And so ends another month ....

A few of you may remember that I started off this year following two photography challenges which involved taking a picture every day for a year. There were several of these on the internet but I chose to follow Suzie's 365+1 challenge where each day you are given a word prompt to inspire your photo. At the same time I decided to just take a photo each day of what I was doing, or anything really that caught my eye.

I have to admit that somewhere during the second month I gave up on Suzie's challenge because I found myself inventing situations so that I could use the word prompt. This seemed too contrived so I decided to concentrate on my other photos, and each month I make a new page to display them so that at the end of the year I will have a diary of my life during 2012. I am using a 12" x 12" format, and a set of five Carina Gardener month-masks that I bought from Jessica Sprague's site. I choose a mask at the start of each month and update it daily whenever possible.

Knowing my total inability to recall recent events, despite the fact that i have clear, detailed memories of when I was five (some 60 years ago - ouch!), I decided to put my photo collages into an album with a facing page for each month saying what the photos represent. Usually, when I have filled my photo page I post it on my other blog, but this time I decided to mount it and finish the pages to show on here. Although I edit the photoboards digitally I like to add some 'real' embellishments to add interest. For April I used some chipboard letters and punched/diecut corners and motifs.

So that was life in the Perry household for April. Now I have made a start on May. This is the first time I have used a photoboard with regular shaped spaces, and although I edited it slightly to take three larger photos, I think I prefer the other boards which have an assortment of sizes and shapes on them. To show you what I mean, here are the first pages that I made in January.

It is harder sometimes to edit photos to fit the various shapes, but I think it makes the page more interesting.

The rest of the set

In my last post I showed the Christmas card I had made for the Rudolf day challenge on Sandra's blog, Stamping for Pleasure. I said there, that I hoped to make a set of six of them, as I do need a lot of cards come November, and it is helpful to have some made in advance. You can see my first card here, and now I have made the other five. They are not a matching set this time, but they are all on the same theme using my new Marianne ivy die, encircling a bird image.

This is the pair to the original one; very similar but on an A6 card instead of a DL one, and this time I have cut a round aperture, and put the bird on a scalloped circle of printed paper, inside the card.The robin is cut with the Marianne small bird on a branch die.

The next pair of cards are both using images from the Woodware Winter birds plate of stamps. The ivy circles and card edges have been coloured using Black-star-gold Crafty Notions mica spray and a Brilliance lightening black ink pad. The owl is backed on a black circle matted onto white card embossed with a cuttlebug folder, and the robin is on computer printed paper. The sentiment sliders are a cuttlebug die.

The final pair both make use of robin images salvaged from old Christmas cards. They are mounted onto printed papers and then onto a base card, and the ivy is again sprayed with mica mists. Another Marianne die was used to cut the snowflakes on the blue card.

Although the original card carries the sentiment Merry Christmas, none of the others do, so I am entering these five in Craftyhazelnuts Christmas Challenge 70 which is to create a Christmas card with a sentiment that doesn't include the word Christmas.

As the second pair include stamping I will also link them to the Christmas Stamping all year long Challenge 8; Anything goes.


P.S. I apologise for the huge white gaps in this post. In draft there are no gaps to delete, so I cannot do anything to change it. I have reduced the size of the photos (you still see a reasonable size one if you click on them), but that didn't help much. Just one more moan about the new Blogger. I am getting very fed up with it!

Rudolf a day late

Yesterday was the 25th April, so already another Rudolf day has come and gone. The aim is to make a Christmas card on the 25th of each month. Well this month I did actually get my card made on the right day, but I finished it too late to photograph, so I had to wait until this morning. Then I was out all day at my parchment craft class, so finally I am back at the computer, and this is the card I made. 

