Aurora Penguin

I spotted a technique Sandy Allnock shared on her YouTube a few weeks ago and thought I'd give it a go.   She shared how she used a small sieve to scrape bits of watercolour pencil onto wet paper around leaves to get a splattered background look.   The results were fab - check out the link for more details.

I'm always looking for ways to make fun aurora style backgrounds - especially on my "pole" Christmas cards.  I thought this technique would be prefect for this so I had a go.  You need a good weight of watercolour card - I tried with normal card first and had a few disasters with warping as I found I needed to respray some water to get my colour to flow after sieveing.   For my colour I used the new woodless watercolour pencils from Tim Holtz - set 2 in this case - and because I'm tight - rather than scraping the pencils - I saved my shavings from when I sharpened them and pushed those through my sieve with my fingers instead.  You can see the starting point in the photo below.  My card curved which helped me get the runs I needed for an aurora - but for something more like Sandy, taping the card to a board would help - do as she says not as I do lol!

To turn it into a card, I stamped the adorable little penguin from Colorado Craft Company and coloured him with both the same watercolor pencils and and a standard black pencil.  Cut him out and popped him on a snowy hill.   The sentiment which seems to be my go-to for my Christmas cards this year as I love the sweet little statement is makes, is from Boughs and Holly by Concord and 9th.   The card base is also now something we carry in store - in this case a 300gsm A6 card and envelope in cream by Papermania, this brand has been my go to for years, so as lots of people were asking for card bases and envelopes, we've added them in white, cream and kraft in 3 sizes.

I hope this gives you a new idea for making backgrounds - it was good fun and if you use your pencil shavings off any watercolour pencil, it's a great way to reduce waste and get "free colour" too!

NEWS FROM THE STORE

• As we said above, we now stock a range of PaperMania cards and emvelopes in 3 colours in packs of 50.  You'll find them all in our miscellaneous brand section.

• Lawn Fawn restocks are also now available but are selling fast again.

• We've also added the lastest release from Colorado Craft Company

• We're working on adding the lastest releases from Altenew and Waffle Flower Crafts at the moment - should be online later this evening hopefully depending on how we get on around weekend household chores.

• The latest release from The Greetery is in transit as the stencils were late to arrive so we couldn't get it ahead of release - should be here on Tuesday customs willing and we'll get it processed as quickly as we can around packing orders.

• The upcoming release from MFT is also in transit.

• Concord and 9ths release will be here in a week or so.

• There will be new items from Purple Onion Designs and Mama Elephant later in the month too.

That's all for now

Happy Crafting

Tara