Petra's CJ.

This is my first ever entry in someone else's journal! If you recall, I am in a circle journal with 9 other people from UK Stampers, and the idea is that we send a journal around with an unmounted stamp, and everyone does an entry with that stamp. Well, this is Petra's journal, and she has chosen a journal made of envelopes and tags. Each player decorates an envelope, then uses Petra's stamp on the tag. Petra's stamp is a sort of hippy-chick from Time to Stamp, quite a challenging one really! First of all, it made me think of 'Hair', then I started to think about 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' by the Beatles. Hence the colours etc! (Check out the 3rd photo for the lyrics if you need an explanation).
The envelope is covered in paper made using the usual water/craft mat/Distress Ink technique. The diamond stamps are by Limited Edition, and the swirl stamp is from Paperartsy. The 'tangerine tree' is done using stamps from Aud Design, and the 'cellophane flowers' are also Aud Design. They are yellow and green, coloured with alcohol inks, but didn't photograph well.
The tag inside was inspired by those star charts, which show the night sky as a join-the-dots picture to explain the constellations. After sponging on some distress inks, I used Field of Sky to stamp on my stars in silver, then used Petra's stamp with Versamark and clear holographic embossing powder. As you can see from the photo, when you tilt the tag the image of the woman becomes clear, tilt it back and she's invisible!
I'm up to my eyeballs in birthday cards again, I have three to do this week. Then I have a flurry in January, and that's it for a while! I think that in February I need to sit down and make a few, so I'm not always playing catch-up. But I did take the time to make some arty ATCs for UK Stampers. I got really inky and pricked my fingertips (I used hand-sewing on them!), but afterwards I felt really good. Sometimes you just need to go where your muse takes you, it's really therapeutic. I forgot to take photos, though, sorry!