I had a new Marianne die in the post this week, and as usual I had to give it a quick try. I always do this with whatever bit of scrap paper is to hand, which is silly really as it is then often wasted. I did the same with this one, but as I had used white paper I tried giving it a spray all over with  perfect pearls, sour apples, and then darkened the embossing and edges a bit with a Memento cottage ivy ink pad. I felt the circle called for a little bird inside it so I found another trial cut, this time of the Marianne small bird on a branch die, and used my copic pens to colour it like a robin. Then I found a nestie circle that was more or less the right size for the ivy circle and used it to cut a hole in piece of thin white paper with white vertical glitter stripes. Behind the hole I used a small snippet of pale blue paper with white spots on it, and mounted it onto a pale green DL card. I glued the robin across the circle and then the ivy circle around the hole. For the lower part of the card I used some sticky ribbon and a cuttlebug slider label stamped with a simple greeting, and hung from it a little wooden charm that I bought at the Ally Pally show last year. It had a patterned fabric surface but I coloured over this so it looks vaguely like another robin. I thought the pearl spray on the ivy had got rather lost, so I added a little stickles to liven it up. It doesn't immediately strike you as a Christmas card, but it makes a change. As usual I am hoping to make a set of six of these, to add my stack, and ease the work when November comes around. So I'll get a production line going now, but first I will pop over to Stamping for Pleasure, to link this one to the Rudolf Day Challenge there. Why not join in and get a few cards made in advance this year.

Apparently the new style blogger does not allow you to upload a tall thin photo. It kept turning it on its side - landscape, so I had to cut and paste it onto a wide white square and put it on it's own instead of beside the writing. I do wish they wouldn't change things that are working perfectly well as they are!!

What's On Your Workdesk Wednesday 151

Yes it is Wednesday again so time to have a quick peek at how other crafter's like to work. If you are not familiar with this idea, pop over to Julia's blog at the Stamping Ground, and read all about it.

My desk is not very exciting today, but at least it has something on it now, unlike the clean and tidy space it was first thing this morning. It is getting very sunny here  most days, so even if I didn't have to move everything out of the cats reach, I would still have to tidy away each night, or the sun would bleach and warp it all.

So here we have it. The box spilling over on the left is my Christmas backing papers as it the 25th today, so Rudolf Day, when the aim is to produce a Christmas card. The tidier stack on the right is bags and boxes that I have just prepared to take to my monthly parchment craft class tomorrow. I am afraid I am not a very good student. My eyes are not functioning very well and I find it hard to concentrate, and when you are perforating parchment, just one tiny hole in the grid too many, and you have ruined the whole project.

In the centre are some sticky ribbons, and other non-sticky ones that I am trying to match to a die-cut. And then there is my cuttlebug and two new dies that arrived this week. The white ivy circle is a Marianne die and the purple one is a Cheery Lynn die. It looks almost circular in the photo but it is actually a very pretty oval, the shape I like most for small images. The little bird is a die I have had for a while and hopefully he will be sitting inside the ivy circle on a Christmas card before the end of today.

And of course, my ever-present fluff ball Baggins is sitting on my die storage folder. He has been diagnosed with an over-active thyroid but the medicine is not agreeing with him, so he is mostly sitting on or near me and dozing all the time. Hopefully, yesterday's blood test will enable the vet to adjust his dosage so I get my loving, funny cat back.

Now I will visit some of my Wednesday friends. Forgive me if I don't make it to too many of you today. My eyes won't allow me to look at the computer screen for long at a time, but I will do my best.

Sunset silhouettes

I bought a new bridge camera in January and spent a month or two getting to grips with some of its features. So when I did an evening shopping trip and saw a lovely sunset I just had to take some photos of it. (I was reliably told that the lilac colour was due to volcanic dust in the atmosphere). This was one of my favourites. I always like photos that have a main view with foliage etc silhouetted around the edge, and I knew that one day I would use the photo as inspiration for a card. So when I saw the Create a Scene Challenge for this month was Silhouettes, I gave it a go, and here is the card I made.

I used glossy cardstock, and torn paper masks to give more contours along the horizon, and I sponged the sky with Adirondak peach bellini ink , and wild honey, victorian velvet and dusty concord distress inks. Then I reversed the masks and used Memento tuxedo black and London fog inks for the hills. When these were dry I used a collection of small foliage stamps by Lavinia, Stampscapes, Just for fun and A time to stamp, and the Tuxedo Black memento pad to add the silhouettes. I trimmed the finished image and double layered it with lilac card and then very dark grey card, and mounted it onto a square orange base card. Then I used the left over trimmings of grey card to cut and emboss two flourishes with one of my first spellbinder dies, and used these to hold a small lilac greeting. (The finished card is actually more colourful than it looks in this photo. The bright sun out here makes taking accurate photos quite difficult|).

