink quite alot to compensate… LoL! I’m joking! (well not really…)

Anyway, all that just to say that I’m SOOOO happy to be back and making card and today’s card uses Hero Arts Winter Forest Digi stamp from the a2z Scrapbooking store which I decided to transform in to a Halloween card! This is my first Halloween card as we don’t send Halloween cards in Europe but as our current challenge is to make “Frightfully Fun” cards, I thought I’d challenge myself.

I first prepared my background by blending in Ranger’s distress inks and went over it all with Hero Arts Black ink. This is the first time I’ve used their inks to blend and they go on really well! I then flicked on some water. I formatted & printed the rows of trees from the digi stamp set which contains 8 stamps around the main image and 12 extras, like paper and other Christmas digi images.

I used just the row of trees and once they were printed on my background, I drew in the tree branches, with any black marker, to make them look even spookier! To draw in the spooky wolves eyes, I used my Derwent line painter which are pens that contain acrylic paint, so they’re great to colour over distress inks. The white specks are also from a white Derwent pen. I wanted to use a Hero Arts stamp for the sentiment and found this from their Color layering hydrangeas set which I stamped in white and went over with my yellow Derwent pen.. I thought it quite funny to suggest that it’s the wolves that are here for you… just waiting for you… or it could also mean that I’m here to keep all those bad things away.

Well I hope you liked how I transformed this Christmas digi stamp into a Halloween card. Thanks for stopping by and have a great Creative week!

Are you on social media? We are! Please join us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook? so you don’t miss any fun promotions or new challenge announcements!

September 15, 2018
by desperatehousewifecraft 7 Comments

Hero Arts Cowboy Adventure

Hi all, it’s Gwendolyn here and I’m back to showcase the Hero Arts “Cowboy Adventure” stamp set which you can find from the a2z Scrapbooking store. I love this stamp set as I can make masculine cards for graduation, farewell, retirement… or even a birthday card for someone who loves travelling!

The idea for this card came from our visit to the Grand Canyon afew years ago when we were doing a family road trip on the Route 66 & I will always remember the sunsets during that trip as they were spectacular!

I started out by blending in Abandoned Coral, Spiced Marmelade & Mustard seed distress inks to create my sunset background. I then stamped in the mountains with Hero Arts Caramel hybrid ink & coloured them in with my Spectrum Noir Illustrator alcohol markers. The cowboy was stamped in with Hero Arts black ink and to make the large arched rock, I stamped the arch image twice, fussy cut them, and used the underside of one to create the opposite rock formation. I then trimmed them down so they would fit snugly over the cowboy and adhered them on foam tape so it would give the illusion that the cowboy was behind this rock formation.

The sentiment from the same stamp set was stamped with Versamark clear ink on black card stock and heat embossed with Hero Arts White detail embossing powder. I cut the sentiment strip so that it would resemble mountains too and mounted it on foam tape too.

Well I hope you liked my card and if you would like this stamp set, you can custom order it from the a2z Scrapbooking Etsy store. Don’t forget to use my personal code, which you can find below, for a 15% discount for every order over $25!

Thanks for stopping by and I hope YOU never stop exploring!

Are you on social media? We are! Please join us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook? so you don’t miss any fun promotions or new challenge announcements!

Please join us in this month’s “Clean and Simple” challenge. As you know, we’ve changed our rules a bit and participants are no longer required to use Hero Arts products to enter our challenges. Each month we feature a ‘Digi of the Month’ which will be the prize offered to our randomly-chosen challenge winner from our Hero Arts store. Our current monthly challenge can always be found in the menu bar, and runs from the 1st to last day of the month

August 25, 2018
by desperatehousewifecraft 3 Comments

The Perfect Blend

Hi all! Its Gwendolyn and I’m back today to share a perfect blend I discovered when I mixed Sugartree & Hero Arts digital stamps! In my last two posts I showed you how you could use the Hero Arts “Painted Petals” digi stamp, and then the Sugartree “Hug In A Mug” digi stamp.

Well today, I’m going to show you how to use both of them together!

