Welcome to 2016

Hello everybody and welcome to my first non-scheduled post of 2016. I had to get ahead and schedule my late December and early January DT posts because I was on holiday to Mexico in early December, then went to France for Christmas, then had family over for New Year - and cooked a Christmas dinner. As I craft on the dining table, it meant packing away all my craft stuff, and I've only just got it all out and into action again. But it's such a wet, miserable weekend I'm devoting it almost entirely to crafting, so I have several cards to post about today if I get chance.

Have you made any crafting resolutions this year? I think mine are the same every year and generally last about a week into January:

• make two Christmas cards every week to avoid a last minute rush and the boredom of having to mass produce them
• stop shopping! Only buy consumable basics - A4 card in white, black, cream, gold and silver, and adhesives and ink pads as they run out. Also basic pearls and gems, if they run out, although I have pretty good stocks of them.
• sort out my stuff - bring some of the old favourites back into use and sell/bin/recycle/donate as appropriate all the things I  will never use.
• use my stuff - the snippets, the stacks and stacks of patterned paper, all the hundreds of peel offs left from my peel-off crazy days, they are all gathering dust and are there to be USED.

Anyway, enough rambling and on with the craft. I started off with a card for the Butterfly Challenge, where the theme is X is for Xanthine. Despite being a crossword addict and former rather serious Scrabble player, I'd never heard of the word Xanthine but here is the definition according to Mrs A

Xanthine =  The yellow colouring matter found in certain plants as in Yellow Madder.
(Madder is from the Genus Rubia and has small yellow flowers, whorled leaves and a reddish brown root.)

 

and so she wants to see a yellow butterfly on our card, and ideally more yellow elsewhere in the design.

I made this card in my head several times over before actually setting to and making it in real life, and I have to say the imaginary version worked a lot better than the real one! I die cut the butterfly from bright yellow paper, and again from a pale yellow panel just slightly smaller than the card front. Then I did the stamping on the yellow panel - and I really wish I'd not bothered with the swirls. They were supposed to be  way of drawing attention to the aperture, but they just look messy. Inking the edges of the aperture would have worked better.

I covered the card front with patterned vellum - it has a yellow all-over trailing vine design, to show around the edges of the top panel and through the aperture, and then mounted the panel with foam tape and attached the body of the butterfly in place in the aperture.

The delicate effect I was looking for doesn't really show off the different layers - I might try this technique and layout again using bold, bright contrasting colours instead!

 

Anyway, it's eased me back into crafting again which was the main object of the exercise, and I thoroughly enjoyed making it even if it didn't work quite the way I'd intended!

Birds at Twofers

It's time for Twofers first challenge of 2016 and this time I've chosen the theme - we'd like to see a bird or birds on your work. It can be any kind of crafting - not just a card - as long as it contains some stamping and no digis.

For my card I mad a brayered background using a Kaleidacolour Caribbean Sea pad, and then overstamped and embossed it with this lovely Heron silhouette stamp (a Linda Luckin stamp, unfortunately no longer available). I had all kinds of embellishments ready to use on it, but when I tried them they all detracted from the impact of the image, so I decided to keep is simple by just adding some layering and a background of a plain and glittered card from my snippets box, bordered in black to echo the silhouette of the image.

I'm playing along with

Crafty Creations Challenges - Anything Goes
Creative Card Crew - Anything Goes
A Bit More Time To Craft - Anything Goes   

A Vintage tag at Sparkles Christmas

Happy New Year - and January 1st means it's time to start crafting for Christmas 2016! If you join in a few of the regular festive challenges, you are less likely to find yourself having to make all your cards in an unseemly hurry at the end of November! So do please hop over to Sparkles Christmas and play along with our monthly challenges!

This month we'd like you to make a vintage style Christmas tag. Our sponsor this month is Crafty Sentiments Designs who will be giving the winner a choice of 3 digis.



I've delved into the snippets box for this challenge and made my tag entirely from bits and pieces left over from my Christmas 2015 crafting. A die cut frame, a bit of inking, lots of ribbon and some brass pearls finish the look.

Ring in the New Year at CD Sundays

Good morning everybody! I hope you all had a good Christmas. I don't actually know whether I did or not - NOT because I drank so much I can't remember a thing about it, but because I'm writing this in advance, as by the time you read this I will be away visiting family in France and giving my younger two grandchildren lots of Christmas cuddles.

I'm back with another GDT post for CD Sundays and our theme this time is "Ring in the New Year".  I've used a decoupage sheet from La Pashe's "Christmas with the Wrinklies" CD. Those bell ringers have jumped the gun a little bit - just look at the clock, it's still five minutes to midnight! It's tiny details like that that make me love the La Pashe designs so much!

I wanted to use a tartan backing paper but none of the ones I had on CD were as good a match for the colours in the image as this one from the DCWV "Stack 9" 12 x 12 pad, which must be the most useful paper stack I have ever owned! I've made a simple easel card and to give the stopper plenty height, I attached it with a double layer of foam pads.

Homespun at Less is More

Another favourite challenge that my travels have kept me from joining in with recently is Less is More - this week the theme  is Homespun and I'm delighted to be back and joining in again!

I cut a scrap of gingham paper with pinking shears and used a brown marker to make faux tacking stitches,  then added the die cut dressmaker's dummy (it's actually brown, not black as it appears on the photo - and I'm afraid I don't know which die was used as I received it in a swap)  and finished the card with some buttons and a charm of dressmakers' scissors, tied to a mini-hank of twine.

Back to the snippets box

Thanks to all my travels I haven't been crafting much and my posts have all been scheduled, or using cards I made before setting off, so I've not been out to play in the Snippets Playground for a couple of weeks. But at last I've managed to scrape together time to get my craftiness on again, and this card is an absolute snippet-fest! As well as using up snippets of several different patterned papers, it includes the last two sentiments from a sheet of die cut ones I've had for years AND loads of die cuts of my own that are left over from previous projects - you know, those times you cut something and the size or colour just doesn't look quite right to use it in the way you've planned, so you put it away with all the other might-come-in-handy-sometime stuff.

I made it an easel card simply because I had too many bits and pieces to use up on a normal card front, and the only new things, apart from the base card, are the green layering card and the wooden frame.

The Snippets Playground is open for two weeks this time, with lots of goodies to be won, so why not come and play over there and help us to cheer Di up?

Merry Christmas Mark

As you probably know, my husband Mark is crazy about chillis - growing them and cooking them, and I try to make him chilli themed cards whenever possible, even at Christmas (and if anyone knows of a range of stamps that includes a chilli, please let me know!)

Because I've been unable to find a suitable stamp, I hand drew a chilli a couple of years ago and scanned the image, and have used it in several different ways. This year I resized it to comfortably fit a DL sized card, then printed it and cut it out. I stamped the Christmas greeting randomly all over the image, then mounted it onto white card and trimmed to leave a narrow border.

Next I die cut lots of snowflakes using a die that was a magazine freebie a year or two ago and stuck them randomly all over my DL card, trimming any overlapping edges. I used 3D adhesive to mount the chilli on top of them and then finished the snowflake centres with "chilli red" gems.

I'm sharing this with

The Male Room - Christmas or Seasonal Greetings (actually in my case it's more SEASONING greetings!)
Dies R Us - Winter - use snowflakes