Farewell to Waltzingmouse Stamps

Deborah Frings and I have opened the old Waltzingmouse Fanatics blog to do a final farewell hop for Claire following her heartbreaking decision to close her fabulous store.   http://waltzingmousefanaticschallenge.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/waltzingmouse-stamps-farewell-hop.html   Waltzingmouse were the first stamps I bought online and it was love at first purchase and I've been #foreverawaltzingmousefanatic since that very fist purchase.

So here is my celebration of all things Waltzingmouse - this could have been a very long post as I had so many options to choose from but I've been brutal in the edit!

This is one of my favourite cards - I used the snowflake die in the background for embossed texture and then did a paper- and wood-pieced robin to go on top.   He does give me the Warm Fuzzies like all Claire's stamps do!

One area in which I think Claire always excelled where other stamp companies often fail (or at best ignore!) is in masculine themed products.   Her products were always so easy to make cards for guys with which is an area I know many of us struggle with.  This is one of my favourites.

I was totally THRILLED to be on the Waltzingmouse blog as part of their "friendly feature" back in 2013  http://waltzingmouse.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/july-friendly-featuretara-caldwell.html   Here is the doll inside the doll card I made for it.
 

I was also lucky enough to be pubished in Paper Crafts magazine in the same year with MY ALL TIME FAVOURITE Waltzingmouse stamp set - that cowboy set just makes me happy everytime I see it!

I couldn't resist making a little something new with my Waltzingmouse supplies - this one is just for you Claire -  I will miss you!

I used Camellia plus Compact Sentiments Part 2 - Claire always had the perfect sentiment for every occassion!  Simply stamped and embossed and watercoloured (roughly!) with Gansai Tambei paints.

Do join in the hop and share your love of the mouse!  http://waltzingmousefanaticschallenge.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/waltzingmouse-stamps-farewell-hop.html

Tara
x

Stripes and Flowers

It's time for a new challenge at Waltzingmouse Fanatics and this time you don't have to make a card for a fella so hopefully you'll be less scared to play along!   We have a really simple sketch for you to play with so pop on over and check it out http://waltzingmousefanaticschallenge.blogspot.co.uk/

For my card I wanted to play with my new stash (well naturally lol!) so I decided to make my stripes from stamps from Gift Card It as the pretty stamps can be used for anything not just gift cards!

I started with the large frame and stamped just one long edge onto green card with a darker green ink just letting the curve fall off the edge.  I used the two leaf springs on the same green with the same ink and make a pattern for the bottom stripe.  For the centre stripe I opted for some yellow DP - I do love the effect of stamping over a soft pattern and this tiny yellow and white dots was perfect for this.  I stamped the floral bunch all over and then coloured with a couple of copics.  I stamped a sentiment from the same set in the same green ink on the white base card.

I finished with another new product - the lovely funky florals dies and die cut a couple of the flowers and leaves from green and yellow felt and stuck them together over the centre of the top border adding a blingy gem to finish.

We hope you're inspired to join us this week - can't wait to see what you do with the sketch http://waltzingmousefanaticschallenge.blogspot.co.uk/

Rustling feathers

It's time for another Waltzingmouse Fanatics challenge and this time around we have another sketch for you - pop on over to the challenge to see it http://waltzingmousefanaticschallenge.blogspot.com/2014/01/challenge-10-sketch.html

My take on it is very loose but I think you still get the idea of the shape of it.

I created a simple one layer card by stamping 3 feathers from Fine Feathers in shades of green into the shape on the sketch.  The sentiment is from Funky Feathers and simply stamped in a darker shade of greeny-blue.

I do hope you'll join us - we'd love to see how you interpret the sketch.

I'm also linking it up to STAMPlorations challenge which is all about feathers http://craftilicious-yorkshire.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/rustling-feathers.html

Waltzingmouse and Flamingos

After our little Christmas break, it's time for another challenge over at Waltzingmouse Fanatics and we have a colour challenge based on a flamingo.

Although it's a bright and sunny image, the weather here in the UK has had me digging out my Christmas jumpers so I decided to use that for inspiration for my card.  I selected the flamingo pink, white and black from the colours for the stripes on my jumper inspired background and put it on kraft base to use 4 of the 6 colours in the scheme.

The background stamps are all from Nordic Winter and I just masked off the edges of my card before stamping them across and filling the background.  Once I removed the masks I added some faux stitching with a thin marker and then stamped a sentiment from Say it Loud Winter Holiday over the top.

We have a prize up for grabs for this challenge too - so I do hope you'll hop over to blog and play along with us - you have until 9th January - http://waltzingmousefanaticschallenge.blogspot.co.uk/

Golden Bauble

It's time for another Waltzingmouse Fanatics challenge today and after our tough theme we thought we'd better have a nice easy sketch and this is what I came up with for it.

