Mucha Influence on Rudolph Day

The 25th of the month soon came round again, so once again I have been putting last minute touches to my Christmas card for the Rudolph Day challenge on Sandra's blog, Stamping for Pleasure.

This time I have used a digistamp from The Paper Shelter called "Mucha Influence". I bought it to use last Christmas but I forgot about it. I'm not sure I've ever seen such a cute little face on any Mucha artwork, but the colours, and muted swirls are there. The background came in the file with the stamp so I printed it onto kraft card and cut it out. I then used the same card to make the base and used a dreamweaver metal stencil to sponge distress ink through the holly leaves for the background. (I don't like it all that much, but very little of it shows!).

I printed the outline of the main image on white heavy paper and coloured it with copic markers. Then I fussy-cut it out, and glued it onto the printed background. I found a See-D greeting stamp that just fitted below her. I used 1mm sticky pads to layer this onto the base card and added a strip of very ancient papermania ribbon across the lower section.

So now I'm off to link this to Sandra's blog and get some inspiration from other folks' Christmas cards. With the snow that's covering half of UK, you should all be in the mood for making Christmas cards so why not join in too.

I am a bit lazy about adding my card to challenges, and I don't have much time to visit other entries for comments which is only fair, but with this being Easter week, some of my usual activities are not happening so I should have a little extra time. So this month I am entering this card in ;
Gingerloft Challenge   ; Use kraft paper.
One Stitch at a Time: Use a digistamp.

Last minute Easter cards

I guess this isn't too last minute for most of you, but as I am posting from Spain to UK I should have had them done and dusted last week. The chances are they will now get lost at the bottom of a pile of mail until the snow has all melted, but at least the family will know I was thinking of them around the right time.

Full of good intentions, I finally wrote my annual new-letter that didn't make it into Christmas cards this year (!), and I decided to make Easter cards to send out with them. A few weeks ago I made the first set of three, which were posted last week. But I needed another four so I simplified the design a little so I could make them a bit quicker, and made two of each.

Instead of stamping and die-cutting lace to go below the main image, I used a simple spring image from a plate by Chocolate Baroque, and a greeting from the same set of Just-rite stamps as the main image, and added a little colour with pencils. The topper is coloured with copic markers, and I used some toning snippets for the frames. There is a spellbinders frame die to go with this stamp which makes it very easy to cut. The paper behind the topper is embossed with one of my new A4 double sided eBosser folders. This one is so useful and I have used it a lot already. A strip of sticky ribbon makes a tidy join between the two sections.

They are now all written and addressed and will be in the post tomorrow morning. You never know. They may just get there in time. These days UK keeps going right up to Easter Saturday. Out here Semana Santa (Holy week) is taken very seriously and there certainly won't be any post on Friday and Saturday, and probably not Thursday either, though we won't have a holiday on Easter Monday.

I actually needed five more cards but I am not showing the last one as it is for my sister Jean who follows this blog. She has both sets of stamps that I use for these cards so I wanted to do something different for her, but I will try to remember to post about it when I know she has received it.

WOYWW 198

I am determined to make it to the Wednesday blogfest this week, having missed a couple this month, so I am writing this late on Tuesday evening. If you visit Julia at her Stamping Ground, you will see what this is all about.

I was out at a choir practice all morning but this afternoon I actually sat at my desk and did something constructive. So here is my desk in full swing. The little green and blue note book has small daubs of each of my ink-pads, and it is very useful when I am choosing the best colour to use for a project. There is one completed card on my mini-easel, and some printed digistamps. One is for a repeat of the finished card, and one for a Christmas card ready for Rudolph Day next  Monday. My cuttlebug is out to make the lace for the bottom of the cards, and the large plastic shoe-box on the left is full of sticky ribbon, printed borders, paper lace, etc.

To the right of this is the latest in my continuous supple of cups of tea, essential for a good crafting session. The folder is how I store all my stamps. I took any that were wood mounted, off their wooden blocks, and put them on Ezmount, and now I mainly buy clear stamps, or unmounted rubber ones. I laminate A4 sheets of paper to put them on, with a stamped example and record of the company on the back, and store them in plastic slips. This folder is all word stamps, but I have sixteen folders altogether, each one with a different theme - florals, flourishes, butterflies and bugs etc. It's a system that works for me, and it is easier to store the folders than all the wood stamps that I used to have.

As you can see in the top photo, Arwen is in her usual place, but today I have another little friend in with me.

