First Altered Beermat

I have sat here since the end of the Easter holidays with a nice pile of circular beermats in front of me, waiting (and waiting, and waiting) to be altered.

Finally I got around to having a little play with one. I was relieved that the top layer of paper (the bit with the advertising on) peeled away neatly, leaving me with a blank canvas.

I have been drooling over all of Hels' beermats over at Ink on My Fingers, so it seemed only fitting that I would enter my first attempt into the Sunday Stamper's big special challenge to celebrate 100 weeks. The theme was FREE, under the song title of Free as a Bird (so I added a little bird to mine). Take a look as there is some SERIOUS candy to be won!!


This was nice and simple to do. I covered the base with Antique Linen DI, a bit of torn book page coloured with Worn Lipstick DI, a distressed paper flower and stamped elements all coloured with the same DIs plus a hint of Tea Dye DI too.


I loved making the masks for the various colours on the Cute Companion and completely love the tickets; they are one of Tim Holtz's stamps and come all joined together in a block but I very patiently cut them all down and went to work with the DIs!


The finishing touch was a gold eyelet and a strip of old-looking lacy stuff (from a bag of lace from the charity shop) which has allowed me to hang it on my notice board.

Will need to do more beermats now! (well I do have 29 left in my pile!!)


Take care and happy crafting

Charli xx

Altered Tag

Here is my latest project.

The tag came from a pair of jeans from a very cheap but popular clothes shop here in the UK. I loved the organza ribbon overlay and the rainbow print background.

First off, its quite flimsy so I backed it with card to give it some strength. I stamped my 'Happiness' stamp (from previous project) over the 'Denim Co' with black ink.

A piece of white tissue paper was coloured with Antique Linen Distress Ink, crumpled and lightly brushed with Tea Dye to emphasise the creases. This was layered over the base to tone down the rainbow, which is still faintly visible.

I used Antique Linen again to tone down the white ribbon (after placing a scrap of paper underneath to protect the rest of the tag) and took my permenant brown marker and  drew the tree onto the organza. Using black ink I stamped the bird (from one of the Cute Companions plates) twice onto the ribbon and twice onto the tag beneath.

The finishing touch was to write the word 'FLY' using the same marker, this time on the ribbon and the tag under it.

This is my entry into the Tag You're It challenge: "On a Bough".

Off to work on another project now....

Take care,

Charli xx

Happy Easter!

Hope you are all having a very Happy Easter and not making yourselves sick with too much chocolate! And a HUGE thank you to the lovely ladies who are following me and who have left comments. I'm sorry I've taken so long to post something new, but I honestly don't know what happened to the last week - it feels like the world was on fast forward!

The project I'm showing today is a little book that I made for a dear friend and (now ex-) colleague of mine, when she left us for a new job.

The design is based on that of a mazebook, but I wanted something slightly bigger - the pages measure 4inch square. I cut four 8inch squares from A4 sheets of card, scored them into four and cut along one line from the edge to the middle, folding them to make pages and sticking them back to back to make a whole book.

I cut the covers slightly larger and as I didn't have any mountboard I cut them from the sturdy backing from a paper pad, and covered them with paper, adding the ribbon and attaching them to the book.

To keep a theme throughout I chose the same two colours (blue and purple) and stamped a series of Cute Companions characters (all girlie ones as we are all females that work together), colouring them with watercolour pencils - all stamped onto the off-cuts from the A4 card from the pages.

The idea behind making a little book was to make it a special something that she could keep, and also I like the idea of each person having a nice neat area on which to write their message, rather than squeezing them in between each others.

 So I went into work armed with small squares of coloured and patterned paper for the messages (much more discreet too!) and assembled the book at home.

I'm really pleased with the results - as were the other ladies - and most importantly the receipient LOVED it!!

(Although I shan't bore you with photos of all the pages, you get the idea!)

Thanks for looking.

Take care,

Charli xx