I embossed the lovely ornament from Ornate Ornaments in gold onto kraft cardstock and added the bauble centre from Vintage Ornaments in the centre before cutting it out.  I mounted it onto a panel of candy cane striped paper from crate paper which is featuring heavily on my holiday cards this year as I think its very festive and cheerful!  The sentiment from Alpine Christmas was then simply stamped in black onto a strip of red paper and glued across the whole card.

I do hope you'll join us - it's an easy sketch to play with - you just need one Waltzingmouse product to play and there are freebies if you don't have their stamps.  http://waltzingmousefanaticschallenge.blogspot.com/2013/11/challenge-7-sketch.html

Christmas without Christmas

It's time for another challenge at Waltzingmouse Fanatics today and I've set a quirky little challenge that I think will stretch the grey matter a bit but I hope you all find it fun and join in!  This time around we're looking for a festive Christmas card but the only Christmas themed stamp you're allowed to use is a single sentiment - the images must be from a "non-Christmas" set.

OK - I know that sounds a bit hard, but once you put your mind to it, it's actually a lot of fun - I got a card into Paper Crafts magazine for this very challenge using entirely Waltzingmouse images (see it here) so it is possible.

This time around, the card actually happened by accident - I was trying to make a card with our first colour theme based on the red and green peppers and I decided to play with creating a background using elements from the Folk Art Medallion stamp set and when I'd finished I realised it looked quite "Christmassy" so I put it to one side and made another card for that challenge......

To finish this one, I simply stamped the Christmas greeting onto vellum and embossed it in black - I like the contrast of the strong black with the soft filter the vellum gives to the pattern underneath.  The sentiment is from Compliments of the Season 2.   As glueing vellum is tricky I just used some sticky backed card strips on either edge to adhere it to the card base.

So now it's your turn - hop on over to the Waltzingmouse Fanatics Challenge site and put your everyday sets into overtime for Christmas!

Stormy Seas

Are you ready for a new challenge?  Well we have a great colour challenge for you today over at Waltzingmouse Fanatics and here's what I did with it.

I paired our colours with the sketch from the current Seize the Sketch challenge to inspire my design and the colours led me naturally to a masculine card.

I started with a piece of of chevron striped paper in blue and grey from my favourite masculine pack - swagger from fancy pants and stamped the lovely splatter pattern from splat that over the top - I think we often forget than we can still stamp on decorative paper!   I added a little distress ink to the right edge to give it a moody feel to match the picture on our colour theme.

Next came the focal strip - another piece from swagger with a couple of feathers from funky feathers stamped on the right hand side in aspen mist from versa magic.  I embossed the sentiment from the same set in smoky slate powder from stampin up.  For the focal feather I stamped the same feather using aspen mist and aegean blue but rather than stamping it onto paper I stamped it into cloud clay - an ultra-lightweight airdry clay that can be cut with scissors (or even run through a die cut machine) - so once it was dry I trimmed the excess with scissors and stuck it down with glossy accents.

Masculine cards can be fun too you know ;-)   Hope you all hop on over to the challenge and give it a go - all you need is one Waltzingmouse product and there are freebies in their shop if you don't own any stamps ;-)   http://waltzingmousefanaticschallenge.blogspot.co.uk/

Halloween Fanatics

It's time for our third challenge over at Waltzingmouse Fanatics today and given that we're into October we thought we'd give you all the chance to get a head start on Halloween and pull out all your new release sets if you ordered them  http://waltzingmousefanaticschallenge.blogspot.co.uk/

Now I'm not the biggest fan of Halloween - nothing against it and I do love a good pumpkin - but it's just not very big around where I live so before this new release I didn't actually own any of the Halloween sets so I planned a project using Claire's wonderful little freebie poem which I thought would be great to give to my great nieces and nephews.

I embossed Halloween Treats from the Say It Loud Winter Holiday set onto some orange card and added a super cute bat I cut on the cameo.   I printed the poem on some copy paper, die cut it with a tag and then used an ink duster to add a little purple and grey ink for a spooky feel.  I filled some glassine bags with my bat poop and then simply stapled it all together.  Quick and easy Halloween treats!

However, when I saw the new release, I was very drawn to The Count - I do have a thing about vampires as I'm an avid reader of the Anita Blake books by Laurell K Hamilton so I made an exception and bought a couple of the sets this year and made a little card.

