Tiny Towns under Alcohol Ink Skies

Posted: August 19, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: Alcohol Ink, Dies, grafix, Penny Black, Sizzix, Spellbinders, Taylored Expressions, Tiny Tree | Tags: , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I do like the look of little houses and buildings against a bold or colourful sky. I’ve done the same thing numerous times with watercolour panels. The little town featured in these cards is the Penny Black ‘tiny town‘ die. Once again I have completed my cards with embossed panels and PB or Taylored Expressions sentiments.

One thing you might notice is that some of the sentiments are stamped on the alcohol ink sky not on a strip of cardstock. After several alcohol ink sessions resulting in a stack of useful panels I remembered my alcohol lift ink. Lift ink does exactly as the name suggests, it lifts alcohol ink off the surface (in this case yupo or grafix craft plastic). Once lifted the ink needs to be wiped off the stamp and a few more applications made in exactly the same spot. It is also necessary to blot the stamped area with a tissue or cloth to remove any ink which has been diluted by the stamp pad. I was very happy with the results and you will see just how happy in a bunch of future cards.

Once again I have created different alcohol ink patterns by tilting the panel to move the ink, blowing the ink with a hand pump or spritzing the ink with isopropyl alcohol to create the spotty or starry look.

I used several different embossing folders to add snow, more little houses or the spellbinders nordic pattern to the background. The little houses embossing folder is from Vaessen Creative and was found at the new craft supply store in Ottawa.

Thank you for the encouraging comments left on the recent alcohol ink blog posts. I am glad to be providing some inspiration to get your own inks out. If you haven’t seen the previous alcohol ink posts look here and here.

And stay tuned there are more little houses, trees, baubles and Bethlehem skies to come. Have a great day!

Alcohol Ink Skies

Posted: August 14, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: Alcohol Ink, Dies, grafix, Penny Black, polar bears | Tags: , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Well hello! Once again it has been weeks between blog posts, but here I am with a surprising selection of cards for you.

Surprising because they are alcohol ink panels. I don’t remember the last time I worked with alcohol inks. In the last month or so I have done little else in the art realm but work with alcohol inks. Why might that be? I have been working outside with said inks. My sister-in-law who was staying with me in June and July joined me at a friend’s house where we set up outside in the shade with a pleasant breeze and proceeded to experiment with the inks. As I mentioned I hadn’t use them for a long time and had forgotten many techniques. Since then I have refreshed my memory by watching a few videos and have worked outside with the inks numerous times where I don’t get headaches from the alcohol and everything dries quickly. Occasionally panels end up in the garden but that is a price I am willing to pay.

I made a few panels with 2 or 3 ink colours per panel and a generous amount of 99% isopropyl alcohol to move and blend the colours. I used an air blower (hand pump style, not electric) and sometimes a spritzer filled with isopropyl to add splatter which looks like snow or stars. I worked on yupo paper, grafix white craft plastic and Nara paper, all similar products and all from my existing supplies. I am still committed to ‘Using What I Have’ as much as possible.

The second surprising thing about these cards is that they are Christmas cards. Never have I started my Christmas cards in the middle of summer. I have never wanted to because I am influenced so much by the seasons. For whatever reason that is not the case this year. Future me is going to be very thankful for this strange occurrence. These are three cards I made featuring the ‘polar bears’ die from Penny Black and a PB stamp set, “All is Bright”. I really enjoy creating northern skies with alcohol inks; they seem to mimic the beauty of the northern lights I am yet to see in person. I know that polar bears have nothing to do with Christmas but when I create alcohol ink or watercolour skies I am reminded of the verse from Psalm 19, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.’ Thank you for visiting and reading to the end of this post; I will warn you now, the alcohol ink blog posts have just begun, so buckle up my friends!

Botanical Thank You cards

Posted: July 24, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: gel press, Penny Black | Tags: , | 7 Comments

Recently a friend asked me to make her ten thank you cards. I decided to make them using a few botanical gel prints. Some prints were quite large, featuring several flowers or leaves on one large sheet of copy paper or rice paper. The cards above were from a print taken with dark green and cream paints so I added green mats and sentiments on cream card bases. I love printing plants; the detail possible always amazes me. So, as I use up these prints from another summer, I feel the need to pull out the gel plates and print some of the many flowers and leaves within reach this summer.

