Vintage Christmas

Yes, two Christmas cards in one day and it's only February! I don't often keep my New Year's Resolutions for this long! It's helping with the decluttering resolution too, as I'm using up a lot of Very Old Stuff.

For this card I have used an image and matching tag that were sent to me in a RAK a long time ago, and paper left over from a HOTP kit that is also several years old, teamed with lace and twine from my stash. The sentiment came in a Craftwork Cards goody bag.

I'm playing along with

Crafty Hazelnut's Christmas Challenge -  Vintage or Anything Goes
Clear It Out Challenge - Anything Goes/Twine

Like cat and dog

But these two aren't fighting, far from it - they look as if they've eaten too much turkey and settled down for a Christmas afternoon nap.

The decoupage is from a sheet that came with a Crafters Companion magazine a couple of years ago. I teamed it with a background of snowflakes stamped onto vellum, using white Stazon and then attached to pale blue card, a panel of paper from an old HOTP kit wrapped with ribbon and a sentiment from a free download a blogger kindly gave away a few years ago. I wish I could remember who - if it was YOU, or you can remember who it was, please let me know so I can credit them, because it's a lovely sheet of sentiments that I come back to over and over again.

I am sharing this with Winter Wonderland - Best friends.

Love/Valentines at Cardz 4 Guyz

It's that time of year again, and I'm sure many of us find that the hardest card of the year to make is that for our Other Half when Valentine's Day comes around. So, to give us all some help with that, the latest challenge at Cardz 4 Guyz is Love/Valentines. We'd like to see your cards - and don't forget, they must be suitable for a man! It's a theme that is so much easier to tackle when making cards for women, isn't it?

For my card, I went with an idea I've seen around in card shops, of using the King of Hearts from a pack of cards as my main image. To go with it, I computer generated the text "To the King of my Heart".

The papers I was planning to use were a selection of snippets from a very old Hot Off The Press pack, which were all reds, blacks and greys and I think had a name something like "Male Romance". However when I lifted out my playing card, I realised there was a lot of blue in the design, so I added in a snippet from the docrafts Heritage Press paper collection. A bit of grosgrain ribbon (I always think it looks more masculine than satin or organza) and some heart-patterned Candi finished the card off.

 

Many apologies for the fuzzy photo, I keep taking fresh photos and replacing the one in the post, but however clear they seem originally, Mr Blogger seems determined to have a fuzzy photo in this post!!!

I am sharing this with

Pixie's Snippets Playground - week 215
Ooh la La - Love and Romance
Alphabet - Y for Your Choice
Suzy Bee's - Love  
Craft Rocket - Valentine/Love
Just Us Girls - Valentine 

Happy New Year!

Or in Cantonese, Kung Hei Fat Choi.

As you may know, I lived in Hong Kong for several years. Chinese New Year was a wonderful time to be there, the city was even more vibrant, colourful and lively than usual and out in the rural New Territories, where I lived,  the fields were full of plum blossom and miniature orange trees.

I decided to move right away from the usual red-and-gold colour scheme of Chinese New Year cards, and instead go for a much cooler blue and silver look. However then I was beset by problems. The dark blue card I'd chosen to stamp on wasn't the least bit stamping friendly - it was too rough and absorbent. I just about got away with it with the Chinese characters, but when it came to the dragon,  the card soaked up so much ink from the detailed image that there wasn't enough left on the surface to hold the embossing powder.

A rummage through my snippets box found some more stamping-friendly card in a different shade of blue, and also part of a sheet of lovely encapsulated sparkly silver paper - although it has a fab sparkle, the surface is completely smooth eliminating those "how the heck am I going to get anything to stick to this" moments. However there wasn't enough of it for all my layering, so it was back to the snippets box again where I found a little piece of matte silver paper which I used for matting the lighter blue layers.

And yes, I have realised NOW that if I'd cut our the centres of the matting pieces (I'm sure there's a name for doing that but I can't bring it to mind) the sparkly paper would have gone a lot further, but I forgot all about that at the time! But now it's all put together, I like the balance of the matte and sparkly silver layers so much it's not going to take me long to convince myself I planned it that way all along.

I finished it off with the very last few peel offs from an ancient sheet - I WILL use them all up one day!

Incidentally Mark, who always notices when things aren't dead straight, tells me that my topper is slightly askew. I have astigmatism and don't spot subtle differences so much. Anyway,  this being Chinese New Year I reckon it's a very auspicious sign. Our amah in Hong Kong  used to insist on setting all the pictures on our walls at a slight angle, because if they are dead straight, the ghosts can sit on top and make mischief. If the pictures are askew, they slip off and have to go away.

I'm sharing this with

The Male Room - Oriental
Pixie's Snippets Playground - week 215

All white then?

Oh the punny titles are coming thick and fast today!

This week it's Less is More's 5th birthday and I've been playing along as often as possible for most of that time. The latest challenge is White on White and what a struggle I've had to keep it clean and simple! I cut and embossed all the elements I thought I needed and started to lay them out to finalise my plans for the card and, well, ended up setting aside about three quarters of what I'd planned to use. I think if I'd just used the die cut elements on a plain background, it might have worked, but I love this embossing folder, a magazine freebie from last year, and was quite determined to use it, so I had to lose almost all the embellishments. I'm sure they will be along on another card soon though!

 

Back to the fuchsia

OK, huge apologies for the groanworthy title!

In fact I've not come BACK to this fuchsia at all, because it was, until today, NBUS. I bought a lovely set of floral stamps from Clearly Besotted last summer and they had yet to see ink. Anyway, here is a very CAS card made with the fuchsia stamp  and a sentiment from the set. I didn't make it a one layer card because I wanted to colour the image in with Promarkers, and I hate the way they show through if you use them directly on to a card front, so I made a feature of the panel by raising it on some thin foam tape.

I did try adding a strip of ribbon between the flowers and the words, but it didn't seem  to add anything to the card and it ate into all that fresh white space.

I am sharing this with

Addicted to CAS - Bloom 
Cardz 4 Galz - Fantastic Florals

Chilli Garlic Peanuts

Last week, as you may have read on Mark's blog, we had a very enjoyable visit to the Hoo Hing Chinese Supermarket. We stocked up on all kinds of lovely ingredients - some hard to find, some simply a lot cheaper than in local supermarkets.

One bargain was a big bag of "redskin" peanuts,  ie raw unsalted ones, just as they are when they emerge from the shell. I used some of them to make a savoury nibble that I used to make regularly when we lived in Hong Kong - Chilli Garlic Peanuts.

These are delicious as a nibble with drinks. And the powerful spicy flavour means you only need a few of them, so you don't overfill on them, something that's far too easy to do with conventional peanuts.

To make a batch that will serve 4 people, you need

100g raw peanuts
about 2 tsp cooking oil - use one with little or no flavour such as sunflower or groundnut oil
2  large cloves of garlic, crushed
1 tsp cumin seed
½ to 1 tsp chilli powder, depending on how hot your chilli powder is and how spicy you want the nuts to be
½ tsp salt.

Heat the oil in a frying pan over a medium heat, add the nuts and gently cook until the skin starts to darken. Stir in the garlic, cumin seed and chilli powder and mix well, then continue to cook, stirring constantly, for 2-3 minutes.
Remove from heat and mix in the salt. Drain on absorbent paper and serve when cooled.

Don't make too many at once as they tend to go soft with storage, although they will be fine for a couple of days in an airtight container (If you've managed to resist gobbling them all!)