My first paper bag book

 This is the final part of my AECP (Altenew Educator's Certification Program)  level 2 challenge. If you have not seen the first part of the challenge it is all in my previous blog post HERE. 

For this part of the challenge I need to make an altered Item/upcycled Project. I thought about this for a while before coming up with this idea. I knew straight away that I wanted to use the same colour pallet as I used for the first half of the challenge which is blue and yellow. This time I changed the black for a grey though and went for a slightly darker yellow. This was mainly to fit with coloured card that I have. So the inks I have used are as follows:

Honey Drizzle and Aqualicious are Altenew Crisp dye inks and the Soft granite is from Hero Arts. The card was some I had in my stash and I used my swatches to match up the inks to the card.

TIP: Swatching your supplies to make comparing colours easier and saving you testing them each time which would use up more ink, paint etc.

I have not got them in this picture but I also used some copic markers to add details so did the same thing to match these colours as closely as possible. The copics I use are: C5, Y38 and BG49

While thinking about the various things I might be able to do I suddenly remembered that I had a few paper bags which I had been intending to make into a photo book and so this seemed like the perfect time to have a go at it 😀

I have taken inspiration from so many of Altenew's amazing online classes for this project but my main inspiration has come from the following classes:

Masking Unleashed - I used masking with the stencil to ensure I only inked the areas I wanted

In the mood for color - Blue for calm and yellow for happiness

Polychromatic - Tone on tone stamping

These are the paper bags that I am using for this project. They are just white paper bags which are about 22.5 cm x 17.5cm

I have used 3 of them to create my book.

As well as the 3 bags I used 3 A4 sheets of each colour card, 2 sheet of A4 white card and 1 piece of frosted shrink plastic.

I started by folding the bags in half to form the pages. I used an Altenew bone folder to make sure the crease nice and clean.

This is now the base of my book. The openings at the top of the bags allow for large pockets which I will add some cards into that could be used for journaling or putting photos on. Mementos such as entry tickets could also be slipped into these pockets. The bottom of the bags could be stuck flat but I am also going to use these as little tuck pockets so I did not glue them at this stage.

I arranged the pages the way that I liked so that it does not have all of the bottoms of the bags together. Then I tied some twine around the pages just to temporarily hold them together while I get the measurements I need and so I remember which way round I want them to be. You could also write page numbers in pencil on the middle of each page and this would probably be what I would do if I did this again as then later you can lay everything flat to add the card panels and do your stamping and stencilling. But I was learning as I went so you can learn from my mistakes 😂

Once your bags are folded you can then measure the size of each page to work out the size of the card panels you will need. I wanted to cover the bottoms of each bag as well so that needed a smaller rectangle for them.

Then I cut my panels out. For my book I needed :

9 x larger panels (10.8cm x 17.2cm)

3 x smaller panels (8cm x 17.2cm)

Having cut all of the panels I then used wet glue to stick them all onto the pages which strengthened the paper bags so they can support the photos which will be added. 

Looking through my Altenew stamps I was drawn to the beautiful Wallpaper Art stamp set. I knew that I wanted to do a lot of tone on tone for this book because I do not want the decoration to distract from the photos. 

I started with the front of the book and I added yellow card to the front and back as yellow is a colour that evokes happiness. So I lined my stamps up with a stamping platform and stamped them across the panel in Honey Drizzle.

I stamped the main flower outline and then masked the flower to add the leaves as if they are coming from behind the flowers. for the back of the book I stamped two of the flowers at the bottom of the yellow panel and then added leaves reaching up the panel from them. Again I used masking to make the flowers appear to be overlapping as they would be in nature.

Then I wanted some more flowers for both the outside and inside the book. If you are new to Altenew inks then one of the things that I love most about them is the way you can buy them in colour sets where you have 4 shades of a colour making stamping the layering stamps a very simple process. For my project as I am using the honey drizzle and Aqualicious colours as my main focus I used the Sweet Dreams and Pocketful of sunshine ink sets to create my flowers. This means they tie in perfectly with the rest of the colours in the book but still have the shadow and high lights that give the them a 3D look.

For the layered flowers I have used the Build-A-Flower Hawaiian Coral stamp and die set. 

I stamped the layers in the following colours:

Outline: Jet black

Base layer: Yellow flower - Citrus Burst

Blue flower - Dew Drops

Second layer: Yellow flower - Maple Yellow

Blue flower - Aqualicious

Third Layer: Yellow flower - Honey Drizzle

Blue flower - Teal Cave 

Stamens: Hero arts soft granite

Once stamped I used the coordinating dies to cut them out so they are ready to use and I can play around layering them onto my pages like embellishments.

Going back to the front of the book I used one of the blue flowers on the front to contrast against the yellow. The band across the cover is a 10.8cm x 3.7cm grey card strip with a 10.2cm x 3cm white strip layered onto it. The sentiment is from the Handmade tags stamp set.

I have kept the back page more simplified an used the same 10.8cm x 3.7cm grey strip and layered a 10.8cm x 2cm yellow strip then a 10.8cm x 1cm teal strip on top of that.