I stamped him in versafine black for a very strong silhouette in the foreground and then masked him so I could add the spooky ruin from All Hallows Eve behind him in grey.  I went for this set for this very image as it reminded me of my all time favourite painting which hangs in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool - it's a Gothic ruin just like this and the painting is so huge I can sit in front of it for hours and just imagine myself stepping into it.   Anyway, enough waffle - back to the card.  I added just a hint of red on his collar and the top of his walking stick and matched that in to the sentiment so it looked like it was scrawled in blood - perhaps it needs a few drips to finish it off.......

I do hope that's got your blood flowing (lol) and that you'll hop on over to the challenge site and play along with us this week http://waltzingmousefanaticschallenge.blogspot.co.uk/ and to get a bit more inspiration don't forget to visit my team mate Deborah

Fanatics Challenge No 2

So just to keep you all your toes - our challenge this fortnight at Waltzingmouse Fanatics is NOT a sketch but a colour challenge - based on the lovely image above ;-)

Now I made a card as soon as I set this challenge - and it worked out brilliantly - but then when I looked ahead of what dastardly really fun and interesting challenges we had coming up, I realised that it would be much more appropriate for another challenge so I had to rush and make another......

I decided to try to use all the colours and whilst the chillies themselves didn't speak to me (I'm a wimp with hot food!) I did stick to a foodie theme and pulled out the little bargain set Big Berries - Strawberry which I've only used a couple of times to date.  I simply inked two berries with two different shades of red ink (HA pale tomato shadow and SU real red) and the stems with two different shades of green (SU certainly celery and gumball green which I know is a bit off for the shade on the photo but we're not that strict at Waltzingmouse Fanatics so I think I'll get away with it lol!)

For the background I used the other two shades - loosely interpreted by me as a kraft base which I stamped with the super cute Pinstripe Mini Backgrounder using Brilliance Pearlescent Chocolate ink which is one of my all time favourite inks - I use it a lot as an alternative to black on masculine cards as the shimmer is subtle and not too girly ;-)  Then it was simple a case of finding an interesting arrangement of the fruits - hard with 2 - 3 would have been more eye pleasing but I didn't have room so I used my sentiment to form an interesting visual triangle and distract the eye from the oddly even fruit.....

Possibly not my best work but I found the colours rather, well, challenging actually - just who sets these challenges?  Oh yeah, that would be me lol ;-)    I hope you all find it much more inspirational than I did - we had such great cards in the gallery for our first challenge so I can't wait to see how creative you can all be.

We're just playing for fun this fortnight but we'd love to see if we can beat the 20 entrants we had last time so I do hope you'll join in :-)    Waltzingmouse Fanatics Challenge No 2

Waltzingmouse Fanatics is GO!

So it's our inaugural challenge at Waltzingmouse Fanatics today http://waltzingmousefanaticschallenge.blogspot.co.uk/ and we have a lovely sketch to kick it all off with.
 
I decided to make a couple of projects - one masculine and one feminine.  For my first project there was only one way to go - Way Out West with a focal element is from Sheriff and all done in kraft to keep it masculine.

I cut a piece of kraft card with a curved line following the sketch and then stuck it to my stamp mat and stamped two of the backgrounds from Way Out West across it - the words in crumb cake (SU ink) and the stars in black.  I adhered that to a kraft base card and kept the top part plain except for a silver stitch line.  I used another piece of kraft card to stamp the sheriff's badge and embossed with pewter ink.  Once cool I added a swipe of picket fence distress ink and buffed it off with a damp paper towel.  I'm quite pleased with this one.


For my second card I went more feminine and used the new Funky Flowers set as my focal element and a couple of sentiments from Say It Loud to create my background panels.
 

I'm not as happy with this one - I was trying to be clever with my background stamping and this version is my third (and best) attempt.  I cut a panel as before but this time in white and stamped the word "birthday" from Say it Loud across it in black ink.  I stamped "happy" from the same set in grey ink on my white base card but despite my best effort they didn't line up quite as I wanted (and yet I drew pencil lines and no I can't do maths!)  So I added a nice thick black line with a copic marker to cover up the mistakes and make a more defined dividing line.

For the focal element this time I stamped the largest flower from funky flowers in tangelo ink and then stamped the smaller one in pool and layered them up.  To form the flower centre I stamped the medium flower in tangelo again on shrink plastic to add a little dimension and interest.  I finished with a couple of leaves in pear tart which is my favourite green ink ever.

So now it's over to you - visit the challenge blog and play along for your chance to win a £20 voucher for Waltzingmouse stamps - you have almost 2 weeks to play so plenty of time to get your mojo rocking http://waltzingmousefanaticschallenge.blogspot.co.uk/

August Pajama Party

It's PJ party day again at Waltzingmouse stamps and who doesn't like to party in their pjs with their crafty buds?   Well I'm in for sure. http://waltzingmouse.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/invitation-to-wms-pajama-party-on-30th.html

There are 4 challenges this month that you could pre-prepare, plus the bedtime story sketch which will be revealed later.  I've had a go at all 4 this month (although I have combined two into one so I hope that's ok!)

