Poppies

I thought it would be nice to post a blog about something other than a challenge Christmas card for a change, so here is a card I made last night for a friend's 70th birthday.

I recently bought this stamp on a plate from the newly named Chocolate Baroque site. One of my fellow CB Guild members posted a card using it with a pretty pink ink which looked lovely, so I thought I'd try to make something quite different. I tried stamping it on red patterned paper and than on a couple of different shades of red card, but they each seemed very flat. Then I tried this one and knew it was what I was looking for. I wanted to highlight the moon so I looked through my bits and pieces box and found a tiny off-cut of two layers of fantasy film sandwiching some red fibres. I just managed to cut out a disc the right size (I knew I was keeping it for something!). Then I used a sharp craft knife to cut around the flowers that overhang the moon in the main image, and slipped the disc behind them. I then cut out the panel, edged it with black diamond stickles, and use the same for the centres of the flowers. It seemed to belong on a DL card but there was still a lot of space, and people who know me will know that I don't do empty spaces very well, so I went on a hunt for something to stamp behind the panel, eventually settling on this lovely star trail by Great Impressions. The whole card had a sort of oriental feel to it so I chose a small greeting by Elusive Images in a similar style, and punched out three of my lovely teeny weeny dragonflies.






This card nearly didn't get made as on my first attempt I realised that I had stuck the panel on wonky, too wonky to leave, so I removed it and in doing so I wrecked the base card. I nearly threw it all in the bin, but as it was raining hard which means that our TV was not working, I started again, and I am pleased that I did, as I am very happy with the end result!

Be good! Here comes Santa!

Okay, I know it's only April, but I missed last week's challenge because my son was out here on a visit, so I didn't want to miss this one as well, and I think his sleigh takes off around lunch time today . So last night I had a quick think and came up with this card.

I don't actually feature Father Chrismas very often on my cards but I do have a few Crafty Individuals stamps so I chose one of those. Having stamped him onto cream card I added a little colour with a sponge and Adirondak red pepper and pesto ink pads. Then I cut it out, mounted it onto a narrow red frame, and then onto some thick card. It looked a bit 'flat' so I added some orange/gold glitter to the candles on the tree (He'd set his beard alight if he carried it with lit candles on wouldn't he?!), and sprinkled a very little around the frame which gave it just the lift it needed. I then triple embossed the panel with UTEE. I used the same red for the base card, folding it for my preferred card size - A6, and cut away about a third of the front. The remaining front area I covered with some striped paper, a docraft download I think, but then I struggled to find a toning paper for the other half. In the end I went for a complete contrast of off-white with a tiny greeting in gold all over it, and enhanced its edge with a fiskars punch so it showed the red card back through the leaves. Then I mounted the Santa panel and added a matching greeting using a Hot off the press stamp.




I am entering this card in Bah! Humbug! challenge 16; The Man Himself...Santa Claus

Easter or Christmas?

Now for me Easter time means much more than just fluffy chicks and chocolate eggs. It is, after all, when we celebrate the death, and more importantly, the ressurection of Jesus, but there is no denying that it falls in Springtime, a season usually associated with the colour yellow. It is also marked by the sharing of chocolate eggs as a symbol of 'new life', and eggs are almost oval in shape. So I was quite happy to try a challenge to put a little of Easter into a Christmas card, by using the colour yellow, and/or including an oval shape in the design.

Having chosen some slightly mottled yellow card from my stash, I started with one of my favourite Christmas stamps by Stampendous. This image was too large for any of my nesties oval dies so I used the Design master software to draw a large oval and a slightly larger scalloped oval mat, and cut them with my Craft Robo. I darkened the edges of the smooth oval to make it stand out from the mat. To enhance the image I restamped the word panel on some more of the yellow card which had been sprayed with making memories bright gold mica spray. (You can see this better in the close-up picture). I mounted it on a small piece of brown mulberry paper and glued it onto the main image. I then cut out the main prongs of the star and embossed this with bright gold powder and glued it in place. I had difficulty finding a suitable backing paper. All the browns and yellows that I tried just dulled the panel, so instead I used some grey/blue distressed wood paper by Studio K, and echoed the scalloped oval with a Martha Stewart lace punch along one edge. I finished off by tying some narrow gold ribbon around the left edge and adding a greeting that I made using Imagepac.

I am entering this card in CHNC challenge 17: a touch of Easter for Christmas.

Three Kings

I have visitors again this week, but last night I found myself with a couple of hours alone so I decided to make a quick challenge card and this is what I made.

