Jaine Drake – July Guest Designer

I hope everyone had a great long weekend with Canada Day on Thursday and July 4th yesterday. What a great time of year! School is out and already a reason to get together with family and friends to celebrate.

The guest designer we are celebrating this month is not from North America, but from England and has been living in Luxembourg for several years. She is creating a very cool range of different kinds of projects with her materials and we sent her the “Itty Bittys” stamp set, on of our favourites, to see what she would come up with. Jaine had so many ideas that we are showing her creations in a couple of posts, to give you some time to use her inspiration.

I’m a British expat living in Luxembourg with my husband and three daughters who are obviously a lot of my inspiration. We’ve been here for 16 years and before that lived for a short time in Oman in the Middle East. Luxembourg is something of a crafting desert but slowly ideas and supplies are beginning to seep in from across the borders from France and Germany.

I studied art at school but didn’t pursue it once I’d left.  It wasn’t until I became a Mummy that my crafty nature started to come out again. I started off with cross-stitch and patchwork and quilting and progressed to paper crafts like papier maché and decoupage.  Later on I went into card making and decided to start selling some of my work. I always said I’d never get sucked into scrapbooking but I think it became an inevitable progression from the cards and since then I’ve never looked back. I now teach paper crafts and still sell my work from time to time but teaching is the most rewarding thing.

I’m lucky enough to have a work room dedicated to me and my crafts although it does become a meeting point for the girls and their friends when they feel like a bit of cutting and sticking! I’m not sure I can say what my style is as I’m always changing and developing but at the moment I’m very much into the shabby chic style although my cards do tend to stay quite graphic and clean. I’m a gardener too and like nothing better than to sit in my favourite place in the garden just looking and taking in the ambiance, maybe with a craft book on my knee.

The stamps themselves were very easy to work with and their little inchie size meant I could use my inchie punch to cut out  perfect squares. For the cards I decided to keep the designs quite simple and their shape and size meant creating a grid style card was easy. I used coloured pens to add some colour to the images except for the first card where I decided just to use a brown Versamarker pad on brown cardstock for that wood grain effect.

Thanks,

Jaine

Jaine has more tricks up her sleeve. We have a couple of tutorials for you about stamping on polymer clay and metal coming up!