I like scene cards but have a limited range of stamps for them so far, so I am pleased that I have finally managed to enter this challenge which I have followed since it started three months ago. Do visit their blog here, and see some of the other lovely scenes that have been created.

Blog candy at Creativelynks

One of the great things about keeping a blog is the many friends that I have made. One of these is Lynne, whom many of you will know from the Less is More, and Sir Stampalot challenges. Over the past few months I have enjoyed reading about her move to Scotland, and seeing some of the beautiful cards she has made. She has just reached the awesome number of 100 followers, and to celebrate she is offering some great candy. You can find out all about it here, so pop over and be inspired by her lovely creations.

My first ever......

My first ever entry for a C&S challenge. People who know me will appreciate just how difficult this was for me. I just don't do white spaces! However I do love many of the weekly entries in the Less is More challenge and have often thought I would like to have a go.

This week I was again playing with my flowers pressed through a cuttlebug (You can see my original post about this here). I couldn't find any suitable flowers this week, but I did come across two 'weeds', one on the campo and one in my garden, both with pretty leaves so I thought I'd give them a go. I preferred the flower background papers that I made when I sprayed the page with a mica mist before pressing it, so I found a sour apple perfect pearls mist and used this. Unfortunately the spray was so strong that it blew my leaves away and I had to reposition them, but when I passed the sandwich (A plate, C plate, card, flowers, card, B plate) through my cuttlebug I was very pleased with the result. The little heart shaped leaves left a lovely impression in a blue-green, and the silvery fern leaf made an olive green impression, and the mica spray gave a bright green sheen to it all.

I wanted to make use of this pretty paper and I remembered my igoogle reader showing a challenge to use three shades of green, so I went back for another look and found it was the Less is More challenge. So I hand cut six simple flower shapes and edged them with peeled paint distress ink to define their outline. Then I combined them in pairs using two tiny jewel brads and a larger pearl one which I made more green with a copic marker. With a Marianne die I cut two sets of leaves, divided one into two pieces, and tried out a few arrangements with them on a 15cm square card, until I found one I was happy with. I finished this of with a simple greeting from a Butterfly kisses stamp, highlighting the capital letters with an Artquest pearl paint.

So there you have it, my very first C&S card. Now I know it is not quite as difficult as I expected, I will probably try again one day.(PS any hints on how to photograph a white card would be appreciated. On this one the greens look washed out. They are actually very pretty. On the other one I took, the white background is pink!).

As I have just discovered that Samuel Taylor's April challenge is also to use green, I shall enter this card there as well. He is offering a fabulous prize of a pot of Indigo Blu 'Yorkshire dales' mega flakes, a tub of Flitter glu and a scoochy sponge to apply it with.

WOYWW149

Hello my fellow bloggers. For once I am up in time to do a quick post before I leave for my usual Wednesday morning sewing group. I took the photo last night before I tidied everything away!

Last time I managed a WOYWW post I was playing with flowers pressed through my cuttlebug to make background papers. Yesterday I had another go. It seems to be an 'inbetween' time in the garden with not a wide choice of flowers, but I spotted two lots of wild flowers with very pretty leaves so I thought I give those a try and I was very pleased with the results. So last night I used some of the paper to die cut flowers for a card. (Later today I shall do a blog about this card so I won't put any further detail here).

There are a couple of distress inks out to edge the flowers, and one of my lovely Artquest paint palettes. The huge blue folder is full of my unmounted word stamps and the set of boxes house all my different sorts of brads. At the back you can of course see Baggins, who is never far away. He was looking a bit disgruntled, (his usual expression), probably wondering how long he had to perch on that corner before I would clear a space for him to lie down in.

Right, now I am off to visit a few of the early birds and I'll try to get back later to get to some more, but I have a three hour round trip to the airport this afternoon to pick up my son and his girl friend who are out here for the next week. So there won't be much crafting going on but family comes first, and I love having my boys here.

If, like me, you enjoy seeing what other folk are busy creating, hop over to Julia's blog and join in the fun.