Flowers for sisters

Hello again! I've been busy making cards not just for the various birthdays this month, but also for the commission of 10 cards that my mother in law asked me for. I've been enjoying the challenge - and the opportunity to buy new stamps and other goodies for it! One of these cards is for my sister, the other for hers (I'll let her choose which she prefers!) and thanks to The Daily Marker 30 Day Colouring Challenge, I've been trying out new techniques. This one is water colouring with an embossed image using a gorgeous flower stamp set from Clearly Besotted - Just Darling.

[Supplies: Spectrum Aqua Markers - Floral; Versa Mark Ink; WOW! Bright White Embossing Powder; Ranger Dye Ink Grape Soda; Ranger Archival Ink Jet Black; Wink of Stella 8mm Tip Pen; Bazzill Basics Paper; Clearly Besotted Just Darling] 

 
I absolutely loved doing these cards. It made me feel like I was a real artist - even though I am most definitely not! I also definitely need more flower stamps in my life...

I stamped the images onto water colour paper with Versa Mark ink and heat embossed with WOW! Bright white embossing powder. I then simply used my Spectrum Aqua markers directly onto the paper and blended with water. The embossed image saves colour running too much onto the blank space.

This is mounted using fun foam and lots of tape onto a card blank with has two 2cm strips of Bazzill basics paper at either side - it's a cheat and saves me paper! The sentiment is from the set stamped in Ranger Dye Grape Soda. I wrote over the sentiment in Wink of Stella and also added a little to the flowers - a card is not a card without Wink of Stella!

This card is simply mounted onto a Kraft card blank with fun foam and the sentiment stamped in Ranger Archival Jet Black. I held back on the Wink of Stella!

Thank you so much for reading, hope you have a great weekend - can you believe we're nearly in July??

Tea-riffic!

Hello crafty friends! Been a bit hectic this past week without a huge amount of time to do any crafting. We're away for a few days visiting family and also celebrating a big birthday for a really good friend. It's a birthday with a 0 at the end of it and this friend deserves a really good do. I'm sharing the card I made her with you today. She loves tea, so the Best Pun Ever from Lawn Fawn was just perfect:

[Supplies: Spellbinders Nestabilities Large Circles (I did not buy them from here, but they are no longer listed where I did buy them); LF Let's Polka 6x6 Paper Pad; LF Best Pun Ever stamp set and dies; LF Large Stitched Squares; Ranger Dye Ink; Ranger Glossy Accents; Wink of Stella 8mm Pen; Caran D'Ache Prismallo Aquarelles; CB Long Flag Die;]


It's a shaker card using the tea cups from the set and also some cupcake stamps I bought cheap in Hobbycraft, as the shaker elements along with some clear sequins. The tea cups were stamped in different Ranger Dye Inks, as was the tea cup on the outside, coloured using my Prismallo Aquarelle water colour pencils, then covered in glossy accents. The cupcakes have also been outlined using my Wink of Stella pen to add some sparkle. I encased them all in a square from my Papermania capsule collection cut using my LF large stitched squares, with the aperture cut using my Spellbinders large circles. I adhered it to the card with lots of fun foam. The background paper is LF Let's Polka. The sentiment is from the Best Pun Ever set stamped in Ranger Dye Pink Gumball onto the CB long flag die.

I really love this card and hope she does too. Thanks for reading and as always, have a fantastic weekend!

Funky purple thanks

Hello! So who is still doing The Daily Marker 30 Day Colouring Challenge? I'm still going, with the odd hiatus - sometimes you have to do housework! This card was inspired by Kathy Racoosin's Day 8 post, where she created an amazing card background just using a roll of tape and markers. It was pretty inspiring, so I came up with my own interpretation. If you follow me on Instagram, you'll have seen the first few photos, but not the finished product!

Basically I started with a piece of watercolour paper and took a couple of my Spellbinders Nestabilities Large Circles and drew around them in a random pattern with some of my purple Spectrum Aquas, overlapping to create the different shapes. I then got to colouring in between the lines using all my different purple and blue markers and pencils - from my Spectrum Aquas, to my lonely blue Inktense and my Caran D'Ache water colours and my Artists pencils too. This was the result:

It looked a bit odd with the water colour pencil as is, so I blended those bits with water to soften it up. In hindsight, I shouldn't have used a water colour marker to draw the circles - they naturally bled a bit, and it looks a bit messy up close. You don't get anywhere by not experimenting though!

