Enchanted Sparrow Paperscape

My sister Jean, known to many of you through her own blog, had her birthday while I was away on holiday, so I wanted to make her card and have it packaged up, so I could post it to her from UK before I moved on to Denmark. Because of that, it was rather a rushed job, which I know I could add some refinements to if I did it again, but I also knew she would not be too critical so I sent it anyway!

I had been browsing through a site that sells svg cutting files, mainly for 3D projects, and my eye was caught by a very realistic little sparrow sitting on a blossom branch. It turned out to be intended as a paper wall hanging, so I bought the file called Enchanted Sparrow Paperscape, from a site called simply svg cuts, and I decided to make it up and just use cut corners to slot it into a plain white card to send to Jean.

Because it was all done in a bit of a rush, I packed it up and forgot to take any photos, but this weekend Jean sent me some, so here it is.

The background was a piece of plain white card, dusted with a range of distress inks, and then sprayed with perfect pearls sour apples mica spray.

There were then two layers of frame to cut, lots of little flowers and their centres, and the little bird which has nineteen individual pieces, thirteen of them being just for the wing! I was going to show you a map of the pieces but I have just realised it is probably copyrighted, so I had best leave it. But this close up shows the layers on the bird, and you can see that some of them are very tiny indeed. They are also very odd shapes, but I was pleased to find that it soon became fairly obvious which way they should go. Because I use the Designer Edition of the studio software with my silhouette cameo, I can import svg files and cut them straight away, so it was just a case of resizing everything together, so my hanging would fit on a reasonable size card, and sorting out which piece should be cut from which colour. It was a good opportunity to use up some very tiny snippets which I always have plenty of lurking in my boxes.

If I made it again, and had more time, I think I might double layer some of the flowers, and add more shading to their petals, and maybe a little sparkle to their stamens too.

Because I wanted Jean to be able to use this as a wall hanging if she wanted too, I did not add a sentiment to the front, but wrote inside the card instead.

This one can definitely be linked up to Pixie´s Crafty Workshop.

Noel, Noel for Rudolph Day.

Having been on holiday for the past two weeks, the 25th of the month seems to have come round a bit fast, but I have managed to get one card made ready for the Rudolph Day challenge. 

I used a new Sheena Douglass stamp that arrived in the post while I was away. The word as far the camels was one stamp. I stamped it onto an off-cut of plain white card, and added some extra palm trees for balance at the end. Then I made a mask and covered the letters and ground while I dusted on some distress ink. Next I removed the masks and used copic markers to colour the letters and the ground. I used a gold gel pen on the star.

I have a lot of pre-cut cards and envelopes from years ago and the DL ones are all a bit colourful for me, but I am determined to use them up, so I chose a yellow one for the base card. Then I covered most of it up with some blue background paper that I found in my Christmas scrap box.

I trimmed the coloured image panel and added it to the BP, and highlighted the edge of the panel and the BP with very thin gold peel-offs.

Finally I stamped a greeting from a new Stampin´up set.

Considering this was rather a rush job, I was quite pleased with how it turned out, and I hope to get a few more of these made soon.

I am entering this in Scrappy Mo´s Rudolph Day Challenge.

If you are trying to make a start on your Christmas cards too, why not visit her blog and find out all about it.

Happy Birthday Son!!

We have several summer birthdays in our family, so before I went to UK, I made several cards to deliver by hand while I was over there. Today it is our second son Michael´s birthday, so I can now show the card I made for him.

Michael has always rather liked the big cats, so when I saw this Tiger face cutting file on the All Things Silhouette Facebook page, I knew I could use it on his card. (The file was designed by the talented Anne Huxter, and was generously made available to members of the group. She has designed many other animals and her files are on sale at her website Treasured Templates)

I made a bright background using red, yellow and orange brusho inks on a wet paper. I was generous with the ink so some crystals didn´t dissolve completely, but this just gave some texture to the finished project and I quite liked the effect.

The black face lines were cut from vinyl on my Silhouette cameo machine, and I used a wide sheet of transfer paper to place them over the best area of background, which I then cut to fit. I then mounted it onto a white A5 base card.

I used the Salamander Script font to write the greeting in the silhouette software, and resized it to fit across the card, and also cut this from black vinyl. This still left me with too much of a gap, so to fill it, I cut strips of trellis with a Memory box die, from the left over brusho background, and trimmed it to fit above and below the sentiment.

I love the way this turned out, and I am sure Mike does too.

Butterfly Challenge #33 : F is for Flowers, or P is for Poppies

Yes, the Butterfly Challenge for this time includes the criteria to add some flowers, so it was the perfect opportunity to try out my new Heartfelt Creations poppy stamp and die set. This set was only released last week, but I had pre-ordered it - I´m a sucker for anything poppy related - so mine came very quickly.

