Bluebird of Spring: Crafty Tutorial

See what Leah made with our Chipboard, Tart Tins, and other crafty goodies!  This is a wonderful project for a gift, springtime decoration, or class!  Complete supplies used are listed below.  Thank you Leah for giving us this detailed tutorial!

With March approaching, most people's thoughts in the United States turn to spring. Wouldn't it be fun to chase away a friend's winter blues with these sweet spring wishes?

Supplies that you'll need:

• Jenni Bowlin Bird Chipboard
• Jenni Bowlin Chipboard Flowers
• Jenni Bowlin Tart Tins
• Vellum Butterflies in Yellow
• Pearl and Rhinestone Charms in Cream
• Jenni Bowlin/Ranger paints in Stick Candy, Malted Milk, and Soap Powder
• Jenni Bowlin/Ranger inks in Stick Candy, Malted Milk, Speckled Egg, and Brown Sugar
• Ink Blending Tool
• Ranger Crackle Accents
• Crackle medium for paints
• Ribbon 
• small stick to attach your butterfly to
• small piece of floral foam, floral moss, and spanish moss - all available in the floral aisle of your craft store
• small twig to attach to the base {optional}
• heat gun, hot glue gun and glue sticks

For the bird, you'll need the Malted Milk paint, crackle medium and Soap Powder paint:

Give the small chipboard bird a coat of the Malted Milk paint and allow it to dry thoroughly. Feel free to use your heat gun, but keep it as a distance. The heat can sometimes bubble the paint as it dries:

Apply a nice coat of the crackle medium and let it dry. The less you push the medium around when you're spreading it on, the better crackles you'll get on your finished piece. Allow it to dry. If it's wet at all when you apply the overcoat, it won't crackle.

Spread a nice, thick coat of paint on top of the dry crackle. Make sure you have plenty of paint on your brush and spread evenly - you can't go back over your work much, because the crackle medium can cause the paint to clump.

Watch it crackle as it dries. I don't like using a heat gun to dry this, unless I keep the gun well away from the piece, so that the paint won't bubble.

Distress your chipboard bird by dabbing your finger in Malted Milk ink, and swiping it across the bird in the same direction as the crackles.

Finish the edges with the same method, using the Brown Sugar in.

Attach the wing using a hot glue gun, and add a rhinestone for the eye. then set it aside to create the base, and "nest" for your bird.

Apply Stick Candy paint to the small chipboard flower from the package. Once it dries, apply a coat of Crackle Accent. Set it aside to dry.

Apply a coat of malted milk paint to the tart tin and allow it to dry.

Distress the tin using the same method as the bird, using the Malted Milk, Brown Sugar and Speckled Egg inks. Just gently press your finger in the ink pad and brush across the tin. You can wipe excess off using a paper towel if you need to! Allow the ink to dry.

Glue a small piece of the floral foam to the bottom of the tin, using the hot glue gun.

Hide the foam by gluing a piece of the Spanish moss to cover. Cut off any flyaway pieces.

Press bird into the foam and add hot glue to hold.

Once the crackle on the flower for the base is dry, distress it first with the Stick Candy ink, and then with Brown Sugar ink.

Add some floral moss on top and glue.

To make the banner piece, curl the paper around the edges.

Distress with Brown Sugar ink and the ink blending tool.

Glue the tart tin to the base, and add the stick on the side. Embellish your bird by adding the tag, bow, pearls, and mounting the butterfly on the stick behind the bird. 

All finished and ready to give to a friend or enjoy yourself!

I hope you enjoyed this sweet little project! Leah

Got Vacation Photos? Get 'Em All On One Layout!

Today at Summer Camp we'll look at getting many photos on a layout. Betsy brings us this idea for getting lots of photos on her vacation layout:

I found photos the other day of a summer vacation we took in 1999.  It was one of our most favorite vacations full of cousins, aunts and uncles, adventures, and really funny stories. I really needed to scrap them!  There were only about 15 photos, but why not get them all on one layout?!

Supplies: Haven Patterned Paper, Core'dinations Aunt Grace, Vintage Style Sew-on Buttons, Chipboard buttons, Embellished butterflies, Flag Banner stickers and chipboard.

There are two photos on the front of the layout, but hiding underneath that grouping is a bunch of others. The title and the chipboard buttons are tabs that pull up ...

to show sets of photo collages and journaling ...

These photos are old, taken with a basic camera, and covered in shadows and bad lighting.  Using some quick PSE fixes (auto sharpen, shadows/highlights, brightness/contrast) really helped make the photos better.  The photo collages were made in PSE by using rectangular shapes as masks for the photos.

You can download the photoshop files I used to create this right here with these links:

The front collage:

http://www.4shared.com/photo/oA_WIbyo/collage_front.html

Photo collage 1:

http://www.4shared.com/photo/nJdBKMYE/collage_inner_block1.html

Photo collage 2:

http://www.4shared.com/photo/5_cXBgOC/collage_inner_block2.html

Photo collage 3:

http://www.4shared.com/photo/N8piR1Tq/collage_inner_block3.html

Title block (adhere to the back of your first collage):

http://www.4shared.com/photo/GedoDwpD/title_backing_page.html

Guest Star Mandy Koeppen

Today we welcome Guest Star Mandy Koeppen to the Jenni Bowlin Studio Blog. We are sure you will fall in love with her heartfelt vintage stylings. Welcom Mandy! And thanks so much for the lovely inspiration!