The background paper is sponged with Adirondak citrus ink and distress ink in barn door and tumbled glass. I used Adirondak lettuce ink to randomly stamp a palm tree (Crafty Individuals), star (Elusive Images),and words of the carol 'We three kings' (Clarity Stamps), and highlighted areas with a gold pen. I then overstamped in black with the main image of the kings by Crafty Individuals and the gifts which I can't remember the maker for. I cut out the panels and mounted them on red card to fit a DL card, and then mounted this on to citrus green card. A few red gems completed it. The words of the carol are stamped in full on the insert.

I am entering this card in Crafty Hazelnuts Christmas Challenge 16 - sing song - a card inspired by the words of a Christmas carol or song.

Take two.

On our journey through the Christmas alphabet, this week we have reached H is for Hotspot. This is an interesting technique whereby an image is stamped in monochrome, usually black and white. It is then stamped for a second time and a small area is chosen for the 'Hotspot', coloured, cropped, normally as a circle, matted onto a second slightly larger, darker circle, and then carefully attached in its correct position on the main image.

Cute images lend themselves to this technique, and I don't usually do 'cute', but I did manage to find this little mouse stamp by Personal Impressions, and it worked just fine. I used a momento inkpad so I could colour it with my copic markers. I wanted to make a bright and cheerful card so I used a sheet of docrafts paper which could be nearly antique!, some slightly gaudy parcel ribbon, and I made a poinsettia with my new Marianne die that was just begging to be used. I can take no credit for the holly and bow as it is something I rescued from a Christmas card I recieved last year.

I am quite happy with this card though it is not really my style so I had a second go with a stamp I have used in this way many times before. This is one of my favourite Penny Black images, new last autumn I believe, and I have a pair to it showing a doe and her baby in a similar landscape. To stamp this, I carefully inked up all the background with a pad, again I used momento tuxedo black, and then I coloured the stag with a brown Marvy le plume pen, and stamped it altogether. Normally I would leave it like that, but for this challenge I repeated the stamping and cut the stag to mount as my hotspot. I layered it onto some silver holographic paper, (this was a rash buy from QVC I think, and I have enough of it to wallpaper my room, so I am trying to use some up!), and then onto black. A large tree by Magenta stamped onto a white base card provided the background, and a simple SeeD's greetings and some punched out silver snowflakes was all it needed. However, I usually add a bit of sparkle with a stickles glitter glue to snowy scenes, using one of my trio of ice, diamond and crystal. When I couldn't replace one of these I bought the newer one called frosted lace which appears to be whiter in the bottle. I though I'd give it a try on this card but I was disappointed to find that it has much less sparkle. than the others. That was last night. This morning I found that it had taken on a hint of pink, which wasn't quite the effect I was looking for. Whether it interacted with the momento ink, or whether it will always look like this, I have yet to find out. But what's done is done, and I am happy with the card anyway.

So I am entering both these cards in the ABC Christmas Challenge - H is for Hotspot.

Another scrapbook page

This is just a quickie to show the scrapbook page that I have made as a pair to the one I did last week. (See my post on 8th April). That one was 'Let's play in the garden', so now I have done 'Let's play in the house'. Once again I have used a template from my book Creative photo cropping for scrapbooks. It was rather a fiddle, a bit like doing an odd shape jigsaw, but in the end I put the house together. I wasn't sure I liked it when I realised how small the photos would be, but I used the partial silhouette technique with the photos, and a pale cream for their background, and it made them stand out really well.

I did a minimal amount of journalling this time, fitted around the contour of the roof top, along with a photo of the actual house my son spent his childhood years in. I used the same font as on the previous page for the title, in colours taken from the main image. I then decided I didn't like the gaps at the side, so for the left side of the house, I printed out a bare tree from the Artylicious CD Essence of nature, and cut it all out to show the sky behind it. I decided against adding leaves as I would probably have over done it! For the other side I used a tiny Art Impressions stamp to build up the idea of an evergreen shrub. I just love that range of stamps. They are so versatile. A couple of rows of hand-cut grass completed the scene.

I wanted to give the pages a feeling of fun, and childlike simplicity, and overall I am very pleased with the results. They will of course, be put in the album facing each other.

A challenging challenge.

When I read that Bah! Humbug! wanted us to use candy canes in our design this week, I knew it would be a challenge to find something. But I hadn't expected it to be quite so tough. Having scoured my copious collection of stamps, reeves of paper, folder full of decoupage sheets, and several CDs, I had drawn a blank. Then, just as I was thinking I had better give this one a miss, I remembered my recent foray into the world of digistamps. I wasn't sure where to start looking. There are so many digi-sites to choose from, but I put it in google and after a bit of browsing I came up with a stamp for this cute little gingerbread man enjoying a swing from - Yes - a candy cane, from pinkcatstudio.com. So here you have it.
I coloured the image with water base pens. The pretty layered oval is a Craft Robo template that I bought a while back from www.craftsuprint.com, the blue layer is a Graphicus paper, and the background paper I printed from the Artylicious Season's Greetings CD. In the end it was a relatively quick and easy card, which I am entering in Bah! Humbug! Challenge 14; Candy canes.

