My scrappin' life

WOW! Embossing And Beyond Mini Album - A Peek Inside And Some Great Links!

Hello and welcome to my blog! I hope you are all enjoying a fabulous weekend!

Today I want to share with you some peeks inside my Embossing And Beyond Mini Album. I taught this workshop at the Artfusion Event that Nathalie Kalbach and I organized last June. It was also an inspiration piece for the Take It, Make It Challenge on the Craft Stamper Blog based on an colorful layered embossing article I did for the June issue of Craft Stamper Magazine. Check it out, there is a challenge on the CS blog every month with great prizes to be won!

The mini is filled with a variety of embossing techniques and will take you a step further then "just" embossing a stamped image using WOW! Embossing Powder and WOW! FabFoil. You should definitely check out the WOW! blog for great inspration. You will find many techniques, fun ideas and great projects created by the amazing WOW! DT!

You can follow WOW! on a.o. FB, twitter, Pinterest and YouTube. You can find all these links and more here!

It was a fun workshop to teach although we probably could have used a little more time. I'm considering teaching this in my own studio in the near future too but might turn it into a day workshop.

More details on the date a.s.o. will follow later :)

Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend!

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Artfusion 2013, an amazing and inspirational experience!

Last Friday my sweet friend Nat Kalbach and I finally met in Utrecht for our Artfusion 2013 Mixed Media Event. We had been planning, organizing and looking forward too it for months and now we were there!

After I picked up Nat from the railway station we went to the location to unpack my car that was loaded as if I was going on a 3 weeks vacation with my whole family :)

The location was artsy and fitted the artfusion feel we had in mind for the event but I have to say it was quite a challenge to create a seat and a place to work on for everyone but we managed, LOL!

After a very short night and totally excited we returned there Saturday morning to do the last preparation and get ready for the guest to arrive. What a fun, mixed group of people came in around 9 am! We had girls from all parts of the Netherlands, Finland, the UK, Sweden and some girls living in the Netherlands but originally coming from Israël and Spain. 33 ladies in total! They all blended together, shared their passion for mixed media art and inspired each other and us! It was so much fun to see all the different approaches to the projects Nat and I taught. There was so much humor and laughing and dirty hands. It was lovely meeting up again with people I met on previous events and workshop and also get to know new people that I only met online before!

Minna, I hope it is ok I took some pictures from your blog :)

Thanks to all our great sponsors we had a small goodie bag for everyone at entrance and also a give away for each and every attendee during lunch, which made the event even more fun!

Besides that we had a lovely kit to give to the winner of the name badge contest on both days and a great price to give away during the crop evening.

After the workshops were finished we went to dinner with some of the girls that stayed the whole weekend and then went back to the location to crop. Around 10 pm everybody was so tired that we decided to go back to our hotels and get some sleep. I went to bed with the happy feeling of having another great day ahead!

On Sunday we had a bit smaller but just as fun group with some new people. Again it all blended together and everybody was having a good time! There were more give aways for everyone and there was a really relaxed atmosphere. 

Around 5 pm we closed the door, hugged and kissed and said goodbye and we all went home. I felt tired but satisfied and happy. I had an amazing weekend!

I want to thank Nat for doing this with me. You are a wonderful friend, teacher and artist, Nat and it was lovely doing this together and spending the weekend with you! Hopefully we will see each other again soon! I also want to thank all the lovely ladies who attended our weekend and thereby made it possible! Thank you for your enthousiasme, the laughs, the help with making coffee, lunch and cleaning up and all the sweet messages we received afterwards!! It was great to meet you all and I hope we all will see each other again one day!

And finally a huge thank you to all our lovely sponsors who helped making this weekend a succes! WOW! Embossing Powders, Scrapbook Adhesives by 3L^TM, Craft Stamper Magazine, Scrap 365, Histoires de Pages, Cocoa Daisy, SODAlicious, Sizzix, Stencil Girl Products, Prima, Revlie Schuit and PanPastel!!

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Stamp Carving - A Whole New Experience (and CS blog hop winner!)

Before I forget I'm going to announce the winner of the Craft Stamper blog hop. And thank you to everyone who visited my blog and all the sweet comments on my Gelli Plate post!

The winner of the Scrapbook Adhesives by 3L^tm and WOW! Embossing Powder package is:

Congratulations Ann! Please e-mail me your address and I will send you prize out soon! :)

Now, if you have seen my Gelli Plate/Craft Stamper blog hop post you know that I sometimes have stuff lying on my table for quite some time before actually using it. Here we have such a thing again. I had the stamp carving set for at least 3 months, maybe longer. And last week I finally decided it was time!