Mandy Koeppen wears many job titles in her everyday life from chauffeuring family accountant, to zoo keeping therapist but her favorite and the one she loves most is Stay at home Momma. Mandy is happily married to her best friend Louis. They are rockin the suburbs in Michigan where they are raising their 3 children Teagan 8, Mavrick 7, and Avery 5. When their circus aka life has an intermission Mandy has a passion for Scrapbooking , she’s always up for a day of treasure hunting hoping to score that next must have vintage item, she loves photography, and raising Autism Awareness for her sweet boy Mav. Mandy currently designs for Epiphany Crafts, GCD Studios, and Precocious Paper. To see more of Mandy’s work or to get to know her better you can visit her blog http://mandykoeppen.blogspot.com/ or follow her on Twitter: MandyKoeppen.

Guest Star Sarah Jane Dowsett!

Today we welcome Sarah Jane Dowsett to the blog!  Welcome SJ!

SJ really has mad stamping skills, doesn't she? We love the way she's created her own patterned paper with the new Cabbage Flower Stamp. And how clever is she to "thread" her pearl button with a permanent marker?

This next layout featuring the new "Haven" line has such a lovely serenity about it. Gorgeous!

Thanks for the inspiration SJ!

The Butterfly Stamp + Embroidery

For today's installment of "Stamping and Beyond," we bring you Shimelle Laine and her gorgeous embroidery skills . . .

The butterfly stamp is my very favourite - of course - and it's a perfect size for baby gifts. Of course, you could also adapt this idea to a larger garment, perhaps with a flock of butterflies! But for this project, I stamped the butterfly just once on a newborn sized onesie.

I stamped in pink then used three strands of embroidery floss to outline the full butterfly. I find it easiest to stitch on knit fabrics with a hoop, but it's best to stamp without the hoop so the design will be in the right place and not distorted. I just pop a piece of scrap cardboard inside the item so it's easy to stamp on the knit. Once you add the hoop, pull it taut but not tight - you don't really want to stretch the design.

The butterfly is a quite detailed stamp, so you could spend a long time following all the lines with your stitches! I opted to just add a bit of the detail in the top and bottom of the wings, then some wording across the middle. For the lettering, I just wrote in pencil and stitched over my letters. If that's too hard to judge, you could use letter stamps as a guide or print it out on paper and hold it up to the window and trace through the fabric.

The stamp ink will fade with several washes (unless you use special fabric inks) but I like this design both with the ink and with just the outline, so I don't mind if it fades. (Of course it's not for me so really I should just hope that baby and her mama don't mind!)

In progress . . .

Beautiful! Thanks for the inspiration Shimelle!

Stamping on Patterned Paper and More

Design team member Stephanie had a wonderful idea to stamp on patterned paper to create this lovely layout:

The Butterfly stamp was stamped with Lemon Drops on the ledger paper from the Black/Red Extension III.  The text in the patterned paper adds a subtle detail to the butterflies.  The butterflies were cut, adhered to the layout, and the wings gently folded out for dimension.

Michelle used the same stamp on vintage sewing patterned paper to create this piece of wall art:

Michelle used Chewing Gum ink on the sewing paper to get a unique see-through appearance.

Next time you take out your Jenni Bowlin Studio acrylic stamps, try stamping on something other than cardstock! You may love the result!

And speaking of stamps!  See our previous post for peeks of Jenni's new cardstock line and new release of acrylic stamps!

Stamping a Patterned Background

Lisa Dickinson shows us how she used the butterfly stamp to make a patterned background for her beautiful layout.

I pulled out three ink colors: Fountain Pen, Chewing Gum and Chili Powder, along with a piece of ivory cardstock. I wanted a softer look to my stamping, so to keep the stamped image from being too bold, I "unloaded" some of the ink onto a scrap piece of paper before stamping on my cardstock. I alternated between the three ink colors, overlapping each stamp just a bit:

You could cover your entire your background cardstock this way if you wanted, but I cut it down and mounted it on a pink background for my page:

I finished the page off with lots of bits & baubles from JBS, including a mini bingo card, tickets, vellum butterfly, chipboard button, sew-on button and rhinestone button.

Beautiful Lisa!  

Putting Your Stamp on May!

The acrylic stamps from Jenni Bowlin are making her design team very happy!  Check us out this entire month for tips, tricks, and techniques with Jenni Bowlin Studio acrylic stamps!

This week, we'll see how our design team members used the gorgeous Butterfly stamp:

Jill created this layout and explains how she created this multi-colored butterfly border:

I decided to work with a green, yellow, and red color scheme, to match the colors in the papers, and went with a varicolored stamping method.   I began by selecting four Jenni Bowlin for Ranger dye inks, pairing Seed Packet with Stick Candy, and Chili Powder and Lemon Drops. 

I placed the stamp on an acrylic block, and used each pair of inks on the stamp, dividing the color on the stamp into quadrants.  I applied the ink pad directly to the stamp (instead of vice-versa) so that I could have more control over where the ink appeared.

Once the two colors were applied to the stamp, I stamped the image onto a sheet of JBS Core'dinations textured cardstock.  I repeated the process with the other pair of colors, until I had a line of beautiful varicolored butterflies.

I layered the papers, transparencies, and photo beneath the butterflies, and stitched a free-flowing, curvy line over the top.  I kept the butterfly motif going with the addition of JBS vellum-embellished butterflies and butterfly banner alpha stickers.

Thank you Jill for showing us this wonderful stamping technique!