Away with the fairies

Last month I took part in the Chocolate Baroque ATC swap with the theme 'Fairies', - a theme I could really enjoy. Here are my two swaps, both made with a beautiful Ctafty Individuals fairy stamp. The first one has words behind the image from a Chocolate Baroque plate called Artistic Affirmations, stamped onto a card well sprayed with a variety of mica mists. For the second one I stamped some flowers from the CB plate Abstract flowers, coloured them with copic markers and decoupaged them. To go inside them I wanted two fairies facing each other so I stamped one onto shrink plastic, scanned it into the computer, reversed it and printed it onto inkjet shrink plastic. This didn't shrink as smoothly or evenly as the one I usually use, but it was sufficient for what I wanted.

I also made a card for a friends birthday that featured a fairy. This time it is one from an old book and CD of Fairies, elves and gnomes by Dover. It is described as 'electronic clip art' but I guess it's really what we now call digistamps. I haven't used it as much as I expected to, but I have returned to this one image many times. She is so pretty. I stamped her three times and coloured her in a mixture of copic and promarker pens. I have a set of 72 copic markers (a birthday present from my understanding Hubby), but they are all quite subdued colours. The very few promarkers I have are much more vibrant so I used those to lift the design. The main wings are highlighted with black diamond stickles, and the front butterfly is dabbed with versamark ink and embossed with one layer of fine, clear powder. I didn't have a suitable gemstone for the heart hanging from her hand so I used glossy accents on purple ink. For the base card I sprayed blue interference, purple and silver mica mists onto black card. A silver peel-off greeting finished it off.