The internal tuck pocket pages (the ones that are the bottoms of the bags) I have made sure that I have one in each of the colours and I am going to do the same design on each one. I am again keeping the tone on tone feel for these panels. For the leaves that I have stamped all across the panel I have used the Build-A-Flower Hawaiian Coral stamp set. I felt like the panel needed some more interest than just the stamping so I used a copic marker to add some dots around the leaves.

I used the following ink colours and copic colours.

Grey panel- Soft granite Hero Arts ink, C5 copic marker

Yellow panel - Honey Drizzle Altenew ink, Y38 copic marker

Blue/teal panel - Aqualicious Altenew ink, BG49 copic marker

Next I used the Altenew Layered Dahlia stencil to add a bit of colour and more texture to the bag behind each pocket. For each one I have used a contrasting colour. Finally for these tuck pocket pages I have used double sided tape to stick down just the edges of each tuck pocket.

This will just make sure that the little extra inserts I am adding will not fall out of the pocket. 

I made small 7.5cm x 5.7cm rectangles (3 in each colour) and then rounded the corners before slipping them into the tuck pockets ready for the person I give the book to to use any way they want.

 The pages next to the tuck pocket pages I kept simple so a larger picture can be added later. I cut an 8cm x 14cm rectangle of white card and fixed that the the centre of the page before adding one of the flowers that I had previously stamped up. 

With these flowers I only stuck the bottom half of the flowers so photos can be slipped behind the flower.

I am intending to gift this photo book to someone special so I have left the photo areas blank and just written sizes in the places so they know what size to cut the pictures to.

For the larger pockets I have made larger inserts that are 17cm x 11cm two of each colour and rounded all the corners again.

For the last pages I have two double page spreads. One is blue and the other is grey. I did the same thing on both again keeping them tone on tone. I used the both the A and B layers of the Layered Dahlia stencil and They Aqualicious ink plus a little tumbled glass distress oxide on the teal pages and Soft granite on the grey ones. Before I started the inking though I made a mask to ensure that I was just inking one flower in the corner of each page.

To get my mask I drew around the area of the stencil that I wanted to keep with a pencil.

Cut just inside of my drawn line so it would overlap the stencil slightly and stay in place.

Fix the stencil and the mask where I want it and ink through it.

I then repeated the same steps with the second layer and because it doubles up the ink in that area it looks darker even though it is the same coloured ink.

The last things for these pages are some white card cut to the sizes shown to just create places for pictures or journaling. Plus some little strips of card, which like the flowers are just fixed at one end so pictures can still be slipped under them.

To finish my book off I used a pokey tool to pierce holes all along the spine of the book before using thread to stitch it together. To cover the stitching I would the twine around the spine. 

Before tying a bow it the twine I also made a little shrink plastic charm of the Hawaiian coral flower. To do this I stamped the black out line in Kraftin' Kimmie hybrid ink and then did the layers in the Altenew crisp dye ink as I had for the others in the book. 

Here is a little video showing the steps for the shrink plastic charm.

And that finished my little paper bag book off. 

This little video shows all of the pages 😀

I hope this has inspired you to have a go at making one of these little books and recycling any paper bags that you have.

I am going to enter this project for the following challenges:

International art and soul - Say it with flowers

Get creative - Add flowers

Crafting Happiness - Anything goes

Thank you for taking the time to look at my blog.

Huge hugs

Amy xx

Making it masculine

I am so happy to be able to say that I have been given the final challenge for the Altenew Educator Certification Program (AECP) and it is a challenge of 2 parts so this is my first of two posts about it. You can find my second post HERE

**** Warning this is a long post but I think you will like it 😊 ****

The first part of the challenge tackles something that I know a lot of crafters struggle with.....making masculine cards! 

The challenge is to create 4 masculine cards with the following themes:

- Birthday

- Love/ Thinking of you

- Anniversary

- Encouragement

For the second part of the challenge I have to create an Altered item or upcycle project so if you would like to see that then please be sure to check my next post 😁

I could select any 3 components from the classes I have done for either level 1 or 2 of the AECP as my inspiration.

I need to submit my projects to Altenew by the 16th of June 2022.

I had a lot of fun making this set of cards so I hope you like them and are inspired.

One of my top tips for getting your creativity flowing is to limit yourself with the stock that you are working with. So for these cards I decided that I wanted to limit my self to 3 colours and use the geometric theme so I made the decision to focus all my cards around the Trigonometry stamp and die set.

Once I knew what I wanted my focus to be I stamped and die cut a whole load of the great fun triangles out so that I could then play with them and work out what layouts I might want to use.

For these cards I have used things from various classes but my main inspiration is from the following classes:

For the Guys - Using Geometric patterns/shapes and bright colours

Polychromatic - Use white space to let the colours pop

In the mood for color - Blue for calm and yellow for happiness

The Altenew ink colours I used for these cards are:

Maple Yellow, Aqualicious and Jet black

Now onto the cards :)

1. Birthday Card

I love the way that when you are making cards you can play around laying all of the elements out to work out how you want it to look before you stamp it out. This video shows the steps I took to put this card together.

