What A Hoot S1408 : CTMH Stamp of the Month Australasian Blog Hop

Hello and welcome aboard our Stamp of the month Australasian Close to My Heart Blog Hop! Look at us with a brand new Stamp of the Month from a Brand New Ideas Book!!!! Hoot Hoot Hooray!!!
If you have arrived here from Natalie's Close to my Heart Blog then you are in the right place. If you landed here by accident, no problem, please join in by following the link at the end of this post.

So one of the things I do on a regular basis is run workshops for kids. As a Mum and a trained primary school teacher I really enjoy seeing kids of all ages enjoying the creative process and especially the part when they turn to their parents and say 'Look what I made!'.

So today I am going to share some of the techniques I use with kids in a simple stamping session. I have used August's Stamp of the Month 'What a Hoot' available exclusively throughout August for $24 or for just $5 when you spend $75.

This is an amazing stamp to use with kids! It screams creativity. It's like playing dress ups with owls. So much fun!

So when I work with younger kids (today's attendees are 3 year olds), I make sure I get all my materials organised beforehand. I place all my materials in groups on a nearby (but out of reach) table. I want to be able to grab the next step/ activity at a moment's notice. Kids in this age group will not sit quietly while you dig around trying to find a pair of scissors or decide to mix a new paint colour.

So at this session I had a plan that we would create a card. I had all the pieces precut and I had pre-stamped the phrase 'what a hoot' with VersaMark ink onto white daisy cardstock and embossed it with clear super fine embossing powder. I had also mixed up some paint with water - I do this regularly, it makes the paint go further but in this case it also made the paint into more of a wash, which is what I wanted. I had all the stamps prestuck on blocks and the kids table covered in butchers paper.

The kids arrive and it is so exciting to be doing craft!!!

I always start with a stamping activity with no boundaries. This gets the kids used to the blocks, stamps and ink pads (which are super kid friendly - don't worry, nothing toxic here). So I just let them go for it with some plain white paper and a couple of ink pads. I choose colours based on their preferences but also keeping in mind that I don't want the colours to mix so darker colours are better to prevent cross-contimaniation on the pads.

I was really interested to see which stamps they wanted to use together. It's never what you expect.

After some fun I get out my black pigment ink and get the kids to pass me the stamps they want to use on their cards. I do the stamping on this one - pigment ink is a bit too yukky to put in the hands of a 3 year old. After the nod of approval on the cards I cover the stamped image in our very special 'magic pixie dust' (Clear Super Fine Embossing Powder), shake off the excess and while I hold the cards over the toaster I get the kids to say magic words to help the magic happen.

I set the newly embossed images to one side to dry while we do a bit more magic of our own. The pre-stamped 'what a hoot' cards are brushed with the paint solution and.... magic! Words appear! We put these to one side to dry.

Now we can colour our owls. I do not let young children use my excellent alcohol markers. Best markers to use with young kids are Crayola Washables. The number of times I have panicked because texta has appeared on something precious and then run it under a bit of water and it has disappeared has made me a fan of these. Love them.
So why have we bothered to emboss the owls? If you have done colouring with young children recently you will know that they often don't stay in the lines and in the case of my dear boy he often just scribbles over the entire thing making it so you can't see the image at all. When you emboss, however, it creates a plastic coating over the image which prevents the marker ink from colouring it - so even if they scribble over the entire image, you will still clearly see the owl. Clever huh?

Finally we need a pop of colour on our card - a quick mat of coloured cardstock stuck on an angle behind our dear owls helps to create a fun look. With kids I usually just use glue sticks because they are cheap and they can manage them on their own, plus the glue is easy to wipe up if it gets dropped. However when we are just sticking a few pieces down like with this project I help them to use a tape runner - for this project I used my new favorite: EZ dots. Love love love my EZ dots but that is a blog for another day...

Ta da! Look what we made!

The What a Hoot Stamp set  is only available until the 31st of August from your CTMH consultant. I'd love you to leave a comment (or even ask a question) before heading off to the next stop on the Blog Hop- Lisa's blog : Crouchie's Getting Creative

Circus Alphabet S1407 : CTMH July Stamp of the Month AustralasianBlogHop

Welcome to my first ever blog hop entry! If you are not sure what a blog hop is, read on and you'll soon discover a fun scavenger hunt of ideas! This is the Stamp of the month Australasian Close to My Heart Blog Hop. If you have arrived here from Mandy's blog, Hall of Indulgence then you are in the right place. If you landed here by accident, no problem, please join in by following the link at the end of this post. 

