Birthday butterflies

I am determined to squeeze one post in before the next Rudolph day on Wednesday, so here are a pair of butterfly cards I made, one for my sister's birthday, and the other for a friend.

In each case the flowers and leaves were stamped with an Altenew set of layering stamps. There are six layers to the flower and four to each leaf, and they really do build up into beautiful roses. I am lucky to have a range of coloured ink pads in my stash, so I have plenty to choose from. They are then cut out with the matching dies.

The two sets of background papers were from pads I have bought at Lidls at some time, as is the plain dark pink paper.

The doily on the top card was cut with a cheap Chinese die bought through Amazon, and the lower one is a Gina Marie Design die.

The sentiment on the first card is cut with a Joanna Sheen signature die, and the butterfly is using two Memory box dies.

The sentiment on the second card is one I designed and cut with my silhouette Cameo machine, and the butterfly die is by Wild Rose Studio.

Both cards are the same inside and they use a pop-up arch of butterflies and flowers cut on my silhouette cameo from pearlised paper, using a design by Judith Henry, and bought as a cutting file from craftuprint. It was a bit fiddly to put together, but I loved the end result.

I shall be using this insert again, but I prefer my more fancy card front to the plainer one that came with it.

Rudolph day, June 2018

Here we are at Rudolph day again (25th of each month). I have not posted anything since the May challenge. I have made needed birthday cards, but have been too busy to write about them.

But with my new kitchen now finished and the house back to normal, and our first visitors of the season gone, I thought I had better get myself back in gear. We took our son and his partner to the airport yesterday morning, so in the afternoon I thought about a quick and easy card I could make for today's challenge.

I settled on a bought printable file from craftsuprint. It provided a complete card front with decoupage flower elements and layers of the main image to make a pyrimage. I am not a huge fan of pyrimage and I try not to make my cards too dimensional for international posting, so I decided to use just the main card front and printed it directly onto heavy duty card.

There was a corner element of holly sprays and Christmas roses which I didn't care for either, so I used some Joanna Sheen Signature dies to cut two sizes of poinsettias and some holly. I used copic markers to add pale green and yellow to the flowers, and covered the printed corner with my own. Then I used stickles glitter glue to add some sparkle to the flower centres and the ribbon printed down the spine of the card. A few drops of red perfect pearls added some berries to the holly.

My flowers partly covered the very small greetings banner at the base of the image so I glued a new one over it, from a packet a friend gave me years ago. There were hundreds of them in there, and I forget to use them.

And that's it for this month. I made two identical cards, but I need to make a lot more to catch up with my monthly target. (And I started the year so well!).

Scrappy Mo has not posted the challenge yet so I will call back later and link up  to her when she has.(Now linked).

Rudolph Day Challenge for May.

Well here we are at Rudolph Day again (25th of the month). It has been a bit of a roller coaster month for me, will little time to spend in my craft room, but I have managed to make a set of simple Christmas cards, so here are a few of them.

The words "Joy to the World" was a cutting file purchased from the Silhouette store, and cut with my Cameo machine. I ungrouped it all and carefully removed the letter "O", and replaced it with one of three nativity baubles, also purchased from the silhouette store, and reduced to fit in the space.

I cut the main letters from a variety of coloured card and some metallic embossed card. Because the nativity images were more intricate with some fine lines, I cut them from several colours of vinyl. It is hard to photograph it well, but the top one is cut from green metallic vinyl, the next one from black glitter vinyl, and the last one from silver.

I rooted through my stash and found a variety of backing papers, using transfer tape to position the cut images centrally on them. Then I cut base cards to tone with each one, and used  up oddments of border papers, peel-offs and ribbons to finish them off.

I made eight cards in all, each one different, but all using the same words, and one of the three images.

So now I am linking them up with the Rudolph day Challenge - May, on Scraps of life by Scrappymo.

April Rudolph Day.

I see my last post on here was for March Rudolph Day and here we are at 25th of April, ready to post another Christmas card. I don't know where the time goes!

This month I am going back to my preferred images for Christmas cards - Nativity scenes.  My first card uses an old pre-loved Woodware (Francoise collection) stamp that I bought from a friend at my sewing group.

It is very sweet, and only needed a little colouring done with my copic markers. I looked through my Christmas paper oddments and found two matching pieces in different colours. Between them I managed to cover the front of a plain, brown card. I inked the edges of my image to tie it in, and used a tiny strip of brown card to make a banner. The sentiment is embossed with Pirate gold powder.

Knowing that after a very good start to the year, I am now falling behind on my monthly target for cards for next Christmas, I made a second one using a mixture of a Heartfelt Creations stamp, overlaid with a Wild Rose Studio one that came free with a magazine last year.

Again it is coloured with copic markers, and cut with a stitched square die. Using the next size up die, I cut a mat from dark blue slightly glittered card, and then mounted it onto a square white card covered with an offcut of starry paper.

