Golden Buddha

As many of you know, I lived in the Far East for some years and used to love visiting the temples there. Especially the ones off the tourist trail - there was one I loved despite it being at the top of several hundred (!) steps - it was always quiet and peaceful and of course never overrrun with coach parties as all those steps put people off! The temple café was at the top of the steps, where you could enjoy the beancurd dish of the day and a pot of tea for a ridiculously  low price before strolling through the frangipani and oleander trees to admire the beautiful golden effigies and their surroundings.

Back in the hearts of the cities, temples  were usually packed with more tourists than worshippers, and I often wondered what those tranquil looking gods and Buddhas were thinking, looking benignly down on the jostling tourists shouting to each other in every language under the sun. Which is what inspired this card.

The Buddha, a stamp I picked up at a craft show a few years ago but can't remember which stand,  is stamped and heat embossed in black on gold mirri - when stamping and embossing on mirri, an antistatic pad and a stamping platform are your very best friends -  then carefully cut him out.

I used a sunray stencil and distress inks for the background. I chose shades of green to give an aura of peace, calm and tranquillity. And then I put the kibosh on all that calmness by adding a snarky sentiment that expresses what I reckon that Buddha is REALLY thinking.

I am sharing this with

Little Red Wagon - Line it up! 

Inkspirational - Funny Sentiments 



Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers - I is for inks 


Addicted to Stamps and More- Anything Goes  

A Yo Yo Spinner Card

I'd never heard of a Yo Yo Spinner Card until it appeared on the Butterfly Challenge this time. And Mrs A has kindly given us full and clear instructions for making the spinner.

and when you pull down the butterfly attached to the twine,  the number spins and the rest of the sentiment is revealed!

This technique came at the perfect time for me as I was looking around  for an idea for my granddaughter's 11th birthday card. She's at that awkward age where she's too old for children's things and too young for teenage ones, but she's a keen crafter with a love of trying different techniques and she's also fascinated by engineering, so she's going to love the spinner element. 

It took me a lot of rummaging to approximately match the colours of this time's Butterfly Challenge but i think these are pretty close, although I'm very low on shades of blue card at the moment, I can never find one that's neither too light nor too dark.  I've used lots of die cuts, running the largest circle through an embossing folder, edging it with blue ink and then adding tiny liquid pearls dots to the flower centres. The butterflies are finished off with enamel dots. 

So, with apologies for the shade of blue, I am sharing this with the Butterfly Challenge where I am claiming all 7 elements (my choice being embossing/enamel dots) 

I am also sharing this with Crafty Cardmakers where the theme is Butterflies. 

RECIPE: Simple corn fritters

There are lots of corn fritter recipes out there but few are as simple as this one. I'm a big fan of tinned creamed sweetcorn as an ingredient, as you may have already realised, and the only other ingredients these need are self raising flour and eggs,  plus oil for frying, so as long as the shopping's going smoothly (not always the case at the moment) I can whip these up from the store cupboard in next to no time.

Ingredients (to serve 4, approx 2 fritters each) 

1 tin (approx 400g) creamed sweetcorn 

2 eggs

self raising flour - about 100g but see below

oil for frying

Tip the sweetcorn into a mixing bowl and beat in the eggs. Stir in enough flour to form what old-fashioned cookbooks call a "dropping" consistency. When you drop a spoonful into the  pan, it should spread out a bit but not run all over the pan, rather like a Scotch pancake. I haven't given an exact quantity because the sizes of corn tins vary a lot, I've had them from 350g to 450g, and egg sizes vary too, especially at the moment when you can't rely on being able to buy a particular size. 

Heat some oil in a frying pan and drop in tablespoonfuls of the mixture. Fry  on a high heat for 2-3 minutes until bubbles start to appear on the surface and the underside is golden, then carefully flip them, lower the heat  to medium-low, and cook for about 5 minutes until cooked through. 

You may need to cook them in batches.  Because there are only two of us, I made 4 fritters from half the batter, and served them with salad and some pepperoni that was lurking in the fridge. I have a couple of spring onions left over from last night's stir fry, so tomorrow I will chop those and stir them into the remaining batter to make corn and onion fritters to serve with sweet chilli sauce. 

I'm sharing this with Kitchen Clearout at Madhouse Family Reviews -  the perfect place to find  and share ideas for making lockdown cooking more interesting! 

