Arguing black's white

When I was a little girl, my gran used to say, of anyone who disagreed with her, "They'd argue black's white" so this card is dedicated to the memory of her, because I've made a CAS card with black used for the "white" space. It's not exactly as I'd planned it though - I'd really wanted the sentiment to be pink, but neither my pink inkpad not pink embossing powder was man enough for the job, they both had a degree of transparency which made the sentiment look grey rather than pink, so I ended up making it white instead. So I used white opaque gems for the flower centres to link in with the white stamping.

The embossing folder was, I think, a magazine freebie and the flowers and leaves are die cut from snippets.

 

I am sharing this card with

 

Ooh La la Creations - Clean and Simple

Allsorts Challenge - Birthday Wishes 

Less is More - add some texture 

Pixie's Snippets Playground - Week 217 

The Christmas Meerkat.

This card is made using a stamp from a sheet that came with a craft magazine's Christmas issue a few years ago, and I had to make it because meerkat. I mean,. aren't they the sweetest, cutest of animals? Some of the best TV documentaries ever show them in the wild, and even in zoos they seem to thrive on the visits from the public, reacting as if your visit to the enclosure is a treat for THEM, not for you.

They aren't really creatures that I'd associate with snow and with Christmas though, so I'd never used this stamp. Not until I spotted this speech bubble stamp, off a Studio G mini set, and thought  how well it would work with the cheeky little meerkat, getting ready to throw his snowball at Santa.

I stamped him with Memento ink and coloured him with Promarkers, matching his (or her, I'm not sure how to go about sexing a meerkat) scarf to match the backing papers which also came with the magazine, then added Stickles glitter to the snow and used a grey glitter card for matting. It's supposed to be encapsulated glitter, to make it easier to stick, but I still had to sand it and use the extra-strong DST combined with Pinflair glue to hold the layers in place!

I'm sure my UK based friends will be very impressed that I've managed to write an entire meerkat-based post without mentioning insurance comparison sites. In fact it was.......SIMPLES!

I'm sharing this with

Alphabet Challenge - Z  is for Zoo Animals
Crafty Hazelnut's Christmas Challenge - Cute
Christmas Card Challenges - Anything Goes
Sweet Stampin' Challenge - Glitter and Sparkle
Fantastic Tuesday - Make it Cute
Glitter and Sparkle - Anything Goes  

A CAS Christmas

Here is a very CAS Christmas card which I have made using a small text stamp which I think is a Studio G one (I do wish manufacturers would print their names on the acetate backing sheet!). I stamped it once in red then overstamped, slightly offset, in black. Then I masked the stamped area and sponged lightly around it in red and finished it with a scattering of sequins.

Very quick, very CAS and if you move your head from side to side while looking at it, it reminds you of the feeling after a Christmas morning glass of champagne!

I am sharing this with

Winter Wonderland - Clean and Simple
Double D challenges - Red & White
Jingle Belles - TEXT me!
AAA Cards - Sequins   

Thank You at CD Sundays

Today is my final challenge as a Guest Design Team member at CD Sundays - thank you very much, everyone, I've really enjoyed my time with you. Although I have to own up to having missed the sense of anticipation every alternate Sunday morning, wondering what the new challenge was going to be!

This fortnight's challenge is Thank You and I decided to use my lovely Memory Box Thank You die, choosing a selection of papers from the Polkadoodles Cherryblossom Lane CD to go with it. Instead of white or pastel colours for the die cutting and matting, I went for black to really contrast with the lilac patterned papers, and made a large 20cm square card. I think all that black might have looked too heavy on a smaller card. The die cut corners are cut with a very old Cuttlebug die.

Anything Goes at Twofers

Today it is my turn to choose the theme for the new challenge at Twofers, and I have chosen a nice, easy one - ANYTHING GOES.  Why not pop over and share your makes with us? It can be absolutely anything at all, as long as it includes some stamping and no digis. And as always, there is a $20 Alleystamps voucher for our favourite. Don't forget, you only need to make ONE item for our challenge, although of course you are free to make more if you wish to.

