Autumn leaves

Well, autumn is well and truly here now isn't it? We don't seem to have had much wind yet, so the leaves have stayed on the trees after changing colour and are looking really spectacular, especially when we have a bright sunny day, and we've been lucky enough to have had a few of those this week.

I love the colours of autumn, all the rich golds, browns and earthy reds are my favourite colours, so it's no surprise that the very first stamps I bought many, many years ago were these autumn leaf ones - the big leaf cluster is a Rubber Stampede one and the chestnut leaf a Personal Impressions one. I've teamed them with a Best Wishes stamp, which came from the bargain bucket at the local craft shop, also one of my very first purchases, and a set of Rubberstamp Tapestry (now called Card-io) stamps that are positive youngsters, since I see from the pack that I bought them in 2006.

Having dug out my oldest stamps, it was only natural to combine them with my oldest surviving inkpad (black, gold and Versamark having been replaced several times), the Kaleidacolour Autumn Leaves pad. I really don't know how it goes on being so superbly inky, year after year, use after use.

I coloured the leaf cluster with Promarkers and fussy cut it, then used a ball tool and scissor blades to curl the ends of the leaves, sticking the centre of the image down with sticky dots and using 3-d adhesive towards the edges to preserve the 3-d effect.

I think the earth tomes and lack of fancy embellishments give this card a very masculine feel - and my husband has just said he likes it, so QED.

I am sharing this with:

Crafty Creations Challenges - Falling for you
The Male Room - Autumn
Shopping Our Stash - Use your oldest birthday supplies
Mod Squad - get your Fall on
Creative card crew - Masculine