Oooh lovely new stamps

If you have been following my blog for a while - hello :)
You might remember that I used to frequent the wonderful craft shop Imagine That in Upminster where I was lucky enough to teach a few classes as well. The shop is no more, but the brand lives on and the fabulous Emma Godfrey who runs it also works for Paperartsy and has just brought out a range of stamps under the Paperartsy umbrella. How happy was I when she contacted me to see if I would like to do some samples?
Very.
is an understatement.
You can see the whole range here. I had plate three to play with.
Here are my samples

This one took sooooo long to do.
That is because I tried to do a Paperartsy type of background to begin with - splodges and stencils and all sorts and it was a massive failure.
So I sat in the corner and cried a bit.
And then decided that as Emma knows my style then my style would be perfectly fine.
I'm still a bit sad about not being able to achieve what I had planned but hey ho.
As well as the stamps I was sent some lovely, lovely Paperartsy Fresco Finish paints in pinks and teal and a gorgeous old gold.
The background to this had lots of teal to start with but now has a colour scheme that reminds me of a licourice allsort :)
So instead this has layers - Sherbert, Old Gold and plain white cardstock. The top and bottom layers had slightly diluted Old Gold flicked on them. The pink strip was painted with Candy Floss . While all of those layers were drying I stamped and painted various elements from the stamp set. I had to add a Sharpie outline to everything (I really did)  and then stuck it all together. I tried to write "Christmas" to match "selfie", but didn't really manage it :)

Whereas this one took about 10 minutes....

The paints are just the bees knees for doing ombre effects. They manage to both hold their own AND mix beautifully. I didn't try to paint the outline of the frame, instead I used a krylon pen - my hand is too wobbly for such detail :) But I did paint the camera with slightly watered down paint so you could still see the text.

I loved the ombre so much I did it again!

this time just with the pink colours. I stamped directly onto the painted surface (with my toes crossed. I would have crossed my fingers but that would have interfered with the stamping) and it all lined up perfectly. Again I diluted the paints so that the text would show.

And I have just discovered a mistake - some bits that should have been painted - have you?

thanks again Emma for doing me the honour of asking me to be a Guest Designer - any time! (as long as you don't want the signature Paperartsy style...)

In other news as it is past Friday that means I have another Daring Card to reveal.

And as it was the first Friday in Feb it was a fabulous Elemental Inspiration, this one chose by Sharon

For this challenge we need to use at least three elements from the photo on our cards.

I went with the doodling, the paisley feature, the scallop and the blue edging. I doodled the image and coloured it in using water colour paints. Some pink cardstock was put through a paisley embossing folder and I dug out my old scallop scissors for the edging. Some black pen work, a Dienamics die and a Clearly Besotted sentiment and it was all done.