Another tip - Paper roses

This time, we are looking at a  rose made from a simple six petal flower paper punch.  All that is needed are three flowers punched out of whatever paper you choose.  Plain paper with the edges coloured in, pre coloured paper, or why not stamp a pattern onto your paper?

This tutorial by In 2 Crafting (another blog well worth a visit, with lots of hints, tips and inspiration) uses a 2" punch, but I have done it with a much smaller one and although fiddly, works out just fine.

This is what you can end up with:

I used plain paper, just adding a touch of colour to the petals using aquamarkers watered down.  The leaves aren't really rose leaves, but this was the only leaf punch I could find!

Additional touches can be added, such as a drop of glaze to simulate raindrops, or some quicky glue pen and glitter to just give it some bling!

Another tip... faux pearls

Sue Wilson demonstrated a really cool way of making your own "faux pearls" on create and craft tv this week.

Basically, you put dots of "dries white" glue onto waxy paper (I tried it with the strips from the back of wide double sided tape and it worked a treat!) and then when they are dry, brush them with mica pearlescent powder. Use the white, or any other colour mica powder you have - the result is amazingly close to the stick on pearls you buy. Sue recommends spritzing the finished "pearls" with water to set the powder.

If anyone is interested in other things she is doing/has done, you should check out her blog - this is a link to the faux pearls tip and there is also a photo of the aforementioned pearls...

A top tip...

Often, when I am matting and layering, I want that tiny strip around the edge to pick out a key colour from the image, and I am frustrated to find that I don't have the right colour backing paper.

Then it occurred to me that what I do have is a huge range of felt tipped markers in all the colours I could want. So what I do now is cut a piece of ordinary copy paper to the size I want, and run the appropriate colour marker along each edge of the paper so that about 5mm is covered. I then matt and layer as normal. Problem sorted! And a top tip...