Bunnies

Smokey and the Bandit

August 2, 2010 By Glenda 11 Comments

Monday is usually a good bunneh-watch day as I work from home on a Monday, so I can keep the camera to hand ready to snap any likely wildlife. However these bunnies have been evading me all weekend and it seems they like to pose for Adrian as he managed to snap these two this morning.

Don’t you just want to scritch that cute little belly!!

I’m delighted to see the Essence of Nature contest entries rolling in – I tried to leave some comments over the weekend, but Blogger got a bit shirty with me and kept telling me there was a problem, so I will have another go when there’s less internet traffic, see if that helps.

Meanwhile, I’m incredibly frustrated that I haven’t got a lot to show you art wise at the moment. I’m working on loads of stuff and have been churning it out, but it’s either for new stuff that isn’t released or it’s for my online classes which I can’t share either.

However, here’s a card that was made last year that the Guild had in their newsletter, but I don’t think I ever showed it here.

It was made with this stamp set called Bird Song.

It’s a lovely little set and I just realised while looking it up that it’s on special offer at the moment. Well there you go, I honestly hadn’t remembered that when I picked out the photo.

Well I better get back to all that work I mentioned, but I might just have a quick bunneh check first …

Filed Under: Cards Tagged With: Birds, Bunnies

Sleepy Smokey

July 26, 2010 By Glenda 14 Comments

Hello Smokey – I can see you!

Even if you are doing your best lump of coal impression.

Don’t flatten your ears at me young rabbit.

I have a long zoom lens, ya know!

Oh, alright, I’ll leave you alone to sleep. Sweet dreams …

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Bunnies

Three from one

July 21, 2010 By Glenda 22 Comments

What a difference daylight makes! The top photo is the one I showed you last night, taken in artificial light with the flash on the camera. I left the cards where they were and today took another photo in natural light with no flash. As you can see there’s quite a difference in colour – well there is on my monitor, but of course you are probably seeing something slightly different to me as monitors vary in how they output colour. (You can click on any of the cards to see them larger.)

It’s hard to say which is the truest colour as they both look right. Anyway, the point is these three cards were all made from one sheet of A4 paper printed from the Essence of Nature CD.

The thank you card is one I bought ages ago from Craftwork cards, with the word already die cut out. I stamped over it with the tail feathers from the curly birds stamps, stuck a strip of the patterned card behind and embellished with a hand made flower.

The middle card also has a Craftwork Cards product on – the foiled birthday wishes panel which is layered onto a piece of brayered card with a Prima Gallery Rose. I have to say the rose looks much less coordinated in the photo, it’s a much better colour match in real life.

Finally the 8×8 card features a stamped UTEE panel on a brayered background. I drew a rough circle with a Versamark pen and coloured it in, dipped the card in Bronze UTEE and heated it. That was repeated three times to build up a thick layer – each time a few stray specks always manage to get added which creates the dotty effect round the edge. I then stamped into the final layer before it cooled with the moonlit bird stamp.

So there you go, three cards with just a tiny snipped of patterned card left over.

Now as for Smokey smashing flowerpots, well he didn’t exactly smash the flowerpot in yesterday’s picture, the winter frost did most of the work, but he and several other bunnehs are responsible for it’s current state of total collapse. You see they seem to love jumping onto the pots and digging out whatever is in them.

Filed Under: Cards Tagged With: Bunnies, Essence of Nature CD

Essence of Nature Trio

July 20, 2010 By Glenda 11 Comments

I’m falling asleep on my feet tonight, so I’m just putting this photo up and will come back tomorrow to tell you about them.

Well, ok, maybe just one or two pics of Smokey.

Filed Under: Cards Tagged With: Artylicious CDs, Bunnies, Essence of Nature CD

Smokey and the daisies

July 17, 2010 By Glenda 12 Comments

Nobody's watching.

This one looks tasty

They'll never miss one daisy

Daisy, what daisy? Nope, wasn't me.

Evidence! Slightly out of focus evidence, but proof none the less.

Now listen up Smokey – you’re welcome to any amount of dandelions, daisies, clover, grass, nettles, and brambles. I don’t even mind you eating the leylandii (yes, really), but please – would you mind making some distinction and leaving alone the pansies, pinks, begonias, geraniums and all the other plants I don’t know the names of which we paid money for to make our garden look pretty. Got that?

And yes, I agree that he probably has dwarf genes – both basement bunnehs we’ve seen have been tiny and don’t seem to be getting any bigger compared to the other rabbits which are huge. We have hares round here too and they’re enormous!

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Bunnies

Paris Tag

July 16, 2010 By Glenda 20 Comments

I taught a class this week which was all about making backgrounds. One of the simplest was using magazine pages lightly coated with gesso as a collage element. Gesso takes inks differently to paper, so it can be interesting to mix and match them as I did in this tag.

I’ve inked up the tag with Crushed Olive and Dusty Concord distress inks, then used the same colours on the gessoed paper – you can see it’s much paler than on the tag itself.

I glued the gessoed paper onto the tag before stamping, but you can get a slight gap at the edge of the torn piece when you do that – you can just see it at the bottom of the tag. To avoid that, stamp the two separately then line up the gessoed piece over the top of the tag. You need to use a piece bigger than the tag so you can line it up accurately and trim round the edges after you have stuck it down.

I stamped the sentiment in Crushed Olive then repeated it without re-inking for a softer look. I then overstamped the first sentiment with black and the Crushed Olive has given the text a drop shadow effect.

We covered a lot of different background techniques – Direct to Paper

Precious Metal Paper

and lots more.

I’ve taught this class many times, always with some new variants, depending what new products have come out since the last time and I always enjoy it. I taught it to a bunch of calligraphers many years ago as they were looking for interesting backgrounds to write on. I had to test that all my backgrounds were suitable for writing on with calligraphers ink and discovered that shaving foam backgrounds worked great. I thought the soapiness would stop the ink from working, but it was fine.

As you will no doubt have seen yesterday, we had a Basement Bunneh in the garden again. He was quite happy to pose for photos and came back for more in the evening.