The cards below were prints of Queen Anne’s lace printed with black and picked up with gold paint. Again I used cream card bases and black or gold sentiments.

The last batch of co-ordinated cards were leaves and lavender in blue and black paint, lifted with white paint so I added blue sentiments and attached everything to white card bases.

You can find techniques for gel printing plants and many other things in my Gel Print Journey online class and use the coupon SUMMERSALE for a 25% discount. You can also find a playlist of gel printing videos I’ve made on my youtube channel.

Calendar Cards

Posted: February 18, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: border collection, Concord & 9th, cricut, Dies, online class, Patterned papers, Penny Black | Tags: , , , , | 5 Comments

Here are some happy flowers to remind you of spring if you are still surrounded by snow like I am! Also to get you through winter there are details about a sale of my online classes at the bottom of this post.

I received a beautiful Earth Greetings calendar last year from my brother and sister-in-law in Australia. I enjoyed the original artwork all year while also planning to turn the pages into cards once the year was over. I decided to start with the cover which features a beautiful floral design by Jayne Branchflower. The cover has the January artwork on the back so I used bits of each design, both painted by Jayne.

In this post I will feature the blue background panel covered in Australian native flowers such as waratah, bottlebrush and flannel flower. I created two portrait orientation cards shown below. The accents on all the cards are cut from gold cardstock to co-ordinate with the bottlebrush (callistemon) and wattle in the design. The greeting below left was cut on the cricut, below right features a Penny Black border die and a retired C&9 sentiment.

The two cards below I made in landscape orientation and used the PB Border Collection die to add a scalloped edge on the right along with a cricut cut sentiment. On the left I die-cut a PB sentiment, So Many Thanks, and lay it over duralar so it would be easier to see on the busy background. It is also stacked up on navy cardstock to give it a bit more prominence. I created the narrow gold border with WaffleFlower A2 rectangle dies. The cards in this post obviously do not have to be made with calendar pages; your own printed, drawn or painted papers would work, as would scrapbook papers or art papers. I am just having fun with calendar pages right now and hope I have inspired you to recycle and repurpose a few of yours!

All my online classes are on sale for 50% off. Just click over to https://heathertelford.podia.com/ to purchase.

This post includes affiliate links from Scrap’n’Stamp . If you buy through these links I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Pretty Papers

Posted: January 21, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: cricut, My Favorite Things, Patterned papers, Penny Black | Tags: , , | 7 Comments

If you are anything like me you probably have a stash of pretty papers. Maybe they are scrapbooking papers or rice papers, perhaps they are pretty papers you made yourself by watercolouring or printing. I have quite the stash in all the above categories. So in the spirit of using what I have (UWIH), I pulled out some of the pretties and turned them into cards.

All the papers on today’s cards are rice papers featuring bold colours and gold details. They were a lovely gift from a lovely person. Because the papers are so beautiful I really didn’t do much to turn them into cards. (the red one, the bluey-green one, the blue floral one)

All the cards featured today use a panel that fills or almost fills a card front. I simply added sentiments and rounded corners to the red card and the bluey-green cards. For the hello card above I used the cricut to cut the word hello from a cream panel so the pretty paper would be revealed. I added the word ‘Beautiful’ from a Darkroom Door set, ‘You are Everything‘.

The word birthday below is die cut; the other letters are cricut-cut.

I like the finishing touch of rounded corners and have a corner rounder that I really like; it’s the Kadomaru PRO which gives me the choice or large, medium or small corners. What else do you do with pretty papers? I’d love to read your suggestions in the comments.

