New Website is LIVE!!

Hello everyone!  It's taken a few months and a lot of help, support and general cleverness from the brilliant Bimotech web design company but finally the new website is live and it's very exciting!!  The week day home site will stay here for a few weeks but eventually all the posts (250+ over the past 5 years) will move to the new site.  You can also find us on You Tube, Pinterest and Facebook.  Just search for Attic Lane.  All new projects will be on www.atticlane.com only so to keep up with projects, dog stories, christmas baking and you tube tutorials, please visit, support  and follow:

www.atticlane.com

I look forward to welcoming you to the attic down a lane where I make, bake, create and share. 

To say hi on the new site or let us know of any glitches (!) mail:

hello@atticlane.com

Kraft Tex - Hand Bound Book

I recently discovered Kraft Tex, a paper based medium which behaves like leather.  You can't rip or tear it but you can cut, emboss, paint, sew and punch through it.  If it gets wet, it won't spoil.  This makes it ideal as a book cover.  In the video below, I show you how to use layers, pockets and textured papers to make a keepsake book with lots of secret places to store momentos.

Enjoy :)

Shabby Chic Kraft Tex Notebook Tutorial

Have you heard of Kraft Tex?  No me neither until recently.  It's a paper based material which reacts like leather.  Apparently those tags on the back of jeans are made from it.  You can paint, punch, emboss, stamp, iron, stitch, wash and crumple it.  It's just what I've been looking for to create notebooks of a size and shape I want without having to buy a notebook and then alter it.  I bought mine from Amazon and the size is 19" wide by 1.5 yards long so plenty to play with.  And yes, you can cut it with the Brother Scan and Cut.  I used a standard blade set at 12, speed 5 and pressure of 1.  There are sooooo many possibilities and I started with a shabby chic style notebook.

It started as an A5 piece.  I folded the right hand edge in 1 1/4 inches to make a seal over the main cover.  You'll see in the video below how I made the fastening and attached the lace on the front cover.  By the way, the video is badged up as www.atticlane.com.  That's because after 2 months of frustration trying to move the domain to a new host, the transfer has gone ahead and soon I'll be launching the new website!  There are a few more tweaks to make but hopefully in the next month it will go live!!

Batch Making Christmas Cards

I attended a work conference mid week which meant a very nice overnight stay at Stratford on Avon.  A friend and I had time to nip into town to visit a favourite shop which we call the Christmas shop but is really called The Nutcracker Shop.  Among the glitz, pinch faced elves and pink frou frou, I got some inspiration for using a rather good stag shape I have on my Brother Scan and Cut.  I spent a pleasant evening cutting and sticking Mr Stag onto cards.  The tartan paper definitely lends itself to this shape!

I didn't video this because it is so simple to do and it does rely on having some kind of stag shape or die in your stash.  To save on paper I cut the rectangle of tartan paper I was going to use as a mat first, then cut the stag head from the inside.  I stuck the stag head on a smaller piece of kraft card, matted it with the tartan paper and sewed it round the edges with brown thread and stuck the whole thing down onto a white card.  I don't usually think of Christmas cards being better suited to men or women but these have a masculine feel to them.

I then cut a thin piece of kraft stock card, stamped "Merry Christmas" onto it and poked two square brads into the ends.  It doesn't show in the pics but this greeting stands a little proud of the card because I stuck it on with 3d foam pads.  Once the cards were finished it was time to add a tiny stag scene to the front of the envelopes.  I'm still enjoying these lovely scenic stamps from Card-io.

I'd pre-ordered some Tim Holtz stencils a few weeks ago and today they arrived so I had a play day and took a fuzzy photo.  (Ooops not sure why it's out of focus!)

 On the tag in the middle, I spritzed a pale green colour through the music stencil and a darker green through the tree shapes.  Before adding a glitter medium through the sort of half tree stencils (designed to look like snow on the trees) I rubbed distress glaze over the dried trees to prevent the green below seeping up and dis-colouring the glitter.  I like this effect but it will need more play.  Maybe tomorrow.

Christmas Envelopes

I don't usually decorate the front of my christmas card envelopes but I had these rather nice kraft envelopes which I thought needed a subtle jooshing-up.  I didn't want to glitter-to-the-max but I wanted a proper wintery theme to reflect Yule and the winter Solstice as well as Christmas.  These stamps from Card-io fitted the requirement perfectly and you don't need a lot of "stuff".  Something sparkly, a white and a black ink pad and you're good to go.

If you decide to do something similar, don't forget to leave space in the middle for the address and another top right for the stamp!  It's easy to get carried away.

Here's the video so you can see what I did and I hope this inspires you.  Enjoy!

5 Simple Christmas Tags

I'm not taking any credit here, it's all in the clever stamps designs of http://www.card-io.com.  

All I've done is taken their stamps and used them on christmas gift tags.  

Beautifully simple, calm and classic.  

A refreshing change from the sometimes gaudy glitter of christmas crafting.  

Enjoy :)

Little Princess Journals

A few weeks ago I bought some Starlights paints from Inspiration Crafts which are beautiful and perfect for projects such as this.  They cover well and shimmer as the light catches them.  I no longer need to buy specialised base card, I can just paint what I need.  So for example in the video you'll see I punched the leaves around the flower from card stock painted with a white starlights paint.  It doesn't show so clearly in the pictures below but in real life those leaves really shine out.

