Winter Walks - or, the one that wouldn't play

Sometimes a project is doomed from the start, isn't it? When I saw that the theme at CD Sundays for this fortnight is Winter Walks, I thought I'd leave it a few days as it sounded rather Christmassy and I've rather had my fill of Christmas crafting for a few weeks (I'll be starting my 2015 cards soon though).

So at the weekend I decided it was time to set to work on it. But almost everything I could find was just TOO Christmassy. Some rather lovely decoupage on a couple of La Pashe CDs and of course lots of Joanna Sheen images. I printed out a sheet of Joanna Sheen toppers, but as occasionally happens to me with her CDs, the images came out dark, muddy and grainy. Not usable at all. I don't know whether the problem is with the image itself or the way it talks to my computer, but it only seems to happen with Joannna's CDs and then only with certain images.

I was just about to give up when I remembered the Digital Crafting Essentials CDs I got as a cover mounted gift with a magazine last Christmas or the one before. I went through all the hundreds of images on the CD and eventually  came up with a charming topper sheet from the selection provided from the Crafters Companion Winter Paintbox Poppets range. As well as a large image, there were two half-width ones, and I thought they would be perfect to use triptych-style in an opened out gatefold card.

I didn't need to print out a background paper as the colours in the images went beautifully with a sheet I had printed for a previous project, from the old, old CD Filigree Fusion from Artylicious (I don't think it's available any more).

So I created my gatefold card and went to arrange my images on it - only to find the main image was too tall and the smaller ones too wide to fit on my card!

Right, plan B - a horizontal card with just the main image on the left and a ribbon-and-ricrac trim down the right. I matted the backing paper onto silver mirri, stuck down the trim and adhered the whole lot to the card. Then went to add the topper - TOO TALL! Goodness knows why I hadn't realised that it would be, after it had been too tall for my gatefold card!

With the adhesive already drying, I had to act fast, so I turned the base card to portrait orientation and attached the topper, which of course means that the ribbon and ricrac are almost completely hidden.  The greeting and flower, which were going to have been on the border running down the right of the card, are now at the bottom of the image. And, mostly to remind myself that the ribbon is actually there, I fished out the last tiny scrap of it from the bin and knotted it to add to the top of the card.

So here you are - the card that didn't want to be made! I don't think I've ever encountered so many obstacles to the completion of a single, not terribly ambitious, card!

Dainty Dragonfly

This week's challenge at Less is More is a colour challenge - black, metallic + one. The theme at Suzy Bee's Bloomin Challenge is a CAS one too, Anything Goes with a twist - Clean and Simple. And because I delved into my snippets box for all the card I used on this, I'm also joining in at the Snippets Playground.

My snippets box has lots of lovely scraps of metallic card away - I can never throw away even the tiniest scrap, I can't part with shiny things! (Hence my jewellery box is crammed with out-of-date costume jewellery and odd earrings.... maybe I should use them as embellishments?) The lovely deep  blue metallic card is a scrap that's been in there for years, and I picked out a scrap of pale blue card to go with it and cut and embossed them with a Spellbinders dragonfly die set. I don't think the novelty of using a die cutting machine to transform a scrap of card that looks too small to be worth keeping into an object of beauty! I mounted my dragonfly onto a square of black card, corners rounded and embossed with the Cuttlebug Swirls folder.

It's quite hard to see the dark metallic card on my photos, as I am still learning how to use the light box "studio" I got for Christmas and haven't yet worked out the best camera settings to use with it, but in real life the contrast, with the metal glinting through the wings, looks really dramatic!

I finished it by stamping the word "dragonfly", just in case it forgets what it is....

A good walk, spoiled

Mark Twain once described golf as "A good walk, spoiled" and I think it has been THOROUGHLY spoiled for this grumpy old man from The Grumps, who features on the CD The Best of La Pashe 2014. He is also available as a decoupage download, although of course that way you won't get the super-versatile background paper which would be great for all kinds of sport and garden themed cards. The CD and download are both available from La Pashe.

The card is a 15cm square gatefold card, and I wanted to add some golf-themed embellishments, but didn't have anything suitable. So I made the flag by colouring a cocktail stick with distress ink, pushing it through an oval of brown card to make the "hole" and then stickjing white paper around the other end and cutting it into a flag. You could add a number to the flag if the card is for a special birthday.

