Nature at Cardz 4 Guys

Our new challenge it Cardz 4 Guyz this week is Nature. So we'd love to see your cards with anything wild and natural on them - and remember, they need to be suitable for a man or a boy.

My card uses a silhouette stamp from an old Artylicious set. The company is no longer trading, although last time I used an image from the set, somebody commented that they thought Indigo Blu now sold the same designs. I made the background by scribbling blue and green watercolour pencils onto watercolour paper and then washing all over with a waterbrush.

The sentiment is from a Creative Expressions stamp set - the set is actually snowdrop themed but this stamp from it is getting a lot of use elsewhere! And the corrugated kraft came from the packaging of some bottles of olive oil.

I would like to share this with:
ATCAS - Watercolour
A Bit More Time To Craft - Anything Goes
Classic Design Team Open Challenge - October
Creative With Stamps - Sentiment  

Lace balloons

The Spellbinders lace balloon dies - they're very pretty but a real balloon made of lace wouldn't hold any gas, would it?

Anyway, when I was a child my very favourite balloons were ones that were white and swirled with marble colours, and as you blew them up the marbling spread out over the surface of the balloon. I haven't seen them for years now - maybe the colouring was full of poisons and elf'n'safety have banned them? Or perhaps they just went out of fashion. Whatever, this is an attempt to recreate them.

I scribbled over a sheet of watercolour paper with lilac and turquoise watercolour pencils and then blended all over with a water  brush. When the paper was dry I die cut the balloons and added a stamped sentiment and some hand drawn strings.

I am sharing this with
Less is More - turquoise and lilac
ATCAS - Watercolour
Crafty Gals Corner - Anything Goes  

Another Tweet Christmas card

I can't help it, I just ADORE the Woodware robins stamp set!

This time I've used just one of the cheeky little chaps, carrying a holly leaf in his beak. The branch is stamped with a stamp that actually has lots of leaves on it, but they are obviously deciduous leaves that wouldn't be around at Christmas time, so I covered the leaves up with masking tape before inking the stamp. The  resulting branch didn't look "twiggy" enough, so I used a marker pen to twigify it up a bit. Then I added a touch of frost and some icicles using Stickles - it is actually white but on the photo it seems to be reflecting the red and brown of the image. Oh well at least the sparkle shows - you can't win really when it comes to photographing glitter!

I am sharing this with:

Crafty Hazelnut's Christmas Challenge Extra - October
Addicted to stamps and more - Holiday
CASology - Cute 
Fab'n'Funky - Christmas
Just add ink - Wings 

Four cards from one sketch

Earlier today, I published a review of the book Ideas For Cardmakers and now I want to share the cards I made using one of the sketches from the book.

I cut a template for the pieces from scrap card, to save measuring each time, then rummages through my papers and snippets to see what I could come up with.

The first is made entirely from snippets of papers from the Stampin Up "Going Places" pad, with a sentiment stamped using a magazine freebie

Back into the snippets box where I found a scrap of autumn leaves paper and some orange card (which isn't anything like as lurid as it looks in the photo). I cut the orange card then embossed it with a Darice folder - with hindsight I should have done the embossing before cutting, as it has very slightly distorted the shapes so they don't line up perfectly. For embellishments, I used my old faithful chestnut leaf stamp and a Kaleidacolour Autumn Leaves pad.

I can't decide whether I prefer this upright or tent-style!
I am sharing this with
The Male Room - Leaves or Trees
Mod Squad - Falling Leaves
Just Us Girls - Leaves


Back to the snippets box for my third card. The patterned paper is a very, very old scrap left over from a Dawn Bibby kit in the early days of her time on QVC. The silver panels are embossed with a magazine freebie folder, the butterflies die cut with a Spellbinders die. For the lilac panel I stamped all over it with a dragonfly background stamp and Versamark ink and then embossed with a Plum Pearls powder.

