WOYWW 162

Hi all. I've just noticed that I haven't done a post since the blog hop last week, but that doesn't mean I haven't done anything. In fact I have had a busy week. My problem is that I usually make cards as I need them, and this month is a particularly busy one in the family, so I have made several cards that I can't blog about until after the events.

However my halo is shining as I did manage to file away all those stamps I showed last week. They are now all in one or other of these files. It is not quite so easy to categorise them as it used to be, e.g. does it go in Floral, Swirls and flourishes or Butterflies? But I put them where I think I am most likely to look for them, and whenever possible I put a 'note to self' in the other folders. I once did the mammoth task of moving all my stamps from their wooden blocks and putting them onto EZmount. They are now stored on laminated A4 paper in plastic pockets to catch any that fall off, with a stamped sheet and list of companies on the reverse to help me identify them. All the files on my shelf have stamps in except the two brown ones on the lower shelf which house my ATCs and are waiting to be decorated.

Now to my desk this week. I had a play time last night, trying out various methods of applying colour. I stamped my new Poppy stamp from Chocolate Baroque in Stazon, Versafine and Memento. As usual I got by far the best image using versafine, but I was surprised at how pale the memento one was. All was revealed when I came to add colour and found I had stamped them all on to white pearlised card. I am on the waiting list for a cataract operation (September I hope, as only really urgent ops are done in July and August), and the sight in my right eye is almost nil, so it wasn't until the light caught the sheen on my paper, that I realised what I had done. 
Notice that my usual cup of tea is now replaced with a bottle of water. Need to keep the fluids up in this weather. Also don't you just love my jumbo kitchen roll? They are perfect for messy workers like me. Needless to say Baggins is in on the act too. He loves my fan and sprawls out right in line with it, whenever he can get away with it. (His mum, Arwen, hates it and curls up on it's stand on the floor, away from the air stream).

I had cut a mask for the flower from eclipse paper, and had intended making backgrounds trying out sponging with my new pan pastels, and on another, trying my, also new, ink dusters with distress ink, but I decided that the paper wasn't ideal for a trial run, so just coloured the images instead. 

Here are the first two. I prefer the one on the right, stamped with Memento so that I could colour it with copics. I have the full range of colours in these, and a colour chart I made to help me chose which to use. The centre image was stamped in versafine and painted with my much loved H2Os. I only have a few colours in these but I love the sheen they give to flower petals. They didn't perform at their best on this paper, but I think it is usable. For the third one, stamped with Stazon so I could use water base pens, I was not happy with the result so I didn't complete it. I have the new TH distress markers but when I tried colouring direct to paper, earlier in the week, the result was disastrous, so bad I won't even show it on here. The colours were much too intense, and I couldn't find a combination for skin tone. So this time I tried scribbling on a tile and picking up the colour with a water brush. I still found them very hard to blend, and I did not have a suitable colour range, although I do have the complete set. I shall try again on watercolour paper and chose a subject more suited to the slightly 'grungy' colours. I'd be interested to know how anyone else is getting on with them.

Sorry this is a too long post for Wednesdays, but thank you to anyone who has stuck with it to the end. It is time now to go over to Julia's Stamping Ground to post it, and see what my friends are busy with this week.