Ribbon Star Flowers

I am sure you may have done these before, but here is my take on a cute little ribbon flower.

1. Items you will need.  Ribbon (this about 1 cm in width), paper piercer, brad, and a lighter.

2. Cut your ribbon to about 1 inch in length, you can make it longer if you wish. You will need 5 one inch pieces per flower, I cut enough for 2 flowers here.

 

3.  When you cut the ribbon it will fray, so I used a lighter and lightly burned both ends of the ribbon so it would not fray or pull apart.

4. Using your paper piercer, pierce one end of the ribbon to make a hole (if you use a mouse pad or foam mat under your ribbon it makes making holes much easier).  The take the ribbon off the piercer and push it onto the the brad in the hole you just made. 

5. Do the same for the rest of the ribbons until you have 5 total on your brad.  Make sure you fan them out so they do not overlap.

I hope you found this useful.  Enjoy.

Scraps of Darkness Contest

Here is my entry for the Scrap of Darkness Contest, for info about scraps of darkness or about the contest please visit their blog at Scraps of Darkness.

Faux Sandstone or Tigers eye Gems

I follow another blog http://gabriellepollacco.blogspot.com/, she has such wonderful pages and ideas.  One of which was faux polished stones. I loved it, but I needed brown gems, and I had only seen her gems as green or blue (turquoise gems).  So i thought, why not a tiger's eye or sandstone version.

1. What you need: brown ink, round punch (or shape you see stones), white gel pen, various shades of brown and tan map pencils, white map pencil, and kraft paper (or a medium tan cardstock).

2. Punch a circle out of the kraft paper and run around the edge of the paper to soften the edges and also to create a shadow effect to give the illusion of a dome shape.  I like to use my finger to ink the edge (I press my thumb or finger into the ink then rub against the paper to give the shadow effect).
  

 

 3. Take one of the brown pencils and start drawing lines, slightly curved.  Make some think and thin, blend some together. 

 4.  Using the white pencils blend the lines together and to also fill in some of the gaps.

5. Using the white gel pen create the illusion of a dome ans shine, draw a thick white curved line.

6.  Most stones are set in metal, so to create that look i took dark brown cardstock and cut out another circle about 1/8th of an inch bigger than my faux stone.  I then took a shiny paint like smooch ink in molasses to painted around the edge.

7.  Place you faux stone on top of your faux metal setting and you are done!!

I would really like to thank Such a Pretty Mess Blog for this great idea!!