In the jungle

I made this card using a jungle themed stamp set from Woodware and a philodendron leaf punch, which I think is also a Woodware one. I punched the leaves from an assortment of shades of green card, adding veins with a white gel pen.

To make the card, I cut a 6" x 12" piece of white card and scored it at 2", 4", 8" and 12", then folded the sides back and out, rather like a back to  front gatefold card. I stamped and embossed the frogs and lizard on the centre panel then stamped leaves all around to cover the white space - the idea is to have them peeping out from the undergrowth rather than being a major feature of the card. Then I used a dimensional adhesive to stick the leaves down the sides of the cards and rear flaps, taking care not to let any overhang at the top or bottom of the card. This way the card will still stand, and will fit in a 6" square envelope.

Finally I stamped, embossed and coloured  another frog and the butterflies and dragonflies, adding lots of glitter to the dragonfly wings. While I was cutting them out, I wondered to myself why so many crafty representations of dragonflies include long antennae? Dragonflies don't have long antennae, those eye-like bulges on their heads are the antennae. So these must be the rare double-antennaed jungle dragonfly!

folded flat (ish) for posting
 

I am sharing this with the following challenges:
Make My Monday - Glitter
Craft Room Challenge - Anything 3D
Addicted to Stamps and More - Anything Goes
Ooh La la creations challenge - More than one fold

P is for......

PICNIC! Although it could also be for pink, pretty or pastel. This cute teddy bears picnic card was made with decoupage and papers from the new La Pashe CD, The Best of La Pashe 2014.

I'm playing (there's that P again) along with CD Sundays, where this fortnight's theme is "P is for...."  and congratulating myself on steering away from Christmas and not making my P stand for penguin, pole, polar bear, presents, pillar box or poinsettia (all of which went through my mind to start with).

Vintage Couture

Today I've been playing with a stamp I come back to time and time again, I bought it from Dimension 4th a few years ago and love the vintage fashion styling on it. I love looking at the prices too - for those of you in the UK too young to remember pre-decimal currency, that dress at 7/6 is 37½p in today's money!

The papers I've used with it are scraps - some of them VERY tiny - left over from a booklet of vintage papers that came free with a magazine some time ago. I've stamped the image onto some of the papers and cut out the garments, to paper-piece them onto the main image.

The background is a larger scrap, cut with pinking shears and stamped with a faux stitching border.  Being such a long, thin, stamp, it's gone quite wonky and refuses to sit straight on the acrylic block - but do you know, I think I prefer it that way! It gives an "aged" look that works well on vintage style cards.

 

The close up shows the "fabric effect" of the paper prints. Pretty realistic, isn't it?

Having said that I'd probably not get chance to join in, I'm eating my words and playing along in the Snippets Playground and I'm also joining in with Anything Goes with a twist - Make it Vintage at Susie Bee's Bloomin' Challenge 

Tropical sunset

It's coming up to my brother-in-law's birthday,  and although I make a lot of male-oriented cards, I always find him difficult to make for, as he's not keen on any of the "traditional" male hobbies. His main hobby is going on holiday, usually to tropical places, the hotter the better. So I decided to make him a tropical sunset scene.

I die cut an oval in scrap card and used it to mask off  all but the centre of a white card, then sponged inks of various ocean and sunset colours through the aperture dragging them horizontally to give that "striated" effect you so often see at sunset. (Tip - to position the aperture, place the oval you have die cut in the place where you would like your design to be, then put the waste back in place over it as if trying to reassemble the original piece of card. Lift out the die cut and your aperture is perfectly positioned. )

I used a stamp positioner to place the palm trees, so they didn't end up floating in mid air or lying underwater, then stamped with black ink and embossed with clear. Finally I stamped a greeting - using the stamp positioner again. I think it's indispensable when making CAS cards!

I'd already lifted out everything ready to make this card when I looked  in on Less is More this morning and saw that the latest challenge is "More than one tree" - there's serendipity for you!

