With deepest sympathy

I find sympathy cards the hardest cards of all to make. I don't have any religious faith, so that rules out  a whole host of traditional designs, and I don't like to tempt fate by making them routinely and keeping some in stock, so they often have to be made very quickly in response to circumstances. You can't leave a grieving relative to wait while you create a complex and beautiful card!

So for me, sympathy cards lend themselves very readily to the Clean And Simple style of cardmaking. It's often very quick, and can create a stylish simplicity that seems very appropriate at a time of sadness.

Unfortunately we have just had a family bereavement, and this is the card I have made to send:

This week it's a CAS week at Addicted  to Stamps and More so I'm joining in with this card.

The Ugly Bug Ball

The current Butterfly Challenge is The Ugly Bug Ball . Now I have had this stamp, which I thought was a ladybird, for some years, It was part of a grab bag of unmounted red rubber, but I've never got round to using it. So I had a surprise when I stamped it - is it a ladybird? Or is it a snail? Or some sort of strange hybrid?

I'd already prepared my background using some slightly sparkly ladybird paper, so I decided that today it, or rather SHE, is going to be a ladybird, sitting wishing to be invited to dance. I picked up the wrong shade of pink pen and realised it too late Just look how I've made her blush!

A cheeky little glass of wine

This week's challenge at CD Sundays is A Birthday Card For a Male with Wendy and I decided to dust off one of my favourite CDs (OK, I know I have a LOT of favourites - I just LOVE crafting with CDs!) - The Wine Buffs from Katy Sue Designs. I often turn to this CD for male cards or cards for  people who might not appreciate the frills, flowers and lacy bits that hand made cards are often adorned with.

This time I made one of the cartoon images into a gatefold card, adding two very different backing papers from the CD. The wine-stained one on the inside is one of my favourite papers on the whole CD - it speaks to the messy wine-lover in me!

Thanks to Wynn's suggestion in the comments, I'm also playing along with Unstampabelles for the first time

A Speedy Snowflake

Having a cutting and embossing machine makes it really easy to produce quick cards that look (to a non crafter) as if they've taken hours! Thanks to my Grand Calibur, this card was created in a matter of minutes.

 

The background is made with a Darice embossing folder, wrapped with a gold-edged white organza ribbon topped with a gold metallic ribbon. The snowflake is die cut with a Spellbinders (if I recall correctly, I never keep the packaging) die set, alternate layers of white and gold, and finally a bow of the gold metallic ribbon finishes the whole thing off.

 

Total crafting time - including waiting for the glue to dry - was well under 20 minutes, so I'm joining in with CHNC Challenge 195 - 20 minutes or less  as well as CHNC Challenge Extra for September

 

And as I've used two ribbons, I'm also joining in with Winter Wonderland - use two ribbons

Tapas time

Last night's dinner was a selection of tapas, inspired by a meal we ate and some dishes we bought on our recent holiday. Where did we go - Barcelona? Madrid? Erm, actually it was Stow-on-the-Wold. A pub close to our cottage served a rather eclectic range of tapas dishes including Scotch eggs (!), while the local cook shop was one of the best I've ever seen and we came home loaded with goodies, including some tapas dishes.

So yesterday I made:

Tortilla

Albondigas

and chorizo with chickpeas

and served them all up in our new tapas dishes

A rather strange meal to celebrate a Cotswolds holiday with - but a very tasty one!

Seeing spots!

At Clear It Out Challenge this week the theme is Going Crazy for Polka Dots which gave me a chance to dive into my stash and come up with this dotty paper which came as part of a magazine freebie several years ago. The large spotty paper came from the same pack, and the primary coloured papers from a more recent freebie. So this was a pretty cheap card to make! I'd been planning to stamp an image to colour in and use as a topper, but I just didn't seem to have anything among my hundreds of stamps that spoke to me today, so I used some of the papers to die-cut a little posy of flowers instead. The Candi flower centres and the punched border reflect the general dotty theme.

Tagging along

I love using Kraft for tags, it reminds me of the traditional brown parcel tags which were the start of it all! So I was delighted to see that the current challenge at The Kraft Journal is Tag, You're It!

For this tag I've cut a large tag and die cut and embossed a smaller one from Kraft card. The large flower too  is die cut and embossed. I covered the lower half of the main tag with reproduction France vintage newsprint and inked the edges, lightly inking the embossed tag so that the zigzags stood out. I used a water based ink for stamping on the wooden tag and wish I hadn't now because the colour has run a bit, although it looks worse on the photo - in real life it just adds to the aged look of the tag. I only had a very white piece of lace of the right size so I dabbed it very lightly with distress ink to age it a little.