Stampotique Designers Challenge #33 Use your scraps. Also #32, #30 and #29

The Stampotique Designers Challenge #33 is hard this time.
A lot of my scraps are basically rejects, things I made that are UGLY but I don't have the heart to throw them away completely so they sit there in my scrap drawer. It also contains very small scraps of designer paper and a few stamped images that never got used.
I managed to make a card and a tag out of this sad little drawer and used only a white card blank that was new.
This is the pitiful drawer.

Now the only saving grace in this drawer is all the spare Daniel Torrente heads I had left over from a tunnel card I made earlier this year.
I often alter these characters, give them different outfits or move their arms about, they really lend themselves well to this sort of mucking about. 
If you are squeamish you might not want to look at this card.

I had 2 Mort has a Pin Curl heads I had coloured in red.
I used Derwent Inktense Pencils, possibly the best pencils in the world, certainly the most fun to use and as I'm sure you are aware some pencils can be downright frumpy.
I mean just look at this one.

WTF?
A Frumpy Pencil trying to look hot?
NO WAY.

Aha, now we are talking, and as the late great Elvis would say
"A little less conversation a little more action please"
As I understand it, he was thinking about Derwent Inktense Pencils when he wrote that song.

Anyway where were we?
Oh yes.
I thought I would make Mort a twin brother.
Sort of Mortledee and Mortledoo.

Now all I did was turn Mort's head upside down, cut off his chin so his teeth became his hair and added a mouth drawn with a 0.1 Staedtler black pigment liner (which would be the Mercedes of the fineliners as it is a German pen).
That's all it took to create his twin.
But he kind of creeps me out so I didn't try too hard with the background for the card 'cos I can only look at him out the corner of Spanky's eye when she is giving a carrot a really hard stare.


May I just repeat myself here now.
If you are squeamish you might not want to look at this card.
OKAY be it on your own head then.

The background is Ranger paint dabbers, a real ugly colour called Willow (oh the joys of internet shopping) and Cloudy Blue. A couple of bits of scrap DP's and a bit of string.
I made a real effort with this photo and went outside in the sunshine and did a patio shoot.
"Photos from the patio", will it catch on do you think?

Onto the sorry sorry tale of this tag's ignominious beginning.
Do you remember the first year that Tim Holtz did his 12 tags of Christmas?
Well I thought I would join in.
I remember it took me ages to find the correct dimensions to cut out this tag "properly".
 3 hours later the base tag was made.
I then sat there and thought
"OK how are you going to wangle this one then foolgirl?"
Because I didn't actually have any Tim Holtz products.
Not a single one.
Nope, none.

Well the tag was snuggled down at the bottom of my scrap drawer.
Lost and lonely no more.
Recently I diecut a load of nestie tags and inked them with stormy sky distress ink that I didn't like at all, plus it didn't go with the project I was making.
I still think they are ugly so I dragged them roughly through chipped sapphire Distress Ink and they look better now.
I bent them into a deep curve, used white PVA to glue them on the tag. The heads are stuck on with foam pads. The hearts are left over Daniel's Hearts from the same tunnel card project. The boys from the top are Smile, Rocky, Heart Throb, Smile (again) and Rocky (again).
Now I used gold liquid pearls instead of gold brads in the holes on the Nestie double ended tags which looks OK I think and makes a cheaper option than brads.

Ready to do some of the SDC challenges I missed the deadlines for when I was ill?

SDC challenge #32 - Clean and Simple

Describes me really.

How AMATEUR is this then? I love it!
A priceless gem I think.
My nine year old likes it too, worms are bad (the new word for cool apparently).
Hey, that worm is all my own work I'll have you know.

SDC #30 - Recycle.

I have altered a lot of matchboxes and have the matches left over to prove it.
What do you mean, show you?
Looky here then

We probably use one small matchbox worth of matches every 5 years lighting birthday cake candles, so I have a LOT of left over matches.
Strangely no, I don't have any desire to transform them into an accurate scale model of the Cutty Sark or Westminster Abbey.

Instead I came up with some little birdhouse homes for the Three in a round Stampotique stamp that managed to use up about 10 matches.
Now my maths is a bit dodgy but I think about another 9999 bird houses to go to use all of them pesky matches up, unless you know any old men?
Steady.

I thought I would try a different style to my normal and use a muted palette of colours.
This first birdhouse uses a piece of recycled parcel paper, as it was runkled (creased) I ran it through my Xcut paper crimper which is adorable, sometimes it wears a bow; actually it IS a hot tool.
Then I used my finger (another hot tool) to apply some silver acrylic paint to the parcel paper along the top of the ridges.
The base is made of foam board.
I cut up some matches for the gable and used white PVA to glue everything including the beads around the stamp.
It was so plain I just couldn't leave it like that so added some tiny red beads and crystal glitter glue to the match sticks to try and perk it up.
It's still a bit dull to look at...

Then as an antidote I did another one in my normal style.

Now for this one I was planning on putting 3 match sticks together as the little step into the birdhole but got carried away with the other decorations and didn't leave enough room so had to put them on separately, doh.

 SDC#29 - Sketch

Now I have never liked the Pied Piper's general nastiness.
Stealing children for heaven's sake, and I wondered what other story he could  have had to make him nicer, and possibly just another misunderstood soul doing his best to survive.

What if the Pied Piper was a girl who was living in the shadows; living only a half life mostly drab and ghostlike, having neither emotions nor physical sensations   and only a wavering form.
Perhaps to be corporeal and complete she needed to be taught how to live.
Maybe she needed the animals in all their glorious, noisy, colourful variations,  being busy living life at full throttle in the present moment to really teach her how to live.
Maybe it was the animals she was calling with her flute playing and maybe just maybe they all lived happily ever after.

 Of course she could have just been the victim of a careless misspelling by a lackadaisical Scribe who was spending too much time thinking about cheese and she was really the Plaid Pipper which is a whole 'nother story.

Happy creating!
Gini
xx