 

Like an overloaded Christmas tree...

What is a Christmas tree if it isn't overloaded? And I've been rummaging around in my festive Box of Bits to produce a card that is a real homage to the overloaded tree.

I distressed the edges of a couple of papers and used them to cover a kraft card base. Then I went overboard - a die cut doiley,  several buttons, a tag topped with some bling, a strip of cork,  twine and pre-printed sentiments. For the topper, I used a very old embossing folder to dry emboss green card, swiped the upper surface with a clear pad, sprinkled gold powder on and heat embossed, then die cut an oval shape from it, then added a sentiment and bow.

Pretty OTT by my standards but a lot of fun to make - and it's made a smidgeon of space in the BOB.

I am sharing this with


52 Christmas Card Throwdown - Embossing 


Crafty Hazelnut's Christmas Challenge - Anything Goes 

Jingle Belles - Bling on the holidays 

Scrappy Mo's - May Rudolph Day  

Alphabet Challenge - Dry Embossing 

Sparkles Christmas - Add ribbon, lace or twine

Little Miss Daydream

This cute little girl is lost in a daydream - perhaps she's thinking about her birthday party (which is probably going to be a Zoom one!)  and wondering if it will work?

I've had this Whoopsi Daisy digi for about 5 years and this is the first time I have used it. Every time I look at it, I get the feeling something isn't quite right about it. And while I was colouring it yesterday I realised what it is - the girl has SIX fingers on her right hand. A descendant of Ann Boleyn perhaps?

Anyway, I coloured her with Promarkers and cut her out, leaving out the cats that were part of the image,  then took a selection of papers to make the layers. The check, stripe and floral papers are all snippets left over from a previous project, that had been printed out from the Funky Hands CD "V. Funky" and the dotty paper is just a scrap from my snippets box that happened to co-ordinate. I used a selection of stitched border dies to cut out the papers and the sentiment - another old digi from my collection, which I think was a freebie on a blog many years ago.  The tiny dotty pre-made bow was a serendipitous find in my embellishment box.

I am sharing this with

Allsorts Challenge - Ginghams, Stripes and Dots 

The CD Sunday Challenge Blog - Anything goes CD/Digi 

Use Your Stuff - Patterns 

Passion for Promarkers - Spots and/or Stripes 

Encore Paris

I can't seem to stop making Paris themed cards - it must be a result of my trip to France being cancelled, even though I was going to my daughter's place, many miles from Paris. And now my other daughter's trip to France has been cancelled too - they were supposed to be going to the Cote d'Azur for half term. So.... more Paris it is then...

To make the sky, I painted watercolour card with a very wet dark blue then added some streaks of purple while it was still wet, allowing them to blend here and there. Then I blotted off some of the excess water and finished drying with my heat gun, Finally I painted over the whole thing with Jo Sonja's Opal Dust. I don't know whether you can still get that, I've had my bottle for many years.  That needed to be left overnight to dry. I then cut it into a circle and added the die cut skyline, trimmed off the bottom of the circle and stuck it to the card then finished with a sentiment stamped with words from a Clearly Besotted city skyline set.

Here's the obligatory schparkle close up:

I am sharing this with

Shopping Our Stash - The Places You'll Go

CAS Watercolour - The Night Sky  

When life brings you lemons...

... make lemonade. So the saying goes, but I much prefer the snarkier version on this stamp from Rubberdance.

And for an extra shot of snark, I made a card that would have worked perfectly with the more traditional version of the saying. 

I used a Crafters Companion stamp set that Santa brought me and hadn't seen ink yet. I stamped  the lemons, masked them then stamped splodges and bubbles all around. Then I stamped a block of tiny bubbles around the edge with clear ink to form a wide border and heat embossed with holographic powder. You can't see the sparkly shine very well in the photo but in real life it does add a lemonade sparkle to the card.  After all the stampy embossy stuff was done, I removed the masking and coloured the lemons. Then I went and had a much deserved refreshing beverage. 

I used a lemon pearl embossing powder to stamp the sentiment onto black card - I'm going through a bit of a phase of embossing sentiments in white on black and this is a nice variation on the theme. 

Naturally I am sharing this with the Sistahs over at the Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers - Y is for yellow - and isn't Edna looking glamorous today?