Pretty funky, but what to do with it? I've seen some great inlaid die cutting on cards, so after watching a Jennifer McGuire video and one from Lawn Fawn, I got busy with my CB Thanks die cutting it out from the corner of the funky panel and then several from white card stock:

I then glued the white Thanks together using my new bottle of Ranger Multi Medium Matte with its precision tip - that makes it much easier! - and then added the coloured panel on top. To stick it back into the panel, I put some double sided sticky tape on the back of the panel so the blank space for the thanks was now sticky. I stuck it on carefully, and put back in with my tweezers all the little extra die cut pieces from the 't' and 'h' and 'a' etc. Blimey, that is fiddly work!

I then simply attached it to my card blank. It's quite subtle because it blends in with the background, but some Wink of Stella and Glossy Accents help it pop out a bit more.

[Supplies: Water colour card; Spellbinders Nestabilities Large Circle Dies (out of stock where I purchased them); Spectrum Aqua - Floral; Derwent Artists' Pencils; Caran D'Ache Prismallo Aquarelles; Derwent Inktense Pencils; Clearly Besotted Thanks die; Wink of Stella; Glossy Accents; Ranger Multi Medium Matte; Precision tip; Double sided tape]

Thank you so much for reading and have a lovely weekend :)

Home - again!

Hello, Crafty Fans! This latest project I can finally share with you as it made its way to its destination - sunny Switzerland!

It's gone to my best buddy and her lovely partner and family as they have recently moved to a new apartment with some much needed space.

I was inspired by a post from a member of the Sugar Pea design team, SemSee's Sparkly Scribblings, and decided to make a picture for their new wall. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out and they like it too, so double yay!

[Supplies: Water colour paper; Spectrum Aquas - Floral and Essentials; Papermania Capsule Collection 6x6" paper pad; SugarPea Designs Homescape SugarCuts; Daler Rowney Graduate mount board]

I originally planned to frame it in an IKEA Ribba box frame, but frankly that was a silly idea given it had to fly to Switzerland, but I kept to the same dimensions, should they want to frame it. I started with a square of water colour paper around 6.25" - I wanted to have some overlap so it was slightly less than 6" framed - and did a wash of orange and pink Spectrum Aquas, so it would look like an evening sky now they have a better view from their window ;). I then got on with die cutting out the Homescape die. This die is great, because each end of it matches up so you can cut a continuous scene, and this means you can place it off one end of the paper, then match it to the end and cut again so that you get different orientations of the scene, making it much easier to create my scene above. I chose colours to match the sky.

I then took some mount board and made a frame to fit - there are lots of videos on YouTube and it was surprisingly simple. I shall try that again!

I also made a New Home card for them using the same colours of Spectrum Aquas:

[Supplies: Water colour paper;  Spectrum Aquas Floral; SugarPea Designs Home Sweet Home SugarCut; Clearly Besotted Sweet Little Sentiments; Versa Mark Ink; WOW! Bright White embossing powder; Stick It!; Lawn Fawn Large Stitched Square Lawn Cuts]
 

This was my first attempt at emboss resist. I die cut out the Home Sweet Home SugarCut with some Stick It! on the back and adhered it lightly to the middle of my water colour panel. I then stamped the 'new home' sentiment from my CB Sweet Little Sentiments set multiple times in Versa Mark and embossed them using WOW! Bright white embossing powder. I then washed the panel using three of my floral Spectrum Aquas (I think Marigold, Sunflower and Rose Pink). I carefully removed the now soggy paper 'HOME' to reveal it on the paper - I really like the effect. I simply trimmed the card and mounted on a 6x6" card blank. With the other one I die cut out a panel using my LF stitched square dies.

A little close up:

Thank you so much for reading. Hope the sun sets in beautiful colours wherever you are :)

 

Butterflies and Roses

Two posts in two days? I'm getting carried away with all my The Daily Marker 30 Day Colouring Challenge and also the Pretty Pink Posh Watercolour Blog Hop. If you haven't been joining in with the former, you have lots of time still, but with the former, you have until Monday at 11:55pm PST (which I think is Pacific Standard Time!). The cards that are there from the design team are truly inspirational, and lead into even more inspirational cards from Joe Public - I had no idea there were so many crafters and water colourists out there.