A Hexagon Box

Today I decided to make a hexagonal box, using papers from a Colorbok pad that's been sitting in my stash for years. I used my Hougie board for the scoring and measuring, following the instructions in "Everyone needs a Hougie book 3"

The measurements I used were taken straight from the book, so I'm not going to infringe the lovely Kay Rutter's copyright by giving them here, but I took a series of photos as I went along.....

The clever "swivel and score" trick  means that even diagonal lines are precisely placed -

Is it just me, or does everybody sing "Never smile at a Crop-a-dile" every time they use it?

Before assembling the box, I lightly sanded all the folded edges to give a distressed look.

It is EXTREMELY important to have the correct equipment to weight down the folded base while the adhesive on the circle (see above) dries........ if you do not possess such equipment, I recommend you purchase some immediately.

 

I cut panels from another sheet taken from the pad, and edged them lightly with Antique Linen distress ink, then attached them to the sides of the box. I finished the panels with die cuts and stickers that came with the pad, and threaded ribbon and yarn through the holes to close the box.

 

The finished box is shown above. I chose to fold it so that the punched flaps poked outwards - if I had chosen to make an "inny" version, the top would have looked like this:

 

 

Phew! Are you still with me? I'll be filling this little box with sweets to give as a Christmas present, but until them I'm sharing it at

Craft Room Challenge - something 3-dimensional
Crafting Musketeers - Not a Card
Unstampabelles - Box it Up
White Lily Green - Homemade Thursday

A Winter Owl from The Best of La Pashe 2014

If you visit my blog regularly, you'll already know that I am a massive fan of La Pashe products and feel very privileged to belong to the design team, and that my all-time favourite craft CD is The Best of La Pashe 2012. Well, recently I've been teasing you with hints about the latest CD from La Pashe, The Best of La Pashe 2014  and I am delighted to be able to tell you that it is now available.

It costs £24.99 and can be bought from the La Pashe website. There are over 150 unique ready-to-print A4 decoupage sheets, including the following ranges...The Grumps, Sports & Hobbies, Kids & Teens, Precious Moments, McDecoupage, Christmas, Vintage Men's Decoupage & much, much more! And if that's not enough, there are also more than 200 co-ordinating backgrounds, as well as lots of Christmas Toppers.

There is decoupage to suit all skill levels, and the decoupage designs are ones that look great used just as a single layer topper too, so there really is something for everybody.

For this card, I've used one of the Christmas Decoupage sheets and one of the Christmas backgrounds, putting them together into my first ever centre stepper card. It always surprises me what great effects you can achieve with a scoring board and a little careful measuring! The icicles and snow are made with glitter glue, but instead of adding it to the image, I put the bottom layer, before adding the decoupage, under a sheet of clear plastic and traced the shapes with the glue, then left it to dry and peeled it off before sticking to the finished design. It seems to add more texture to the card that way.

Because the base card is dark blue, I've added a white panel to the back of the card, matted with silver. After all, there's no point in sending somebody a lovingly hand made card and not having anywhere to tell them who sent it!

Meet the Buttonfly

Buttonfly? Well, it's like a butterfly, only with added buttons (makes me think of the bread-and-butterfly out of Through the Looking Glass).

The current challenge at Butterfly Challenge is to use three patterned papers with a butterfly. I had a rummage through my bits box and came up with three small pieces of pretty paper left over from a recent make for CD Sundays - they came from a Create & craft Club freebie CD. I couldn't think how to use them though, so Pinterest came to the rescue - I put "card sketches" into the search box and loads of great ideas came up - so many that I started a sketches board of my own. Which means I have no excuse for running out of ideas any time soon!

This card is based on one of the sketches I found. I've embossed the larger white panel with a Crafters Companion folder, and  stamped and embossed the greeting on the smaller one. The butterfly is cut with a rather old die, from the days before pokey holes for removing the diecut were invented. So I tried the cutting-with-waxed-paper trick that I've been meaning to try for years, and the butterfly just popped out beautifully. Definitely something that will become standard procedure!

I added the buttons  simply because the nonsense word "buttonfly" popped into my head and wouldn't let go, otherwise I was planning to use pink pearls to decorate the body!

 
Because all the patterned papers were from my bits box, I'm also popping over to play at the Snippets Playground.