Nice things - sheep and embossing folders and Brusho Paints

I recently made two sheep for my good (virtual) friend at Elephant's Child who has been a wonderful support to my blog and who had expressed a liking for the needle felted sheep I had made for my craft stall.  I felt that she should have some of her own as a thank you.  They arrived safely with her in Australia and she very kindly featured them on her blog post for today.

 I think they made her smile.  I am going to be making lots more sheep in the coming year!

 I have also been playing with new things, like embossing folders on satin board.  For those not familiar with embossing folders, they are a plastic folder which has a pattern on the inside.  When they are run through a die cutting machine, the pattern is pushed into the paper or card and it looks like my examples above.  The ones I used above are really detailed, but the detail has come through really well.  They will probably be used in card making projects.

 I have also finally got round to playing with my Brusho paints.  These are a highly pigmented form of watercolour paint which come in little pots.  They are in a crystal form, so for my first experiments, I wet the paper and sprinkled a little bit of the colour out - you have to make a hole in the lids and shake the pots.  The crystals immediately spread out and formed rather lovely patterns and colour mixes.  I did find that they stained my fingers a bit so need to be aware of that (the colour did go after a couple of days).  Adding more water helped the colours to blend, but I found I needed to be careful as too much water made them more difficult to control and I started to lose some of the lovely effects.

They can be used as traditional watercolour paints and there are videos on Youtube to demonstrate lots of other effects.  I like the effect for the background on a card, and I also like the way each one is unique as I would never be able to get the same image twice.  I hope to do more playing over the Christmas break.