Kit: The Mage Wars

Over at the Simon Says Stamp and Show blog, this week's past challenge, Read All About It!, has been to make something inspired by books or writing.

Until someone starts hosting a "Bookmarks by Newbie Crafters" challenge, this is the best fit for my stuff there is.

I pulled together this kit to start from:

I know, I know, it looks a lot more like three kits than one. But for these bookmarks I'm drawing my inspiration from a trilogy, so I have a mini-kit for each book, with colors from the book's cover:

These three books are known as the Mage Wars trilogy, by Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon. The cover art for all three books is by Jody Lee, whose work is beautiful. Also, the books that Jody Lee illustrates the covers for are almost always books I enjoy. In this case, I do judge books by their covers -- if it's one of her covers, that's as good as any written recommendation.

I also pulled out a few things to try to tie the three bookmarks together visually, rather than inspired-by-series-ly. I don't know that I would normally have pulled out the Shimmer Spritz, but The Artistic Stamper's challenge this month is Splatters and Speckles. I've not tried the splatter-paint-with-mist technique and this seems like a good time -- and then the technique as well as the colors can tie the bookmarks together.

And of course Lawn Fawn's adorable griffin stamp will be a pretty obvious tie-together element as well. I tried to put it on the lens cover to help it show up, but it's pretty unrecognizable in this picture, which is why I mention it. It's just a little cuter and happier than the gryphons on the covers, but hey, griffin stamps aren't a dime a dozen. Actually, fantasy stamps that don't involve fairies or princesses seem pretty rare. Why is that?

I'm looking forward to working these up. I think I'll do the same kind of background for The White Gryphon that I did for the Rainbow Cupcakes bookmark and the unicorn Bookmarks Ever After one, putting pigment ink down and smudging it together.

Supplies:

Kit: Popsicles in the Park

Because I was working with a color challenge for the Popsicles in the Park bookmarks, I went through my little stash and grabbed those colors before thinking about what I wanted to do bookmark-wise. The assembly process itself sparked my imagination, and I ended up pulling together pretty much a whole kit: papers, inks, embossing powers, and stamps. (I don't really use embellishments on bookmarks -- a functional bookmark has to be flat.)

And then I made the bookmarks, and then I decided I should have photographed the kit too, because it was fun to put together.

Instead I photographed the remnants of the kit:

Everything I used on the bookmarks is still there -- in the case of the paper, in scraps -- plus you can see a few things I didn't use -- the pink & orange embossing powders, the little flowers/stars stamp, the striped orange paper, the shiny reddish cardstock... You can also see that I didn't really have any greens as pale as the challenge called for, but that's why the challenge rules are flexible.

Here's a closeup of the stamps and ink/powder/pen I picked out (photos are at different scales):

I had probably too much fun putting together the mini-Queue of Colorbox cat's eye inks. I found most of the colors I wanted in the Swell queue, and got the brighter pink from Tulip Field:

Of course, while the Queues are nice and compact to store, removing a few colors leaves others without a lid. So I combined the remnants of Swell and Tulip Field to create a new Queue for storage, and it actually turned out really pretty:

That would make quite a pretty colorset in and of itself, I think.

Supplies: