Travel may be opening up again for some people, but it's going to be a long time before a guy can just grab his backpack and set off to wander around Europe.
Except on paper.
For this card I printed off a paper, a topper sheet and an insert from the Debbi Moore CD "Cards for Men - Silhouettes".
You haven't seen much craft from me recently (although I have been crafting, just things I can't share yet) so I thought I'd share some of the things I've been cooking recently instead.
I joined a new Facebook group where a recipe book of the month is chosen and members share the dishes they have cooked from it. The book for July was "Vietnamese" by Uyen Luu, and after a few days of drooling over other members' creations, I knew I had to have a copy.
I am totally in love with this book - I've already cooked quite a few dishes from it and as you can see, it is still bristling with sticky notes. Here are some of the things I've cooked (a couple of others were delicious but not so photogenic). I can't share any recipes with you because of copyright. although if you do a web search for the book and author, you will find that several websites have been given permission to share sample recipes.
The Lemon and garlic chicken was the star out of all these delicious dishes. All the dishes are easy to make and use easily obtainable ingredients. I'm hooked!
I love that strip along the edges of fields of ripening corn, where poppies and cornflowers often grow. The gold of the corn, red of the poppies, blue cornflowers, white daisies and cow parsley and green grasses all look so lovely together. So when I realised the flowers on this old Kanban stamp could be cornflowers (they could equally well be pinks, that's artistic license for you!) I decided that would be my colour scheme.
I stamped the image on lightweight watercolour paper - I prefer a heavier one for painting on but the surface of the heavyweight paper I currently have really HATES being stamped on - then coloured it with watercolour pencils.
I added a poppy die cut, using the dies from the new Indigo Blu magazine kit, and a sentiment stamped in an Art Deco style font.
I am sharing this with
Allsorts challenge - Feminine/for a lady
Stamping Sensations - For a lady
It's too hot to craft! I certainly had to choose something to make that didn't involve any heat embossing.
So the inks and stencils came out to play. I made a background by blending distress inks over watercolour card then places a leaf stencil over it and sprayed with water, left it a few seconds to work them blotted up the excess. The leaves don't show up very well in the photo, only the ones on the darkest green show, but if you look closely you'll see it's an all-over pattern.
Next I took the rose stencil and applied a pink glitter paste through it. By now it was so much more than "just a background" that I really didn't want to detract from it by covering any of it up with an image, so I went for adding a simple die cut sentiment.
I am sharing this with
Alphabet Challenge - Use Happy in your sentiment
Country View Challenges - Use a stencil (or two)
For this fortnight's snippets make, I have delved into my snippets basket and come up with some teeny tiny scraps of too-pretty-to-part-with patterned paper, then set to to punch them into little butterflies.
I stamped the wildflower border and sentiment - Indigo Blu stamps that came with a magazine some years ago - then scattered the butterflies in a cloud over the flowers, sticking them in place with Pinflair glue.
I am, of course, sharing this in Pixie's Snippets Playground.
You may be wondering why I've not posted for a few days, well, here's the reason...
We've had a lovely little break away - stayed in a hotel for pleasure rather than duty for the first time since pre-covid, and had a fascinating tour of a commercial fruit farm in Suffolk, which culminated in a visit to the cherry field where we were able to pick and eat some of the biggest, juiciest, most luscious cherries I have ever seen.
Anyway, I'm home and crafting again and was saddened to discover that Bugaboo, one of my favourite sources of digis, has closed down. But I still have plenty images and this one of Gus is one of my favourites.
I coloured him with Promarkers, used a stitched square die to cut the image out, and added a larger red stitched square, a die cut bottle and a stamped Dylusions sentiment. I finished off Gus's outfit with Stickles and his specs with Glossy Accents.
I am sharing this with
Crafty Hazelnut's Christmas Challenge - anything goes/use a die cut or punch
The Male Room - Christmas in July
Creative Crafting Uncles - Drinks
The latest challenge at the Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers is X is for X-posed. As soon as I saw the theme, I knew which stamp I was going to use. Then I scrolled down to enjoy the Sistahs' creations - and say that two of them had already used the same stamp. And I'd used it for an SOSS challenge only a few weeks ago too, so that pretty much ruled it out.
So I thought of another sense of X-posed - photography. And remembered that somewhere I had most of a page of blank film cell images I'd printed out years ago from an Ooh La la CD. While rummaging among my snippets for it, I found a part sheet of saucy retro images I'd printed from a digi I won many years ago. And as luck would have it, the images fitted the space in the film cells perfectly.
Better still, this lady is exposing rather more stocking top than is considered decent. And her little puppy is trying to encourage her to show even more. I made an inky background to mimic the background on the image, then edged the card in dark blue to match her dress. The sentiment is from a Tim Holtz Snarky Sentiments pad and it's slightly weirdly positioned because there was some wording on the image that I wanted to cover up. Which meant there was a space at the top where I would have preferred the sentiment to be, so I did what I so often do when there's a problem - stuck a butterfly on it (that could be a pretty good metaphor for life, really). At least with butterflies on the image too, it isn't totally irrelevant.
Edna's looking pretty X-Posed too!