I am sharing this with
Alphabet challenge - Pretty in Pink
Cut it Up - pink and/or breast cancer awareness
Just add ink - Wings

For my final card, I set the snippets box aside and actually cut into some new sheets of paper, from the Craft Asylum "Candy" 6x6 pad. I chose a grey background card to make the pretty colours of the paper standout.

 
I am sharing this with Perfectly Created Chaos - Show me your patterns!

Now, since three of the cards were made entirely from snippets, I've bundled them together into one photo to share in the Snippets Playground this week, where I've handed in my prefect's badge and am playing along again. Thank you to everyone for playing so nicely last week - I didn't have to hand out a single detention!

And finally (phew) I've put the whole lot together to enter into Crafty Hazelnut's Patterned Paper challenge

Review: Ideas for Cardmakers by Fransie Snyman

A couple of weeks ago, Search Press ran a giveaway on their Twitter feed, with several prizes of a review copy of their new book, Ideas for Cardmakers by Fransie Snyman. Writing a review wasn't a condition of entry, but I was very pleased to win a copy and thought it really only polite to review it!

The book starts with a rundown of the supplies and basic techniques used in card making. It is very clear and thorough, so that even an absolute beginner who had never crafted before could use the book easily. More advanced crafters could skip this section, in fact it would probably be a good idea to do so as the beautiful photos of the supplies are bound to make you want to dash out and but even more stash!

Then on to the meat of the book - the templates, or what most of us know as sketches. Most of us find that when we are lacking in inspiration, browsing some sketches can trigger off a whole host of ideas, and this book contains over 50 templates/sketches, each illustrated on a double page spread with four very different interpretations of each sketch. This is a rubbish photo as I couldn't position the book so there was no reflection off the shiny pages, but it gives you a good idea of the layout.

The templates are divided into chapters by card shape - square, standard (A6), large (A5) and, most useful of all for me, DL. I love the look of DL cards but am very often stuck for ideas for using them.

I tested the book out by using the template shown in the photo above, and made four different cards with it. I'll write about the individual cards in a separate post, but here they all are displayed together - they were quick and easy to do, although the templates range from very simple to quite complex.

My overall opinion of the book is that it is an excellent book with lots of inspiration in it, and it will be sitting next to my craft table from now on to provide inspiration when I'm trying to work out how to arrange the elements of a card. The book is priced at £12.99

Sisterhood of the Snarky Stampers Challenge #69 - Pink Halloween

 

It's October and that means it will soon be Halloween - so for the latest challenge at The Sisterhood of the Snarky Stampers we would like to see your Halloween creations - with a twist; as a tribute to Breast Cancer Awareness month, we want to see PINK Halloween creations!

 

Now I'm not a huge fan of Halloween, the upshot of which is that I don't own much in the way of Halloween stash - but I managed to make this card using no Halloween-specific stash at all.

 

 

I cut the ghost freehand from pink card and added some googly eyes and drew on a mouth. The background is navy card, dotted with glue and sprinkled with pink glitter, and with little wisps of pink Wink of Stella to give a swirling mist effect. I adapted the sentiment from a joke I saw online and was then faced with the question of what font a ghost would write in. I thought this looked sufficiently spooky - it's called Dragline BTN Dm and is one of the built in fonts that comes with Word.

 

Now why don't YOU head over to the Sisterhood and share your snarkiest Pink Halloween card? You may be crowned Princess, or even Queen, of Snark!

Show me a Snowman at Sparkles Christmas

It's time for a new challenge at Sparkles Christmas, and this month the theme is Show me a Snowman.

I've used a very, very old unmounted snowman stamp - it's been in my collection for years and I can't remember where it came from. The sentiment is from a magazine cover gift set. I stamped it on the outside of the card, then cut around it to form an aperture and stuck it down on the inside of the card through the aperture, to make sure it was perfectly aligned.  With hindsight, matting it on some silver mirri before sticking it down would have been even better.

Inside the aperture is a piece of acetate embossed with a Darice embossing folder. My original plan was to leave the rest of the card front bare with just the snowman standing beside the "window" but instead of looking CAS, it just looked bare! So I added some silver confetti snowflakes.