I have one more of each image coloured and ready to mount up. But first I will link these two up to Rudolph Day Challenge - April, at Scraps of Life by Scrappymo.

March Rudolph Day Challenge

As Scrappy Mo said, the 25th of each month soon comes around. This time I am showing a card I made with another Stampendous stamp bought at the end of last year, but not used. (I showed a snowman card made from another of these stamps a week ago).

This time I am using a lovely image of a candle.

I stamped it onto cream paper and coloured it with copic markers. Then I fussy cut around the scroll and distressed the edges. I looked through my Christmas papers and found a pad called A Merry Little Christmas by thecraftblog. I chose a page with a  cream background and holly on it, and the holly was glossy and slightly sparkly.

I cut it to fit a 13.5 square, cream pre-cut and folded card, and just put it all together. As a finishing touch I added a small drop of yellow glitter glue to the centre of my poinsettia and to the candle flame.

This was an easy and effective card, so I made a second one the same.

I also used the last of my trio of Stampendous stamps,to make two cards the same, with this image.

The main oval image is hand-cut, and I don't think it needs any further explanation. So together with the two snowman cards, I have six more to add to my collection.

I am linking these up with The March Rudolph Day Challenge: Anything Christmas.

Playing in Photoshop.

I use Photoshop quite a lot in my digital scrapbooks, but I don't pretend to be an expert, and there is so much in the software that I have never used. So every now and then I buy a tutorial on one technique, and because they are purchased they remain yours to go back to for a refresher whenever you want to. So this week I revisited a tutorial on blending a photo into a background, and decided I needed to have a go.

I chose a photo from one of my files, of a church in Winter. This is actually St Oswald's Church in Oswestry, Shropshire, my home town when I lived in UK, and it was taken last year, and sent to me by a friend.

I edited it a bit to make the colours less intense, and also straightened it. Then I chose a background from a scrapbook kit I purchased from the Digital Press, called Snow, snow, go away.!

I made this even paler than it is here, and added my photo on top of it, and then followed the steps from the tutorial to lose all the hard edges.

I used Publisher to reduce this to the size of some pre-folded card bases I had in my stash, printed it twice and cut it out and mounted it onto two cards. 

Then I raided my mirri-card and glitter card snippets box and found enough silver mirri-card for a snowflake and sentiment on one card, and some pale blue mirri-card for the greeting on the other, with white glitter card for the snowflakes. ( I made the sentiment in my Silhouette cameo machine and the snowflake corner is a part of a die called Winter Corner by Jeanine's Art).

A little bit of glitter glue to add some sparkle to the church scene finished it off.

So that's two more cards for my stash, and hopefully a technique learned that I can use again.

Brenda's giveaway

Brenda, from Floral fantasies, needs to give up some of her design teamwork due to ill health, and is currently running a generous giveaway of pre-used dies and stamps. She has six bundles to give away.

To be in with a chance to win one of these bundles, leave a comment on her blog HERE, and the winners will be chosen by Random.org. over Easter.

Butterfly Challenge #97

We were given a pretty range of colours to choose from this time, as well as some very varied additions. The letter was 'L' for Lemon, Lavender and Light Blue, plus 'L' for Lace, Layers and Letters. Once again these are a choice, along with a Butterfly of course, but I like the challenge of incorporating as many as possible. I only managed six out of the seven this time unless you call the flap of my envelope Lace. But I used several Layers of card, Letters for my sentiment, and all three colours, which again proved a challenge to photograph accurately. My lemon looks very washed out, and the blue was lighter in real life, but I did my best.

I made this card with my Silhouette cameo cutting machine and a design sold as a svg file by The Dreaming Tree. It is one of a set of three cards which are available to buy on their web site, but this week they were offered as a free gift with an order above 10$. So I thought I'd have a go at making one of them.

The base card is Light blue and there is a cut-out swirl in the Lavender front panel to let it show through. The flower and sentiment were cut from Lemon card, with the smaller flower centre cut from a darker yellow heavy vellum (It looks green here but it isn't). I used a pale green card to cut the leaves and held the flower and leaves together with a lavender gem brad. The sentiment was a file already in my Silhouette library, and I am not sure where it is from.

I think all the elements are here, including some tiny butterfly stickers, but the main butterfly can be seen when the card is opened.

I used the same green and lemon card to cut the flower and leaves, and a slightly darker shade of lavender card to cut the butterfly. Then I cut a backing for its wings from the yellow vellum which shows nicely when it pops up.

There was a file for cutting an envelope in the folder, which I wouldn't normally bother with, but as the card was not a standard size, I did cut its envelope this time, and backed the Lace flap with some more of the green card.

So I will link this to Mrs A's Butterfly Challenge #97. Why not fly over and see who else is there, and maybe add a butterfly of your own.