I would like to share with you this mini banner which features July Stamp of the Month Circus Alphabet available exclusively throughout July for $24 or for just $5 when you spend $75. 

This cute little banner will look great on a cake or on the party table PLUS you have the added bonus of being able to scrap it into an album afterwards!

The banner shape is cut from the Art Philosophy Cricut cartridge. Page 29 Decorative Layer cut at 1.8 inches.
You need 16 total pieces. I cut 8 from pear cardstock and 8 from lagoon cardstock.
I used gypsy ink to stamp the Circus Alphabet letters onto the banner. One of my favourite things to do with alphabet stamps is investigate the punctuation shapes that come with them for decorating other things. In this set the full stop is a cute little spiral circle. I used the full stop to embellish the ends of my pennants. I did find with this stamp that you only need slight pressure to get the stamp detail - too much and the spiral becomes a blob.

To finish off I used slate baker's twine and simply threaded the twine through. When you do this, decide how you want the thread to show: across the middle of each pennant or on the side of each pennant (as I have done). It is much more pleasing to the eye if they are all threaded the same way. I threaded by hand as I found the holes big enough but if you find threading difficult just use a large needle.

Circus alphabet is only available until 31 July from your CTMH consultant. I'd love you to leave a comment before heading off to your next stop,  Monika's blog: A Sprinkle of Glitter.

Arrgghhh!!! There be treasure me hearties!

As part of my job as a Close to my Heart consultant I often make projects to order as requested by my customers. This is usually a special card or a cricut shape or maybe a gift box. Last month though I got a request for something exciting... a pirate's treasure chest!!!

The box needed to be quite large (minimum 10x15x12 cm) in order to fit a prepurchased gift inside. Here is what I came up with:

 

As soon as I read the request I knew that I wanted to use the new Timberline papers with the  chocolate woodgrain washi tape. I had been planning on using this combination for an upcoming kids workshop to make a father's day gift, so this was a great chance to make sure the combination worked.

First thing I had to do was design a net that would give me the correct size and shape (lucky I was fairly good at maths at school). I always draw a rough sketch of how I want my nets to look before I draw them to scale on scrap paper and cut them out. It is important to take into consideration the size of the paper you are actually going to use (in this case 12x12 inches) - you want to make sure your pieces will fit on the paper. [There is one piece missing from the photo below.]

This chest required 3 pieces of cardstock. I chose to use Kraft Cardstock to complement the look of the woodgrain paper. 

I used tombow and glue dots to glue the flaps down to create the 3D chest. I use the tombow along the edges of the flaps to stop them lifting and looking untidy and then place a dot on either end of the flaps to give it strength.

Next I cut out rectangular pieces from the timberline paper to cover each of the rectangular surfaces on the chest. It is important to make sure that the 'grain' in the wood is running the right way when placed on the chest. To cut the two trapezoids on the sides of the lid of the box I simply cut that piece out of my net and used it as a guide.

I glued the timberline pieces to the chest using bonding memories glue.

Next I cut lengths of the washi tape and covered all the edges. This helped reinforce the chest as well as hide any edges where the timberline paper had not quite sat flush with the edge.

Once this was all done I felt the chest still needed something. After much deliberation I finally decided a closing mechanism looking somewhat like the padlocks on old chests would work.

I used dimensional elements (framework and mixed shapes) and covered them with bronze shimmer trim. I cut lengths of the shimmer trim and placed them side by side over the dimensional element until it was covered, then I trimmed the excess shimmer trim off with scissors (love my micro-tip scissors for this fiddly kind of work).

This left the edges of the elements looking blatantly white - no problems, easy fix - grabbed a dauber and my chocolate ink and coloured the edges to be a less distracting chocolate brown.

A piece of ribbon from my stash was easily stuck to the back of the two dimensional elements using glue dots and the top element was stuck to the top of the chest with more glue dots. I then put a piece of velcro behind the bottom element - and here is a trick - you stick the joining piece of velcro to it as well (so you have the element, then ribbon, then a velcro hook dot, then a velcro loop dot with it's tacky side facing outwards). Now I can position the bottom element where I want it to be when the chest is closed and push down so that the velcro sticks. Then I carefully open up the chest to make sure that velcro piece now stuck on the chest is stuck down firmly.

Finally I decided the chest didn't look 'piratey' enough so I added some triangle studs.

I was very happy with the outcome but discovered a devastating problem..... Master 3 thought it was for him!