 

I started off my card with just a blank square of water colour card stock and stamped and embossed a rose and some butterflies using my free Clearly Besotted stamp set from Simply Cards and Papercraft (issue 134). I then got busy with my Spectrum Aquas using the floral range (this is the one I use most often!). This was the result:

I liked the rose and the butterflies but wasn't happy with the background, so inspired by Debby Hughes' post using tags, I got out my CB rounded tag die and cut out the rose and the big butterfly, then fussy cut out the smaller butterflies. I found some previously die cut rectangles in my scraps box, got a couple of card blanks, one Kraft, the other white and with a bit of tape adhered the rectangles to the cards, then with some fun foam, the rose and butterfly tags on top. Some twine and then another butterfly set them off. I had to cut the cards down a bit as the rectangles didn't fit so well with the size they were, so using my WRMK Envelope Punch board, I made some new envelopes for them. I loved that when the cardstock went through my die cutting machine it went from textured to smooth. A different touch.

[Supplies: Spectrum Aquas Floral; Versa Mark Ink; WOW! Embossing Powder Bright White; Simply Cards and Papercraft Issue 133; Baker's Twine - Joe and Flo; Bazzill Paper] 

I've another butterfly card I made earlier in the week that I'd like to share because the challenge at Addicted to CAS is butterfly:

 
[Supplies: Memento Tuxedo Black; CD Metallic Pencils; Wink of Stella]

Again using my CB freebies, these are simply stamped in Memento Tuxedo Black and coloured with Caran D'Ache metallic pencils, with some Wink of Stella on top. Very very simple.

Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you have time to do some colouring and join in with the blog hop :)

Father's Day Cards - 30 Day Colouring Challenge

It's been quite a week and amongst other things, the 30 Day Colouring Challenge hosted by the lovely Kathy Racoosin started. I am LOVING it. I've been posting on Instagram every day so far and there are so many people in social media land joining in, it's really inspirational. If you don't know what I'm on about, check out Kathy's blog for more information and join in if you can!

Enough rambling, did I actually make any cards? Well yes I did! I focused on Father's Day cards as that is coming up in a couple of weeks and I had three to make - my Dad, my Father in Law and my Husband!

I've been using some Lawn Fawn stamps I got a couple of months ago, which is nice because they haven't been out of their packet much! Here they are:

My Dad:

My Dad loves reading, so the CB Bookworm set linked with the LF Best Pun Ever fitted nicely. The cup was stamped in Lemon Twist Ranger Dye ink, and like the rest, coloured in using my Derwent Artist's pencils. I cut it from the matching die and covered it in Wink of Stella then glossy accents to make it stand out. I cut a slit in the top and popped in the die cut book worm. I think he's cute. The backing paper is LF Let's Polka.

My Father in Law:

Again I used the LF Best Pun Ever set, stamping the cheese onto a panel of water colour card stock in Lemon Twist and appropriately, Cheese Puff Ranger Dye ink, with the grater in Memento London Fog. I coloured them in with my Prismallo Aquaralles and gave them a light wash with water to bring the colour out. The sentiment is simply stamped in Ranger Jet Black Archival ink. The background is LF Let's Polka Mon Amie. I think he'll like the terrible pun!

My husband:

I love the little ice lollies from the Best Pun Ever set. The little faces that go with them are so so cute! As we have two little girls, it seemed appropriate to stamp the larger lolly in the middle of two little ones My husband likes green and my eldest loves pink, so that was the colour scheme I went with. They're simply stamped onto water colour cardstock with Ranger Jet Black Archival ink, coloured in with Spectrum Aquas (from the floral set), and given a light wash with water. I thought it would be fun to put the sentiment on the inside too - making the 'Coolest' blue (Blue Ribbon Ranger Dye)

[Supplies used on cards: Lawn Fawn Best Pun Ever; Lawn Fawn Let's Polka (currently out of stock where I purchased it) and Let's Polka Mon Amie; Clearly Besotted Book Worm; Ranger Dye Inks; Ranger Archival Ink; Derwent Artist's Pencils; Spectrum Aqua Pens; Caran D'Ache Prismallo Aquarelles]

It's so far been a productive week and we're only on Day 5 of the challenge - I don't think I've made so many cards in a week!

Thanks, as always, for reading and I hope you get the chance to join in with me and everyone else on the challenge. Oh and it's release day for Clearly Besotted Stamps - it's a good one ;)