Here is the finished birthday card. I like that it is clean and simple with lots of white space to make those colours really pop.

2. Love/ Thinking of you card

I decided to focus on love for this card as that was more of a challenge for me personally. The Trigonometry stamp set does not really have any love sentiments in it. I wanted a font that was not too curly to fit for the masculine look and looking through my stamp sets I found there were two stamps in the Handmade tags stamp set that I could use to get the look and love themed sentiment I wanted.

In a similar way to the video for the first card I played around with my stamped and cut triangles on my card blank seeing what way I liked them laid out before I stuck this card together.

I used 5 triangles to go across this C6 size card about a third of the way up the card.

I lined them all up using my ruler and the grid on my glass mat to make sure they are straight.

For the sentiment I cut a 5cm x 5cm square in white card to stamp the sentiment on then cut a 5.5cm x 5.5cm square of the same white card and used the Jet Black crisp dye ink to ink the paper and colour it black. I fixed the sentiment square onto the black square with foam pads so it was popped up a bit.

Before sticking anything down I drew a border around my card base with the Altenew fine liner 02 and then filled it around the edge with the Altenew brush marker to give a thick black line around the edge of the card. You can get both of these pens plus 2 more in the fine liner pen set.

Next I stuck the triangles I had chosen down in the line across my card and trimming the edges where they over hung the card, before taking some of the smaller triangles and placing the un-inked stamps around the top part of the card as I felt it looked just a bit too empty. I wanted to see what they might look like to add interest to the white space. I liked the way they were looking so added some in black and a few in yellow because I realised I had covered most of the yellow larger triangles so wanted to balance the card out a bit more.

Finally after doing all my stamping I fixed the sentiment onto the card using liquid glue so that I had a bit of wiggle time to make sure I was happy with the placement of it. I am so happy with the way this card turned out.

3. Anniversary Card

I mixed and matched supplies a bit again for this card. The "happy" sentiment die is from Heffy Doodle and so is the stamped anniversary sentiment. Again I wanted the text to be in a font that was not to curly to really fit with the masculine feel I was going for and these seemed the perfect choice from my supplies. The stamped anniversary is from the classic sentiments stamp set and I masked part of the stamp as it actually says "happy anniversary" however I wanted to make the Happy with the die cut to add some more interests and dimension to my card. In fact I cut the happy out 3 times in white card and once in the same white card but I inked the white card first with Jet Black crisp dye ink. Then I layered them all on top of each other so it became nice and chunky.

TOP tips:

You can do so much more with your sentiment stamps than just ink and stamp them. Look at all the individual words and you can use them all separately to create your own sentiments that say exactly what you want. For this card I used a bit of tape over the word I did not want when I applied the ink and then removed the tape before stamping the stamp. This meant there was only ink on the word I needed. However if you are really brave you could also carefully cut your sentiment stamp to be individual words.

For my layout again I played around working out a new way to arrange all of those triangles until I found a way that I really liked the look of. For all of these cards I am trying to keep the patterns looking quite random which can be a challenge for me. By that I mean I didn't want to have all of just one colour way on a card or all of the spotty ones. Does anyone else struggle with making things look random rather than planned? 😂

Once I had the triangles all lined as I wanted I stuck them to the card with liquid glue and trimmed off any triangles that over hung the edges of the card. I cut a strip of white card which I stamped the anniversary sentiment onto and then cut an angle across the end of the strip.

Taking the Altenew fine liner 02 again and my ruler I drew a frame around the outside edge of my card going across all those triangles as well and then also edged the white anniversary sentiment strip the same way.

Here is a very quick video with my step by step process for this card

4. Encouragement card

This card used the most of those fun triangles of all of the cards I made for this set. I have put together a little video of my process putting this card together. In this card the sentiment is also from the Trigonometry stamp set so you can recreate this card in any colour way you like with 1 stamp and die set.

I am happy with this card and I think putting the triangles on an angle across the card leads your eye along the sentiment. With life the way it is at the moment I think I will be making a few of these in different colours to send out to my friends.

I think the whole set looks really nice together and it shows just how far you can stretch one stamp set. I feel like although it is masculine this set would be nice for anyone. Plus by just changing up the colours it would have a completely different look. This was a challenge for me but I am so happy with how this set looks and it has made me thing about doing the same thing with more of my stamp sets. By limiting myself in the supplies I used I really got inventive with how I was using this stamp set and I loved playing with it. I also have lots of other ideas for it now and I love getting the most from my stash. I hope this has inspired you and given you some ideas for making masculine projects and to get some ink on your stamps 😀

That is my 4 cards for the first part of my challenge and I am so excited to show you what I have done for the second part. I decided to use the same sort of colour way but change it up to be less masculine. If you would like to see what I did keep following my blog and I will have the post up for it soon.

I am going to enter these cards for the following challenges:

Inspire.Create - Masculine

Lil' patch of crafty friends - Anything Goes

Allsorts - Anything birthday (The birthday card 😁 )

Taylor made cards 4 u - Anything goes + option of masculine

Send a smile for kids - For Dads or a special guy

Thank you for taking the time to look at my blog.

Huge hugs

Amy xx