I created a little video of how I edited the digi files to add the sunflowers and sentiment on the mug and you can find it at the end of the post. Please forgive me if its a little shaky as its the first time I did a video of my screenshot. Once they were edited to create a sunflower mug, I printed them on Nina Solar White paper and coloured them in with my Derwent Graphik line painters. These are acrylic paints in a pen and create a very thick layer of ink. I doodled in the leaves & coloured the handle green with my Spectrum Noir Illustrator marker.

To finish, I added a little Nuvo Crystal drops in the middle of each flower and used the tip of the applicator to create the bumpy texture to add more interest. This was a very simple card to make and I hope you like it! As promised here is the video I made to show you how I digitally assembled the images using the Pages app as I have an iMac it should be the same method with Word or Powerpoint.

Thanks for stopping by and I wish you an amazing crafting weekend!

Hugs,

Are you on social media? We are! Please join us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook?so you don’t miss any fun promotions or new challenge announcements!

Please join us in this month’s “Anything Goes” challenge. As you know, we’ve changed our rules a bit and participants are no longer required to use Hero Arts products to enter our challenges. Each month we feature a ‘Digi of the Month’ which will be the prize offered to our randomly-chosen challenge winner from our Hero Arts store. Our current monthly challenge can always be found in the menu bar, and runs from the 1st to last day of the month

August 15, 2018
by desperatehousewifecraft 5 Comments

Hug in a Mug

Hi everyone. I’m back today to share a card I made with a digital stamp from Sugartree Stamps called “Hug in a Mug” This is a set of 13 individual stamps consisting of 5 images and 8 different sentiments to mix and match as you wish. I don’t use digital stamps very often but I’m beginning to like them more and more as I can change the size of the stamps to whichever size I like. These stamps even come in a second variation for no-line water-colouring with grey outlines instead of black.

I started off by inserting & arranging my image and sentiment stamps using the Pages application as I have a Mac. I then did a print test on scrap copy paper to make sure the images were where I wanted them to be, before printing them again on Multi-technique paper as I wasn’t yet sure how I wanted to colour my mugs. I finally decided to use my Spectrum Noir Illustrator alcohol markers to colour them. I then added clear gel from Lukas, to some parts the mugs, except for the blue part on the bottom mug, to which I added Nuvo’s Caribbean Ocean crystal drops gel instead. I also added Nuvo gloss white crystal drops to the dots in the green cup.

It’s hard to see the shine & the 3D effect in the photographs, but in real life they look like porcelain mugs! I cut out this panel with Stamplorations “Crazy double running stitched” rectangle die and adhered it to a card base which I had surrounded with little dots using my Nuvo drops again.

So all in all a very simple card to make although you do have to let the gel dry, but I just made other cards with the other stamps in the meantime, and I’ll share them in my next post on the 25th of August!

Well I hope you like my card and I would love to know what you think of it. Have a great day!

Are you on social media? We are! Please join us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook?so you don’t miss any fun promotions or new challenge announcements!

Sugartree Stamps “Hug in a Mug”
Spectrum Noir Illustrator Alcohol markers PP1 & FS1, CG1, GT1, DR1 & CT2, B01.
Stamplorations Crazy double running stitched die
Lukas Crystal Gel
Nuvo Crystal Drops gloss – Caribbean Ocean & Gloss White
Clairefontaine 250gm multi technique paper

July 24, 2018
by desperatehousewifecraft 10 Comments

Poetic Petals digital stamp – Part 2

Hi everyone! Today I’m using Hero Arts Poetic Petals digital stamp again, to show you an easy way to colour this stamp, with shining results! This stamp set comes with 4 beautifully drawn flowers and in my last post here, I showed you how to do a no line water-colouring with one of them. Today, I just coloured them in with pencils and markers, directly on the copy paper I printed them on!