The two pups I have been fostering, went back to the vet yesterday, to get them ready for sending to Holland. (I have no idea why, but Holland finds homes for a lot of our abandoned puppies). So I took them back, but while there, I saw this little fellow and it was 'Love at first sight'. He is around three months old and of unknown heritage, but he was also dumped, in someone's garden, when he was very small. He has been fostered but I brought him home for a few days trial, and if he fits in with the family, we will give him a permanent home.

So, introducing Kim. Chris chose his name because when he was a boy he had a big German Shepherd dog called Kim.  I don't think this one will grow that big, but he has fairly big paws, so we will have to wait and see. He is fluffy and his fur is as soft as silk. Apart from cutting his teeth on anything and everything, including his favourite - my toes!, he is very good. Our big girls are not impressed, but they are tolerating him, and allowing him closer than they did the two tiny ones. Arwen definitely isn't keen to share her room, but she is not getting the choice. Kim is not house-trained yet, so I am keeping him close by me. But he is very beautiful.  Don't you agree?

And finally, here is a close up of the card I made. the second one is almost finished. It is the same but I reversed most of the colours - lilac base card and yellow flowers.

Do visit our hostess Julia and join in the fun. See what everyone else is getting creative with this week, and I will try to do the same.

WOYWW196

I didn't make it to the Wednesday blog hop last week; busy, busy, busy. But I have managed to do some crafting since then, so here I am to show my messy work-desk once again.

Last Friday I posted a happy card on Annie's Friday smiles post, that I had received from a blogger friend, Shirley-Anne from Australia. Every week she features a Christmas card on her blog, and this week she chose to feature my Rudolph day scene, which was a nice surprise.

So to my desk. As you can see I have several of my really useful boxes open again, Arwen is as usual on her throne just keeping an eye on the proceedings, and just look at that overflowing waste-bin under the table. How disgraceful!

If we come in closer you will see the very necessary cup of tea which really shouldn't be resting on my new Splodge Away mat, even if it is on a mini-tray (I've eaten the biscuits!). I was actually having a session to try out the new mat but the jury is still out. I did make a better job than usual of brayering a background onto some plain card, but on glossy card I still had too many streaks. I haven't yet used it with distress inks and a sponge applicator, which is supposed to work really well and be economical with the ink.

I also wanted to try out a mask I bought some months ago, but I couldn't brayer enough ink through it for the effect I wanted, so I resorted to using a sponge and ink direct from the pad. You can see a tiny section of this peaking out from under the white paper. Under that is my box of Adirondak ink pads. To the back of the desk are three dylusions sprays that arrived this week, along with my jumbo roll of household paper, and the box that I still manage to keep my brayer in. The empty square is the back of a frame which I have just covered in 1mm sticky pads, ready to add it to my card.

As I later went on to finish the card I might as well show it on here too. The basic idea came from a card I saw on Glenda Waterworth's blog many months ago, though I have put my own twist on it. I was a bit taken aback when I realised how big the mask is. The smallest I could make my card was 8" x 8", far larger than I normally make. I shall have to make an envelope for it, but fortunately it will be hand-delivered to friend from the village, so Antonia won't throw a fit at the post office again!

The mask was inked with Adirondak cranberry, red pepper, and butterscotch inks, and the crane is from a clear plate of stamps by Chocolate Baroque. I felt it needed something to set it off, so I made the frame, inked the edges with a black permanent marker and stamped the cherry blossom from the same plate of stamps as the crane. The sentiment is an old one from Elusive Images.

Well that is quite enough waffle from me for this week. I shall link this up to Julia's blog at the Stamping Ground in the morning, and later I will be back to see what everyone else is busy making this week. Why not click on the link to follow me there and join in the fun.

Daisies and Butterfly

Last Thursday I went to my monthly parchment class, with some trepidation. I do not find this medium very easy to work with. It is tiring on both the hands and the eyes, and it is too 'slow' for me. I am used to making cards in an evening, but parchment has to be done in stages, allowing time for it to rest in-between each stage, and that's hard for me. Also our class has dwindled to just two of us, so it is not as social as it was. However I have mastered the basics, but at our last lesson we both struggled, and neither of us were very pleased with our end result.

Nevertheless, I decided to give it one more go so I turned up on Thursday and found I really liked the project Brenda had prepared for us. It was a simple DL card with some very basic embossing (the bit I don't get on with very well) and a nice, straightforward grid-work border (the bit I do like doing until my eyes give up and I start seeing double!). So I got stuck in with a more positive attitude, and although I didn't finish it at the class (10.00-4.00), I did finish it off when I got home, and have now mounted it up on a piece of green card (greener than it looks in the photo), held it in place with some sticky ribbon, and added the parchment butterfly. I positioned it to hide my only mistake in the grid work - there's method in my madness!