Now my lovely teamies Christi and Zoe thought I was making it too easy on myself by picking Anything Goes, so they gave me an extra challenge, all of my own. They tasked me to use my very oldest stamp, which in my case is this PSX Celtic Knotwork stamp, one I've used many, many times over the years but had been lying idle for a long time.

To go with it, I chose some very old stash too. In fact, I thought I'd completely lost this paper - I bought it when we were on holiday in Bangkok, way back in about 1998, and lost it as soon as I got home. Eventually I thought I must have thrown it away with the packaging from the souvenirs, a great pity as it was one of two huge, giftwrap-sized sheets, of hand made paper. So I was delighted when my recent craft room declutter produced it, tucked down behind a rarely-moved cabinet.

The paper is so beautiful that the stamped image needed no more embellishment, anything more would have detracted from the lovely paper. So if you discount the 18 years spent trying to find the paper, this was an extremely quick card to make!

If you'd like to use YOUR oldest stamp, too, it would be great fun to see what you unearth, but there is no need to do that (it's just me being nosey and wanting to see what's lurking in your stash).

I would like to share this with:
Crafty Hazelnut's Patterned Paper challenge - February 
Sparkles Monthly Challenge - Something for the Males
Craft Your Passion Challenge - Anything Goes
A Bit More Time To Craft - Anything Goes

Victorian Gentleman

What a busy few days I seem to have had - there's not been much time for crafting or blogging, but I've finally got something to show you apart from the heap of gone-wrong experiments on my craft table, about which h the less said the better. Let's just say there's a good reason I don't do much cute girly stuff and leave it at that....

As a reaction to the cute girly failures, I hoiked out a selection of rather steampunky stamps and slid gratefully back into my comfort zone with a very masculine card. I edged all the cream panels with Tea Dye DI and did all the stamping with a Vintage Sepia Versafine pad. To get the paler look for the background cogs, I stamped each one onto scrap paper first and just used the ink that was left behind. All the matting is dome with a matching brown, although it's come out looking much darler on the photo.

Originally I added the panel with the gentleman at a jaunty angle, as I'd planned from the outset, but it looked Just All Wring so I peeled him off and straightened him up.

I'm sharing this with:

Fab n Funky - Male Birthday
Sparkles Monthly Challenge - Something for the males
The Male Room - Monochromatic  

A butterfly explosion card

Back in the day, explosion cards, where a piece of paper bigger than the actual card opens out when you open the card, were A Thing and I've noticed them popping up (groan...... see what I did there?) again here and there, so I thought it was about time I revisited the technique.

The idea is quite simple, once you've worked out what size of paper to use. There is a  simple fold called the Turkish Map Fold (lots of articles and videos about it can be found by googling) that makes the paper sit neatly folded in the card until it is opened and then...... POP!!! The whole thing springs open.

I used a 20cm square of paper to sit inside a 10cm square card, which worked very neatly. I wanted to make sure I got the orientation of the stamping right, so I did a test fold with scrap paper and made notes on it to show where I wanted everything to go.

Then I did the stamping on a still-unfolded square of paper, using a gorgeous set of Indigo Blu stamps that was a magazine freebie last year. I set it aside for a few minutes to make  sure the ink was completely dry before starting to fold (actually that's a bit of a porkie-pie, I set my second attempt aside to dry, on account of what happened when I folded the first too soon). If I'd remembered to use a faster drying ink, it wouldn't have been necessary.....

For the outside of the card, I used more stamps from the set to make the panel, then unearthed an ancient scrap of shrink plastic and stamped the large butterfly twice with Stazon, cut it out and shrank it to make the embellishments. 

I am sharing this with

Crafty Gals Corner - Fancy Folds
Use Your Stuff - Black and white
Addicted to Stamps - Anything Goes
Butterfly Challenge - S is for Stamping (sorry, no sapphire this time!)
Shopping Our Stash - Fantastic Plastic
Mod Squad - The Great Outdoors
Inkspirational - Pop