Watercolour trees & skies

Posted: December 23, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Penny Black, ski lodge embossing folder, Spellbinders | Tags: , , | 1 Comment

Here are a few more watercolour Christmas cards I made this year. I painted a large panel of watercolour paper in blues and greens blended together to create a striped mix of tones. From the large panel I cut background rectangles a bit smaller than my card bases and trees of different heights to arrange against embossed white skies. I don’t know the name of the tree die set as I borrowed it from a friend. I really like the non-symmetrical trees featured on the cards above.

To create the snow banks I cut curved hill shapes, sometimes one, sometimes two per card. The cards were all finished with Penny Black sentiments. I have sent most of my cards but there are a few that will be new year greetings. Last week the snow was gradually disappearing around here as we had warmer temperatures and rain. This week it’s a different story; it’s been snowing for days.

Birds on Birches

Posted: December 9, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: beneath the birches, Dies, Penny Black, sennelier watercolours, winter trees | Tags: , , , | 3 Comments

In case you were wondering I have done some watercolouring for Christmas cards this year; it’s not all napkin art. I created a batch of cards for a friend which included either watercolour skies or watercolour trees.

I painted a blended sky with a couple of different blues then added hand-cut snowbanks and die-cut trees and birds from the Penny Black sets, ‘beneath the birches‘ and ‘winter trees‘.

This would be a simple card to make in multiples by painting a large sheet of watercolour paper to divide into sky panels then add the white and red elements. The greeting is from the PB ‘Christmas sentiments‘ set. How is your Christmas card sending going? I sat in a waiting room yesterday and wrote about eight cards instead of reading a book or scrolling so that advanced me through my list a little.

Eucalyptus & gold

Posted: December 3, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Airy, Dies, Penny Black, stocking stuffers | Tags: , | 5 Comments

I thought this would be my last napkin/serviette related post for now but I forgot about a pack of dinner napkins I bought in the summer. So maybe one more!?

But onto today’s cards; you can see in the photo above that the eucalyptus themed napkins are printed on a white base but my cards are all cream tones. When I adhered the single layer of the napkin to cream cardstock, the background transformed into cream not white.

The napkins are not Christmas themed themselves but I chose to add gold foliage die-cuts, gold embossed greetings and even some gold splatter on the one below to turn them into Christmassy cards. I used the Penny Black dies, ‘stocking stuffers‘ and ‘airy’.

Let heaven and nature sing

Posted: November 27, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Penny Black, Spellbinders | Tags: , | 8 Comments

This is the second collection of napkin/serviette Christmas cards I’ve made, this time with sweet birds and foliage featured. As I mentioned in an earlier post I have had success with a glue stick or double sided adhesive to adhere the single layer of napkin to cardstock, but there are other methods which several of you were kind enough to share with me.

Thank you to everyone who got in touch to let me know about the following options: spray adhesive, modpodge, freezer wrap adhered with a hot dry iron and a full sheet of Avery sticker paper. Some involve wet adhesive, some dry and the freezer wrap uses the melted wax in the paper so I imagine each method produces a slightly different thickness and flexibility. I will report back again if I try some of these approaches.

As is often the case it is hard to see the texture in the background panels and card bases. I have used the Spellbinders ‘in the pines’ embossing folder on both the white and the dark green panels and it does look nice and co-ordinates with the pine sprigs on the napkins.

The sentiments are a mix of Penny Black sentiments, the favourites I pull out every year.

2 for 1 cards

Posted: November 24, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Penny Black, Taylored Expressions | Tags: , , | 6 Comments

Here are some of the ‘2 for 1’ cards a group from our church made on Saturday. I had a couple of friends help with prep and running the event and it was a fun creative time. Of course there were snacks, laughter and plenty of conversation.

The ‘2 for 1 technique’ in this case required the maker to cut an image or word out of patterned paper and turn the positive and the negative piece into two separate cards. To add some texture and pattern we had coloured and embossed backgrounds to choose from.

I have run this event before and there is always some creative free styling when participants see the supplies available. I get inspired watching everyone create. I wanted one photo of all the cards but my kitchen table was crowded with just half so I divided them into landscape and portrait orientation.

Thank you to the twenty three people who participated before and during the event. I hope the residents at the nursing home will enjoy the pretty cards and message.

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