Running round in circles

When I saw that the challenge over at Crafty Hazel Nut was 'Going round in circles' I thought, "Great. A chance to use the lovely Marianne die that arrived in the post this week". So I cut it out in red card using my faithful cuttlebug, and than started searching for an image to put on it. I was struggling a bit as it is quite small, but eventually I found these bells on an ancient sheet of traditional decoupage. I used three layers to give them some dimension, and added them to the circle die cut.


I tried it on several different colours and settled for some yellow Graphicus paper I had in my stash. For the main card I printed out a sheet of red from the Artylicious Season's Greetings CD, and cut a square to cover the front of a blank 15cm square card. It was a bit plain so I added some swirls, also new Marianne dies, and made another circle to carry the text using various nestability dies and an Art Journal stamp.


I am entering this card in Craftyhazelnuts Christmas Challenge 15 - Going round in circles.

Let's play in the garden

Part of the idea behind setting up a craft blog was to enable me to take part in some of the online challenges. I don't do many but they seem to be taking up most of my crafting time, so last night I decided to do something different. Here is the page I made for my son's scrapbook (which I have promised to try to finish before I visit UK in November!)


I have several books about scrapbooking, but the one I return to most often is the Making Memories book 'Creative photo cropping for scrapbooks'. This page is my interpretation of a layout suggestion in there. It took me a while to decide which photos were the right size and orientation for each dragonfly wing, but once that was decided, the rest was not too difficult, just a bit fiddly.



As this was for a boy's book, I shied away from the floral background that was my first plan, and chose instead a muted blue piece that came with an album I bought from QVC, a long time ago, with deep blue and aqua sheets of pearlescent paper for the layering. For the dragonfly's body I sprayed a piece of card with an array of blue and silver mica sprays, and cut it out when it was dry. My son would not appreciate a flower garden on there, so I stuck to muted blues to combine some paper flowers from my stash, to make a few embellishmentas. I also had a root around and found a few blue butterflies. The tiny dragonflies are cut with the smallest punch I have ever seen. My daughter-in-law bought me a set of three of these, and I just love them.
I thought that the photos spoke for themselves and no additional journalling was necessary, so I just used my CraftRobo to cut the letters for the title, with a contrasting mat for each one, using the font LD Wilbert, bought from www.scrapnfonts.com.
It is quite a busy page, but he was a busy little boy, and overall I am pleased with the end result. I hope he will be too.

Now I have to think about 'Let's play in the house'!!

To make you smile.

Over at the Bah! Humbug! site this week we are challenged to make a card that will make you giggle, or at least smile, with the option of adding a touch of tatan to the design. So I have used my 'Twelve days of Christmas' set of clear stamps by Penny Black. These are such fun images. I love the swan with her rubber ring to keep her afloat, the dancing hedgehog, and the calling bird with her mobile in hand. But I know from past experience that the collection is just too big to fit them all on even an A5 card, so I tried to choose just one.


In the end I decided to feature 'twelve drummers drumming', as I have a son who is a drummer in a heavy metal band. But I then had a go at printing all the others with stazon, onto frosted shrink plastic and colouring them with pencils, making a set of tiny tiles that I used to edge the card. Some of the detail in the images is difficult to see in the photos, but whoever gets this card at Christmas will be able to see them just fine.











I managed to find a piece of tartan paper to layer the drummer on, and a small red and green bow just finished it off.

It's not the best card I have made, but I think it turned out OK so I am entering it in the Bah! Humbug! Challenge 13 - which you will find here.

G for Girly.

Having five sons and no daughters, and with five of my seven grandchildren being boys, it is not very often that I find myself making a girly card, but that was the challenge this week over on ABC Christmas Challenge, with the added ingredient to use pink, purple or silver. So I have given it my best shot, and this is the very pink card, that I made.For this card I stamped a sweet little trio of angels by Stampendous, and coloured them in with Copic markers. I used a couple of shades of pink Stickles to decorate their trees and more stickles in icicle for their wings. This was mounted and layered using oval nestabilities. All the papers came from a free booklet that I got with a Papercraft Essentials magazine some years ago.
Two layers of a Martha Stewart lace punch added interest at the lower edge, and I hid the join under a toning piece of ribbon carrying a cuttlebug label with a small sentiment (make unknown).
I am entering this card in the ABC Christmas Challenge; G is for Girly, which you will find here.