These are two notebooks I was asked to create for a friend's two small daughters.  My brief was "make it pink and make it glittery!".  I like pink and in moderation I like glitter but I rarely put the two together.  But the brief set off an association of ideas and the picture I had in my head was a confusion of fairy tale princesses such as Sleeping Beauty and Snow White in a garden.  It all made sense when I started planning these books around the idea of flowers and faded roses.   I know my flowers don't look much like roses but I'm no gardener ;)  I also wanted a "clean" look so white was always going to play a strong role.

In this video I am working on the two books at the same time but I've edited so you see the process for only one book.  

In fact, these are not completely finished.  I will add some little personal details for the girls later and because I know these are for christmas gifts, will pop some little doo dads in the pocket at the end of the book.  It will balance the inside of the books...

Enjoy the video - and if you feel inspired, visit my You Tube Channel (Attic Lane) and give me a thumbs up.  :)

Bouquet of Bats - Mixed Media Page

I seem to have a bat thing going on at the moment.  I love this Thinlets Mixed Media Die from Tim Holtz and for this project have used the tiny bats as the flowers in a spooky bouquet.  They don't look exactly like flowers but I rejected the idea of positioning them back to back to be more flower like because they lost their bat shapes.  The video at the end of the photo's shows you how I did it.  Enjoy :)

Here's the video!

Picasso Doodles

I saw this small metal stencil used on some You Tube videos and having tracked it down, bought one.  It's by Stampendous and is called "Picasso".  I've had a good old mess about with it and really like the wave shapes and curves.  They're the shapes I'm not good at!

I grabbed a piece of card and started playing and didn't stop.  It turned into a Zentangle inspired background but it needed something simple on top.  So I cut some pink flowers, matted them on some darker pink which matched the pink mat on the back of the whole card.  I made some massive dots for the centre of the flowers using some fabby nuvo cystals which dome beautifully and dry hard and voila!  I enjoyed it so much, I made two!

Doodle any shapes you like in the spaces and if you want inspiration, google "Zentangle" and you'll find loads of ideas.

Below you can see the lovely dome of the Nuvo Crystals.

 Card number 2...

Enjoy the video :)

The Book of Layers

This book was a commission and it grew out of a tag I shared on  my blog www.weekdayhome.blogspot.co.uk.  I've called it the Book of Layers because as you will see it is made of loads and loads of layers!    The antiquing creams used are designed to be applied, dried and wiped back to expose the colours below.  If you then seal that layer, it will protect your work below and you can continue adding colours and wiping back.  

 The end effect is one of a book looking aged and worn.  It's hard to remember this is just card.

All the details of how to make the layers and the paints, creams and waxes used are listed in the video below.  Enjoy :)

Altered Gentleman's Journal

I'm not sure what material this imagined Gentleman's Journal was originally made of.  It could have had a protective metal cover which has rusted away with time or it could have been a soft, moulded leather.  You may see other possibilities in it but the history I've given it is that of an abandoned notebook found in an old, decaying, dusty library.  It may contain dark secrets, lovers notes or it may be unused.  We'll never know....

 And here's what it started life as.  Enjoy the video of transformation below:)

Christmas Town Card

Here are two things I love, the Nordic Embossing folders from Crafters Companion and a stamp from the same range.  I'm starting to use embossing folders more because of the opportunities they give for adding texture and depth.  Normally I prefer to start from scratch with that sort of thing but as the variety of folders becomes more interesting - I'm interested!

Can you see the stars twinkling?  I can do glitter when appropriate :)

This card is one of those projects you finish and place somewhere so it stays in your range of vision.  Even a few weeks on from when I made it, it still makes me smile.  It's a very happy card.  There is as always a video to show how to make it but I want to draw your attention to the little houses below.  See under the roof tops how it's got some very light grey shadow?  Do this.  It makes a surprising difference.

Enjoy the video :)

Coquelicot

This is the project I promised myself I'd do to make use of the lovely blue background tag from an earlier blog post. 

I started with this tag base made with a mix of 4 Paperarts Fresco Paints, blobbed onto the tag and spread out using a palette knife.  It's a nice technique and makes clearing up afterwards much easier because you just wipe the palette knife with a baby wipe.  Lazy crafting  :)

The very short video below shows you how I made it.  Enjoy :)

Fallen Leaves Background - Mixed Media Tag

This is a very quick little tag I made using some the the lovely Fresco Paints from Paperartsy, a cut out tree I found as an SVG file for the Brother Scan and Cut (although I would have used a bare tree branch stamp if I'd had one) and some Nuvo gold paste through a leafy stencil.  The idea was to focus on creating a background using a palette knife instead of a brush to apply paint.

In this tag I blobbed 4 different colours of paint directly onto the card including one very light and one quite dark to give range and depth.  You can mix it up as much as you like but the less you move it around, the more "blocky" the paint will appear.  In the first sample below, I used the same colours as above but worked them a little more.

These samples use different colours just to show you the varying effects you can get.

I love that blue and silver.  I need to use that in a project!!

Here's the video showing my twirly palette knife style....Enjoy!