The actual reason I did this was that I’m still on holiday at my Mother in law’s in Madrid and I thought she would have a printer here so I didn’t bring another printed image on proper colouring paper. Fortunately she doesn’t have a printer as this led me to discover that cheap printer paper works just as well for colour pencils and markers! I started colouring in the printed image with dark blue Prismacolor pencils but then decided I wanted a more vibrant look. As I didn’t bring any other colouring medium with me, apart from my watercolours which would not work on copy paper, I searched around my mil’s stationary and found some blue and gold uni ball glitter gel pens & used those.

Once I finished colouring my flower, I cut it out, put it aside and started on the card base. I used the lightest colour card from Hero Arts Floral Mix folded card & cut it into strips with a scissors. I then glued only the broad strips back onto the card. As the copy paper was very thin, I added a thick scrap paper under it and glued the flower onto my prepared card base. This whole panel was then glued onto the darkest blue card from Hero Arts sea mix folded cards.

Can you see the shine the uni ball pens give, i just love it! The typewritten sentiment comes from a… typewriter! I didn’t bring appropriate sentiment that would fit into the small space so I typed it in myself!

Well I hope you like my card and I would love to know what you think of it. Have a great day!

Are you on social media? We are! Please join us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook?so you don’t miss any fun promotions or new challenge announcements!

Please join us in this month’s “Birthday Bash” challenge for your chance at a free digital stamp AND, if you used Hero Arts or Sugartree Stamps, a $20 gift card to our Hero Arts store. Our current monthly challenge can always be found in the menu bar, and runs from the 1st to last day of the month

Hero Arts Poetic Petals digital stamps
Hero Arts Floral Mix foldable cards
Hero Art Sea Mix layering page
Uniball Signo blue, pink and gold glitter gel pens

July 15, 2018
by desperatehousewifecraft 4 Comments

No Line water-colouring with Hero Arts Poetic Petals digital stamp

Hi everyone! My name is Gwendolyn Goh and this is my very first post as a design team member at a2z Scrapbooking and I’m thrilled to be in such a talented team! For my first creation here, I decided to make a framable watercolour piece using one of the flowers from Hero Arts “Poetic Petals” digital stamp set & colouring it using the no line water-colouring method.

I created a video to show you exactly how I did it, but essentially I just printed the flowers onto normal printer paper and shaded the back of the flower I wanted to trace, with a large graphite stick. You can also use an ordinary pencil as that will work very well too. Once the back of the flower was all covered, I traced the flower with a normal pencil. The shading behind the flower acted like carbon paper and I ended up with the outline of the flower on my watercolour paper.

I then started water-colouring by adding the base colour and when that was thoroughly dry, added the fine lines you can find on the digi stamp, which I used as my template, with a thin brush. To finish, I flicked some paint on it (great way to use up your leftover paints) & added a frame with a black marker. I’m quite pleased with the result, especially since it is the first time I’ve done this with a digi stamp, so its really quite easy and I hope you’ll try it. Let me know if you do!

As promised, here’s the video I made to show you how I water-coloured this beautiful “Poetic Petals” digital stamp.

I hope you enjoyed my first post here. Thanks for stopping by & have a great end of the week!

Are you on social media? We are! Please join us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook?so you don’t miss any fun promotions or new challenge announcements!

Please join us in this month’s “Birthday Bash” challenge for your chance at a free digital stamp AND, if you used Hero Arts or Sugartree Stamps, a $20 gift card to our a2z Scrapbooking Etsy store. Our current monthly challenge can always be found in the menu bar, and runs from the 1st to last day of the month

Hero Arts Poetic Petals printable
Winsor & Newton watercolours
Clairefontaine 250g multi-technique paper
Da Vinci no 2 & 7 watercolour brushes
Pencil
black marker

a2z Scrapbooking Supplies

A Hero Arts Retailer

Author Archives: desperatehousewifecraft

Thanks a Latte

Spooky Neighbourhood Hero Arts

Hero Arts Paper Layering die

Hero Arts Winter Forest Halloween card

Hero Arts Cowboy Adventure

The Perfect Blend

Hug in a Mug

Poetic Petals digital stamp – Part 2

No Line water-colouring with Hero Arts Poetic Petals digital stamp

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