Like many of the HC flowers these stamps and dies each come as one plate, so if you stamp the whole plate, you can cut it all out in one go. To make all of these poppies I cut the entire plate twice. I stamped one in black ink and one in Memento rhubarb stalk ink, but because I chose to paint them, this doesn´t really show.

I had intended to use copic markers, my usual choice for colouring, but I remembered that once upon a time I liked H2O paints for poppies because they give the petals a lovely sheen which most poppies have naturally. It is literally years since I used them, but I dug out my paints and had a lovely messy time. I found that the die is not a perfect match for the stamps so I over-painted the edges quite generously as, for this project, I did not want any white frames around the petals.

There were no leaves with the poppy set so I used the leaves from a similar HC set called delightful daisies. These were also painted with two shades of H2Os and die cut.

While the paints were wet, I also did a quick wash of one shade on the underside of the cut flowers in case it showed, and covered both sides of a scrap of white paper ready for my butterfly.

I used some off-cuts of gold mirri-card and two dies from Spellbinders Respendent Rectangles set for the frame, Britannia dies for the greeting, and the Memory Box die Delaney Butterfly, for the lace butterfly. From my scrap of painted paper I cut the matching Memory Box die Cheviot Butterfly, and glued the gold lace one over it. 

I used an A4 embossing folder (sorry, make unknown), to give some definition to the backing paper, and then mounted it all up.

I am pleased with the end result. i love the sheen on the flowers and leaves.

So now I will link this up for the Butterfly Challenge #33, and thanks to Di´s posting, I now know there is a new challenge on the Memory Box blog and their first challenge is to use a Memory Box die and a Butterfly, and I have just a few hours left to enter.

I used up a few snippets of white and gold card card for this, so I can also go and play in Pixie´s Snippets Playground.

Using new stash for Rudolph Day

Once again the 25th of the month has rolled up a bit sooner than I feel it should have, so we are again making our Christmas cards to enter the Rudolph Day Challenge over on Scrappy Mo´s blog, Scraps of Life.

For me this was a good opportunity to try out a stamp I bought from a sale bin a month or two ago. It is a pretty angel by Creative Expressions. I stamped her with a Paris Dusk Memento ink pad onto a white snippet, and then I had to think what to do with her! I tried several dies around her and settled on another new, never before used item, a Spellbinders set called Labels 46, Decorative Elements. I used the outer frame from the set, and when I had cut my angel I inked around the edge with the same Paris Dusk ink. When I ordered a die set from Altnew in America recently, I wanted to add another item, really to warrant the postage cost, so I chose a nice set of Christmas word stamps, all based on words from well-known carols. I used one of these to fill the gap within my die cut, and then a second smaller one from the same set below it.

For my background I was struggling to find anything suitable in my stash so I browsed my on-line folder of paper downloads and found a starry sky. It was a very bright blue which didn´t work with my chosen ink so I played around with it in PS, to change the hue and opacity, and printed it out on the ´Normal´setting, and on ´Fast draft´. 

I found my die cut would just fit on a 12cm square base card, and as I have lots of envelopes that size, I went with it. 

I mounted it up and added a little glitter glue to the angel wings and stars, and a small white pearl to each corner of the frame.

This was a fairly quick and easy card to make once I had a done a trial run with scrap paper, and made sure everything would fit. Also I had several sheets of my backing paper from the various trial prints, and I could cut two cards from each sheet, so I decided to make a few more. And just to prove it, here is my set of six.

They are all much the same with just a slight difference in shade for the backing paper, and different gems and pearls for the corners depending on what I had six matching ones of. The more observant of you will notice that I have changed the orientation of the frame for one card. This is because I stamped too near the edge of my white snippet, and couldn´t fit the die in the same way round as the others!

So now I am off to Scrappy Mo´s to link this up for the Rudolph Day Challenge, where the only criteria is to make a Christmas card,

and as I used six pieces from that huge box of white snippets that I am sure we all have, I will also link up with Pixie´s Snippets Playground.

Sunflower time

Thank you for your kind comments about my Get Well card (previous post). I did warn you I would be back today, so here is a very different card that I made very quickly when we were invited to a 60th birthday party a week or two ago.

Last month my husband had to travel to the south of UK for a family funeral, and flights were difficult at short notice so he had to fly to Bournemouth and travel by train across to Bognor Regis. My sister lives in Bournemouth so she kindly let him use her spare room, fed him and ferried him around to airports and stations. When he came home he handed me a package from Jean, and inside was these beautiful serviettes. She knows how much I like sunflowers, so she knew these would appeal to me. I looked at them and said "Hmm. I must find something nice to do with those", and my dear hubby said, "Won´t you just use them as serviettes?" Of course I won´t!!

So, for my card I took one serviette and separated it into its three layers. Taking the printed layer I cut it just passed the centre, and used modge podge to glue it to a piece of white card, and glaze it. This makes it wrinkle a little but I  rather like the texture. I left it over night to dry.

The next day I cut one flower away, and using only about two thirds of the petals, I fussy cut it and set it aside. 