The golf ball is a punched circle of white card, embossed with the "Swiss dots" Cuttlebug folder but used back-to-front, so the dots go inwards like the indentations on a golf ball. I smudged some green ink on it because on such a wet, miserable day, I'm sure the ball would get covered in grass stains!

Happy New Year

I almost forgot to say it! Because I've already written and scheduled one of next week's posts, it almost slipped my mind that this is actually my first post of 2015.

I hope you all had a good Christmas - mine, and the week or so since, has been spent snivelling into a box of tissues, and today's the first day I've felt like doing any crafting. So I've not yet had chance to play with the three lovely Create-a-scene die sets that Santa brought me. However I feel as if I've been playing with something brand new...... even though I must have had it for about 5 years. Some time ago, I won a lovely pad of 360 sheets of K & Company 12" x 12" papers. I got a nice shiny new plastic storage box to keep the papers pristine in, put it away - and forgot all about it! I've just uncovered it, at the bottom of a pile of boxes, and have been like a child in a sweetshop. All those lovely papers to play with, all effectively brand new!

The card I'm sharing with you today is made with a set based around one sheet printed with large butterflies, although I cut the individual butterflies from the sheet rather than using it whole.

I'm sharing this with

Butterfly Challenge - Thank you with Butterflies
NBUS Challenge #3

Merry Christmas!

And to wish you all a very happy Christmas, I'm sharing with you the card I made for my husband Mark. As you may know, he is passionate about growing chillies, so much so that the fairy lights on our Christmas tree are chilli shaped! So I decided to make him a chilli-themed Christmas card. I searched high and low for a chilli rubber stamp, but couldn't find one that is currently available in the UK. My search for a suitable digi was almost as fruitless - I found a few, but nothing that spoke to me, so in the end I decided to draw and colour my own.

As I couldn't rely on myself to draw several identical ones, I scanned the one I'd drawn and pasted it several times over on to one page, along with a suitable greeting, then cut out the images and greeting to make the card.

I'm sharing this with CAS on Sunday challenge #49 - Christmas

Another House Mouse card

.. and another visit to the Snippets Playground with the other images from the House Mouse stamp sheet I was playing with yesterday. The beauty of this image is that you can engineer your image  to match whatever papers and card you have to hand, by colouring in the balloons to match. As I'm a very inexperienced colourer (should that be colourist, or is that the person who dyes your hair?) and it is the first time I've used the stamp, I used the suggested colouring from the guide sheet, after all I have so many snippets I could probably match up with anything!

Sorting out the snippets

Yesterday, my five year old granddaughter, who loves crafting with me, came over for the day. She was feeling poorly and not really in the mood for crafting, but I remembered how when my own gran looked after me when I felt poorly, helping her to sort out her button tin always made me feel better.  So I suggested to Lara that she might help me to sort out the two bags of offcuts of ribbon and lace, and odds and ends of embellishments, that normally lurk under my craft table making me feel guilty for ignoring them.

She got really engrossed in winding ribbons into neat coils, and sorting beads, buttons, brads and sequins into storage boxes (and set aside a few pretty bits to take home with her) and by the time everything was organised, felt revived enough to make signs for most of the door handles in the house.

This says "Do not disturb the sleep & Lara's workshop open"
Plus a few paper streamers for the Christmas tree

While she was beavering away creating her signs, I sat beside her and stamped some of the gorgeous House Mouse images using the stamps that I won on my first visit to the Snippets Playground and made a start on colouring them. Today I finished the colouring and found that as well as my lovely box of paper snippets, I had all sorts of other long-forgotten treasures to play with among my newly tidied ribbons and embellishments.

The patterned paper is left over from a project so long ago that I can't remember where it came from - it looks home printed, so I thought it might be from a CD, but I can't recall which or see it on any of my current library. The yellow paper I've used in the layering is the very last scrap from a pack of paper (well, it was sold as card but it's too flimsy for that) that I bought on Earlestown market the week my Dad died, so it's been in my snippets box for almost 15 years! All the trimmings and embellishments are "rediscoveries" from yesterday's clear-out