Of course, I thought it needed a touch of bling so I added a small rhinestone to the centre of each flower, and just a tiny drop of stickles to the butterfly wings. And for once I have a card that I will be happy to send to someone.

When I started parchment classes I asked the tutor what is the difference between parchment and vellum, and she said 'nothing', so I think I can enter this card in the challenge over on The little Red Wagon;

Challenge 174: Viva la Vellum.

A little bit of Bling for Rudolph Day.

It's hard to believe it is the 25th already, but there's no denying it, so once again it is time to show a Christmas card, and link it to Sandra's blog at Stamping for pleasure.

This month I was idly rifling through a bag of 'scraps' salvaged from previous years' cards, to see if anything inspired me, when I came across an image I stamped back around October. I bought a plate of Christmas stamps from Chocolate Baroque, and to ensure I managed to use them all, I stamped each image straight away. Two of them made it onto a card for last Christmas, but this one fell by the wayside.

Sticking to my resolution to make mainly A6 or DL cards for posting to UK now, I used a plain white A6 base card, made falling snow with masking fluid and covered it in blue distress ink, adding a little green at the base. I marked where the archway would come and stamped some tiny Art Impressions deer in that area. Then I cut out the archway, and added colour to the stones with distress ink, and mounted it onto the background with 1mm sticky pads. I then found the stamp and printed it again, but this time I just cut out the two trees. I added some green to these and again mounted them with the thin sticky tabs. I covered all the joins at the base with some very cheap 'Structure' paint that I bought at Lidls a while ago. It made quite effective snow.

When it was all dry I felt it needed some Bling, so I used crystal stickles  on the trees and ground to give a bit of sparkle, and yellow stickles for the lights on the trees. I made a mess with one drop of masking fluid  on the left hand side so I hid this behind a single snowflake with a small silver peel-off greeting across it!

Well that is one more Christmas card for my box, but I need to step up my game if I am to have enough by the end of the year. Now I shall link this to Sarn's blog and see what everyone else has made.

Sunshine and Smiles

My friend Annie posts some photos to make us all smile and give us a lift at the end of each week, and she has invited us to join in, so here is my Friday smile.

I have a friend called Shirley-Anne who lives in Australia. We have only ever met in blogland, but last week she sent me this lovely card, along with a fun bundle of die-cut shapes and frames which I am going to enjoy using.

Isn't it a lovely card? Such a happy image I couldn't help smiling when I opened it, so I thought I would give you all the chance to smile at it too.

If you want to see some more smiley pictures, do visit Annie's blog and see what has made her and others smile today.

Share a smile

WOYWW 194

It is time to 'show and tell' again as Julia Hosts another Wednesday crafting party over at her Stamping Ground.

Usually you see my desk looking pretty clear and tidy but this week you can have a peek at what it really looks like when I am working on a project.

To the left you can see how many of my new 'Really useful' boxes I have open at any one time. It is great to have them all right alongside me so I can reach what I want without even leaving my seat!

To the right there is a muddle of ink pads, sponges, dies, glue sticks etc. The lovely wooden port box holds my permanent markers. I think I was going to 'alter' that at one point, and maybe pretty it up a bit, but it didn't get done and it works fine as it is!. The big box at the back is full of sticky ribbons, paper lace and die-cut borders, and the white machine beside it is my eBosser, though as you can see from the photo above, I still tend to use my old cuttlebug in preference to it.

Then in the centre of those two is the little space I am actually working in. I am making a run of simple Easter cards to be sent with a round-robin family news letter that didn't get written in time to go with Christmas cards. (I am full of good intentions!). I am using a recently purchased set of Just-rite stamps with their matching spellbinder dies. I am very pleased with a set of three lace borders that match some of my basic edgebility dies. You can see these, along with some other border dies, held by a magnetic sheet stuck to a piece of brown cardboard. They are all too long for my current die folder, and they were in danger of getting bent, so I mocked up this holder for them, but I have ordered another die folder, (mine is full anyway) that takes A4 magnetic sheets so I will be able to put these, and other larger frame dies, in there. I am still waiting for that to arrive though. You can also just see my first completed card at the back, and two others that are WIPs. I shall then change my colour scheme and make a few more.

For those who left kind comments about my little babies last week, I am pleased to say they are both doing well. Yesterday little Toby joined his sister in eating some solid food from a dish and they are both lapping milk, though I still top them up with a bottle at bed-time, to ensure everyone gets a good night's sleep. They have been no trouble at all, but Suzie has cut her first teeth, so I guess it won't be long before they are awake more during the day and chewing everything in sight. I'll try not to let them distract me too much, and I will visit as many of you as I can.