"Glass Painted" Cards

I've recently come back to creating cards using a glass painting technique. It's exactly like painting on glass with the exception that you use an acetate sheet instead of  a real glassy surface. The use of aperture card is common in this type of cardmaking too. 

Here are the two random cards I've finished off recently - a card with three tulips and a paisley motif. I think the tulips are my favourite. I love cards with acetate - it gives you so many possibilities and the transparency and lightness of the card is appealing too, I think. It doesn't take much embellishing as the transparent motif on its own looks decorative. As for the text, you can either write your message right inside or make an insert out of a piece of paper, glue it in and write inside it so that the message is discreet and doesn't show through the painted front. I usually decide on it just before writing a card out.

The other thing I like about this type of acetate cards is that it's a pretty rare technique among the card makers and not many people actually make cards using their glass paints, which is a shame cause I'd love to see some other creations like mine :) If you, my dear reader, are the person who makes such cards, please let me know, I'd love to have a look at your glass painted creations :)

Crafty Storage Jars

Hi all. Hope you all had a good weekend. Mine was very crafty, busy, full of craft shopping and I really enjoyed it - I've got a lot projects running on at the moment and many are unfinished so they will have to wait for the future blog posts. However my craft creation stars of the week have been for me my two crafty jars :) A while ago I showed you the two little cross stitch designs and here is what I've done with them:

2 storage jars (I used the kilner brand) for some of my craft stash - ribbons, in this case. The cross stitch I made forms a nice padded pin cushion and needless to say is the central attraction of the jar lid :)

 A close-up of the stitches :)

I loved both designs and I kind of regret the Cross Stitcher magazine didn't have a design for a pink/purple option either! I may alter one of these designs in the future and adjust the chart for the purplish colours, if I find some time to do it, naturally :)

Here, the jars have been filled up with colour-coordinated ribbons :)

Since I love combining craft techniques I couldn't resist glass painting the jars too! More "vitrail" pics of the jars below:

In my (still imaginary) craft room these two will find their place somewhere on a shelf among the other crafty boxes :) Such is the vision, at least ;P I shall be making more of this type of storage jars in the future :)

Now with the jars being finished, I moved on to glass painting some acetate fronts for my "vitrail" cards. These are both Scandinavian motifs and some occasional patterns. I haven't made this technique for cards for ages and I missed it. I thought it would be nice to have a set of festive cards like these for Christmas. 

The photo shows them being outlined with a relief paste and drying up. Now the fun part lying ahead - filling the outlines up with colours, putting the pieces together and embellishing! Can't wait! 

In the meantime I also knit. My 35th knitted ball :) currently finished and waiting to be stuffed.

If you ever wondered what glass painting looks like, here is a reality behind it :))) Well, stuff scattered all over the table - half painted drying glass, printed patterns, cutouts, paint pots, brushes... and only 15 cm of free space to paint! Dear me! Is it just me or do other crafters practise that too?

Glass painting isn't only about painting with paints, it involves a great deal of squeezing the tubes and dabbing with the relief paste too! In fact the beauty of the painted vitrail glass depends largely on a professional artistic relief application. The more precise, neat and artful, the better!

It's time to join up the blog linking party Hand-made Monday at Hand-made Harbour. Head over there to see some other fabulous crafty creations. I missed my last Hand-made Monday blog hop which is a shame cause I had had quite a lot to show. Thought I could link up on Tuesday morning but it turned out we had to be cut off the electricity for most of the day. So no laptop, no telly, no even a cup of tea! How dependent we are on electricity these days!!!

If you wanna have a peek what I had for show last week, here is the post ;)

Thanks everyone for their visit and comments left behind. x x x