So I drew some designs and started carving. Wow, that was not that easy at all. If you push just a little to enthousiastic you carve something away that was not supposed to and you have to find a way to adjust.

But hey, they are your own designs, right, nobody sais you can't change them. And by the way, who likes perfection??

Anyway, I thought that once the design was drawn it was a very relaxing occupation. I did it in the evening at the dinning table while chatting with my family who were watching tv. Not much thinking involved. Loved it.

So here are the results:

The first one, making it hard on myself with all those little circles. So they obviously didn't turn out perfect and neither did the cuts on the opposite side. I was worried that I ruined the stamp but I actually love how it looks on paper :)

The second one. Thought this would be easier but no way. I got all kinds of little cuts and imperfections and had to go back quite a couple of times to make it look better but again I really like the outcome:

And then my Valentine's special. I totally messed up the upper part of the angel wings so I decided to carve the whole part out and create a space to do some writing and now I'm totally happy with that!

And now my whole carving block has been used. I turned the little left overs into little leafs and circles.

Love, love, love them! 

I used my new stamps to create this card for my sweet Valentine:

What are you making for your Valentine?

Thank you for stopping by!

Craft Stamper Blog Hop - Looking Back

Welcome to my part of the Craft Stamper Blog Hop! If you didn't pop in here because of the blog hop then make sure to hop over to the Craft Stamper Blog first now to join in, as there are awesome prizes to be won!

My name is Birgit Koopsen and I'm a newbie on the Craft Stamper Design Team. I'm thrilled to be invited to work with such an awesome and talented team and looking forward to creating hopefully inspiring projects for the magazine!

I would call myself a mixed-media scrapbooker. I love to create layouts and mini-albums as well as off-the-page projects like canvasses and every now and then do some Art Journaling. I love vibrant colors and lots of texture. I'm always trying to combine different techniques to create colorful and interesting backgrounds or embellishments. My style goes from quite clean and geometric to busy and messy depending on my mood and the products I have on hand.

Now, the theme for this blog hop is "Looking Back". We were asked to pick our favorite project/technique of last year. Since my first project for Craft Stamper Magazine is yet to come and I therefor don't have a personal project from last year I decided to go through some previous issues to see which article inspired me most to try myself. I came across Kate Bentley's "Gelli on a Plate" article in the newest issue. I know, that's not exactly last year, but.... I brought home a gelli plate from CHA last year and it has been sitting on my desk for a whole year, not used once, although I thought it would be real fun and I absolutely wanted to try. So now I thought was a good time to do so. I spend an afternoon in my studio playing and ohhh you won't believe the fun I had. I just couldn't stop. Every print brought up ideas for a next print and at the end of the day I was left with about this:

And then I made a couple more using more different colors and layers on one print:

For these prints I mainly used stamps, stencils and paper shapes but I can think of so many more objects to "stamp" with!

Stamps are from MyStampBOX, Darkroom Door, 7Gypsies, Prima and Infocrea. Stencils from The Crafter's Workshop.

The technique itself is quite simple. You add a thin layer of paint to the Gelli Plate and stamp or draw in it, add stencils or paper shapes on top and then put a piece of paper on it. You can keep on adding layers and colors as long as you like. Just imagine all the things you can do with these prints. Use them as backgrounds for your layouts or art journal pages, create nice mini-album covers, die cut them to create fun embellishments or make a simple but nice card like this one:

The letter to collect from me is: K

SPOT PRIZE!!! 

My spot prize is a variety of WOW! Embossing Powder and Scrapbook Adhesives by 3L^TM products worth about $ 40, (BPS 25,-, € 30,-)!

To be in with a chance of winning simply leave a comment on this blog post by midnight (GMT) on Friday 8th February 2013. The winner will be drawn at random week commencing Monday 11th February.

I hope you enjoyed my post! Your next stop on the hop is Kim Dellow.

If you get stuck on the hop at any time, pop back to the Craft Stamper Blog. Have fun checking out all inspiring blogs coming next and good luck! Maybe you are one of the lucky winners! :)

Thanks for stopping by, but don't leave without checking out my previous post with another awesome prize to win, generously donated by 7 Dots Studio! 

Have a wonderful weekend!