With the rest of it I cut out a 6 inch square as accurately as I could, keeping the flower fairly central. I used a new We-R-Memorykeepers, mini 8 punch called vine. This is a large corner punch which, used eight times, will make the mat you can see here. With the matching border die it can be extended up to a large mat that just fits onto a 12" x 12" scrapbook page. I saw it in use once and liked it, and I got my son to bring one over for me, but somehow I hadn´t got around to trying it. I do like the shape it makes.

I found some yellow card that matched the sunflower and made a square 15cm base card, and mounted my mat so it just fitted on it. Then I added the second ´thinner´flower shaping the petals slightly.

For the centre I found some micro beads that at some time I had coloured yellow with alcohol ink, and used cosmic shimmer acrylic glue to stick them in a ring. Then I filled the centre of it with rust coloured accent beads. The outer ring is made up of tiny gold beads, amber glass beads and burgundy faceted glass beads. As the party was for a Spanish friend, I used a gold peel-off sentiment that says ¨Felicidades´, literally ´Happiness´, which is the usual greeting on a card here whatever the celebration.

A Get Well card for my Grandson

It is ages since I posted again, but I am pleased to say I am almost done making the cards I need finished before I go away in a week´s time. So tonight there is one that I can now post, and that is a get well card I made recently for my Grandson. He is twenty, not the easiest age to make a card for, but he was very poorly with what eventually we knew was Glandular Fever. He is on the mend now, but of course, it will be some time before he is completely recovered, and in the meantime he will be feeling pretty low some days. So I wanted to make something that would make him smile.

It also needed to be something fairly quick and easy to make, as the Spanish snail mail is so unpredictable and it could be a week or more from posting to it arriving. As it happened, this one arrived in two days! but that is the exception rather than the rule.

Anyway here is my card which I made using a paper cut file bought from Treasure Box Designs. It is one of the Bobble Buddies collection.

To prepare the base card I embossed the front to about three-quarters of the way down, and hid the not very good lower line with a vintage sticker strip that has been in my stash for ages. I lightly distressed the edges with walnut stain DI.

The parts for building the bear were svg files which can be made to cut with my Silhouette Cameo machine (if, like me, you have the Designer Edition of software). On the computer screen, I sorted the files into groups for cutting with the various colours, and using the grid on my mat to match their placings, I used various snippets from my boxes and cut them all out.

I highlighted the edges of most of the pieces so that they stood out better when they were stacked, and added a little rosy pink to his cheeks. Then I assembled him and added him to my card.

The sentiment was computer generated so of course, the front section needed to be positioned and printed at the very beginning. It then continued inside the card like this. (The insert looks very wrinkled because I used wet glue to stick it in place, and took the photo before it was dry. It soon flattened out as it dried and I rushed off to get it in the post).

I finished the insert with a small printed version of the little bear that I had added a trail of hearts to, taken from some clip art I found on Google images.

I shall add this to Pixie´s Snippets Playground, and tomorrow I will try to get back with another card that has now been given, so I can show it.

Fluttering by with some bling.

Goodness, it is a long time since I posted on here, but I haven´t been entirely idle. I have been trying to get all the cards made that I will need during June and July as I am away on holiday for two weeks, and when I come home again, it always takes me a while to get back into the swing of things. Most of those cannot be shared just yet, but here is one I can post, and I made it for the Butterfly Challenge #38: A Butterfly with ´S´for sequins.

I did, of course, cut this butterfly on my Silhouette Cameo machine. The file was bought from the Silhouette store some time ago, just because I thought it was so pretty, so I am glad I have found an opportunity to use it.

I cut it first from a larger patterned paper with some metallic elements in the design, but when I put it over some plain card, it just looked a mess, and the lace design was ´lost´. So I tried again with this tiny floral paper from my stash. I´ve had it for ages and I have no idea where it is from! I then tried placing it over a pale blue card and a pale pink one, trying to match the flowers in the pattern, but it looked very wishy-washy on both of those. So then I tried various darker cards and was surprised to find it looked best on this mid-lilac tone. So that is what I used.

Then it was time for the sequins. I don´t really use sequins. Had I even got any?... Well Yes. In a little box, at the very bottom of a bigger box, hidden away in a dark cupboard that I rarely visit, not only did I unearth some sequins, but some of them were a perfect match for my card. Result! So I glued these on the butterfly body, and the larger flowers on its wings. I even found some tiny shiny dots - mini sequins? - that I added to the smaller flowers.

The butterfly sentiment is a never before inked stamp, make unknown, and the Happy Birthday is a much used Aspects of Design stamp.

So I will flutter over with this to Mrs A´s blog for the Butterfly Challenge, and see how other folk have incorporated sequins in their cards.   

Thank you all for your visits and kind comments. I do appreciate them. I have struggled to find time to visit everyone recently, but I am trying to have a catch-up session tonight.