The first challenge was "Tie a Knot in it" and I just adore the new knot set.   I decided to make a wedding card with it.  I embossed the frame onto a scrap of kraft card in gold and then masked the edges so I could stampt the heart into the middle.  I then used picket fence distress ink dauber and rubbed it all over quickly buffing it off with a damp paper towel - the white has come up really harsh in the photo but irl the kraft shows through much more.  Once dry, I stamped the sentiment over the white above and below the heart and cut the frame out by hand.  I stamped the straight rope onto a kraft base card and embossed in gold and then lined up the frame so the lines matched up.  The frame is popped up on dimensional foam for added interest.  I finished with the twisted rope embossed in gold at the bottom.  I think this would be a great card for a natural beach wedding.

The second challenge this month is "Get Naughty" which was the perfect opportunity to play with the new ocean bound set and I knew instantly which image I wanted to play with first - the life preserver ring!

I divided a 3x3 inch card into 9 boxes with very light pencil lines and then stamped the image 8 times to fill the card - although I left the central ring empty.  For the central image I stamped the ring twice onto 300gsm card and fussy cut it out.  I left some extra length on the "red bits" on the top image and totally cut off the rope - this allowed me to replace the rope with some bakers twine which I thought would make the central image a fun stand out embellishment.  I used glue dots folded over for dimension to stick the top image the bottom one and used the rope image on the bottom one as my guide for my twine, folding the "extra" card around the back to keep it place.  Once I was happy with the twine, I carefully cut the rope off the bottom image and my embellishment was complete (hope that makes sense - it reads more complex than it was to make!)  I finished with a simple folded banner sentiment to bring out the red.

For the final project I decided to combine the colour theme challenge with the Golden Oldie challenge:

For the golden oldie element I decided to use the first stamps I ever ordered from Claire - I found her brilliant company after doing a google search when I bought my spellbinder labels dies to see if there were any stamps to fit them and came across the genius that is Rescue Remedies!   So I decided to use one of the stamps from that set combined with the colours from the inspiration photo to make a quick and easy wrapper to go around a bar of chocolate - doesn't it make it look so much prettier - the perfect little pick me up for a colleague having a tough day!

 

I used the labels 4 die from spellbinders to cut a piece of white card stock and then inked up the stamp with the black, red, blue and one of the greys from the colour combo (I use the small momento dew drop pads so the points are perfect for multi-coloured inking if you do it carefully!)  I then used a piece of blue DP and some paler grey velvet ribbon to mount the label onto and hey presto - a pressie for a quid in less than 10 minutes which can only be a good thing!!!!

So that's the end of my PJ party projects for now - but I just wanted to hijack my own post for a minute to make sure all you Waltzingmouse Fans at the party are aware of the new challenge that starts next Saturday (7th September).   Deborah Frings and I are both HUGE Waltzingmouse Fans and we really missed the weekly sketch challenge so when we met this summer we cooked up a plan of launching our own challenge just for Waltzingmouse Fanatics like us - so with Claire's support and blessing (and even a prize for the first winner - shhh it's a secret!) we're launching http://waltzingmousefanaticschallenge.blogspot.co.uk/ just next week.   It will run fortnightly, not weekly, and will be a mixture of challenge types not just sketches - the only rule is that whatever you make has to use Waltzingmouse products somewhere.  

So if you haven't already checked us out - click the image below - select whichever "follow us" option suits you best and you'll get to see the first challenge when it goes live at 8am (GMT) next Saturday!   Don't forget to like us on Facebook too - the links to all our social media feeds are all on the blog.   We really hope you'll enjoy our new challenge - we're really excited to get started and to see who comes and plays with us :-)

Calling all Waltzingmouse Fans

 

Well today is the day that I can let out the little secret I've been keeping for a few weeks - Deborah Frings and I are launching a new challenge site for all fans (like us) of Waltzingmouse Stamps.  The challenge will run fortnightly on Saturdays and will feature a variety of challenges - sketches, colours and themes and the only rule is that entries have to include at least one Waltzingmouse product on their projects.  It's not just about cards it can be scrapbooks, altered items, gifts - you name it - anything goes as long as you follow the theme of the fortnight and inlcude your Waltzingmouse stash.

The first challenge goes live on 7th September but if you head on over to the blog today you can see the pictures of Deborah and I clutching our Waltzingmouse stash ;-)

http://waltzingmousefanaticschallenge.blogspot.co.uk/