Here there be dragons......

Last week my husband retired from work, and to celebrate we went away for a lovely weekend in East Sussex. Everything was perfect - glorious weather, a lovely hotel where we had a beautiful suite with a view over a llama farm (!), wonderful meals and visits to some fascinating and beautiful places.

One of the places we visited was the National Trust property Nymans - you can read about our visit over on Mark's blog, and I'm sure you'll be seeing lots of posts inspired by our trip on here - I've just reached out my Magnolia tree stamp, for example.

Inside the house at Nymans, I was fascinated by a small collection of stained and fused glass work which was displayed beautifully in the rooms each piece had been inspired by. Photography was not allowed, but you can see the artist Elizabeth Lamont's wonderful work on her website. The magical colours and silhouettes reminded me of encaustic paining, and when we got home I couldn't wait to get out my encaustic paining tools and waxes and try to recreate the atmosphere of some of the pieces.

For the two cards in this post, I used the lovely Linda Luckin dragon-serpent silhouette stamp, sadly no longer available, stamped onto glossy card using Stazon ink and then painted over using a hot iron and waxes in clear, turquoise, blue and purple. I finished each dragon with a little glitter in matching colours.

I am sharing these with:

The Male Room - Magic/Fantasy
Craft Rocket - Mythical creatures
Shopping Our Stash - Hidden or tricky element (encaustic painting)
Retro Rubber - Anything Goes (the stamp is around 8 years old)

Black and White at Cardz 4 Guyz

This week it's Amy's turn to choose the theme at Cardz 4 Guyz, and she has chosen Black and White.

I decided to use the New York stamp from the Tim Holtz "Cityscapes" set. Somehow I think of Paris and Rome  as feminine cities, London and Sydney as unisex ones and New York as masculine. No, I don't know why either, maybe it's personal associations although never having been to Rome I don't really have any right to make my mind up about it.

Anyway, we normally associate Tim's designs with everything that's inky and messy and exciting, but I think the Cityscapes stamps have so much going on in them that they lend themselves to a much more CAS treatment, and that's what I've done here. The image is stamped in Onyx Black Versafine and embossed with clear powder, then matted and layered with black. To add extra interest, I used a hammered textured card for the bottom black mat, making it a little larger than the other layers. It doesn't really show on the photo but the extra texture looks good in real life.

I am sharing this with
Craft Your Passion  - Anything Goes
A Bit More Time To Craft - Anything Goes
A Beautiful Mess - Anything Goes
Classic design Team Open Challenge - Anything Goes   

29 Again?

Not much waffle from me today as it's school holidays and I'm on a Granny Day, but right now Lara is engrossed in a grown up colouring book so I've snuck away to the computer.....

I love the shocked look on the face of this cat, stamped with a cat from Katzelkraft's "Les Chats Russes" set. It looks absolutely horrified that its person has just lied about their age. The sentiment is from Rubber Dance stamps. The background is simply a paw print stamped randomly over the card front.

I am sharing this with

C.R.A.F.T. Challenges - Create your own background
Alphabet Challenge - C for Cats
Sweet Stampin - How Old???
Quirky Crafts Challenge - Raining Cats and Dogs 
Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers - J is for Joke

A manatee is for life, not just for Christmas

I am really not sure what this manatee is doing in my digi collection. I must, at some point, have won it or bought it, which means that at some stage in my life I must have thought, "I know exactly what I need - an image of a Christmas manatee. One with bits of Elastoplast on his tail." I'm a bit worried about what I must have been drinking at the time....

Anyway, I think the doleful looking fellow works very well with some of the sentiments on the Dylusions Christmas sentiment sheet. I printed him out and, following the advice of several commenters when I had a problem colouring digis with Promarkers, left him to dry for 24 hours before colouring him. Result - no smudging. Thanks to everyone who suggested it. After colouring, I cut him out and finished his hat trim and beard with Wink of Stella.

The die cut "flowers" are from the Kanban set I sorted out last week. The larger flower was white but I coloured it with a yellow distress ink pad.

I am sharing this with

Allsorts Challenge - April Fool/Humorous
Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers - J is for Joke 

Enter..... Chloé

When I lived in Hong Kong in the 1970s/80s. there was a regular TV advert for a fashion design brand where the voice -over simply said "Enter..... Chloe" and that gets stuck in my head every single time I use the beautiful Chloe Stem die (Memory box?) so I've tried to work it out of my system today by using it FOUR times.

I combined snippets of light and dark purple card and cut the Chloe stem twice with each, and also used an old Cuttlebug die (it came bundled with my first ever Cuttlebug years ago) to cut two squares of each colour.

The Chloe heads are stuck to the squares, slightly overlapping the edges, and the stems trimmed off at the corner. I tried various arrangements of the squares and settled on this, with them radiating out from a central gem. The sentiment is stamped with purple Versacolor and embossed with clear powder.

I am sharing this with

Pixie's Snippets Playground - week 223 - if you are an infrequent visitor to the Playground, or perhaps even have never played, you really MUST go over there this week, not just to drool over the beautiful picks and inspiration, but to join in yourself and play for a really wonderful prize!
Cuttlebugmania - Monochrome
Glitter and Sparkle - use a punch/die  

Birthdays at Twofers

Today is the start of our latest challenge at Twofers, and since Zoe is celebrating a Big Birthday this month, I have chosen the theme Birthdays.

I've used an apple blossom stamp from Clearly Besotted, coloured with Promarkers and layered up with kraft and some papers and ribbons from my stash, a punched border and a ticket stamped with a Studio G mini set. The set includes a selection of sentiments to add to the ticket, and in honour of Zoe's birthday, I have added the words "Senior Discount".

Do head over to Twofers to see what Zoe and Christi have made - and share your birthday cards (as always, using some stamping and no digis) with us for the chance to win a $15 Alleystamps voucher.

I am sharing this with:
Addicted to Stamps and more - Make your Mark
Crafting Musketeers - Spring is in the Air
Crafty Gals Corner - Anything Goes
Cardz 4 Galz - Springtime
Fantasy Stampers - In the Springtime
Classic design Team Challenge- Anything Goes   

CAS Christmas at Sparkles Christmas

It may be April Fool's Day but there's no fooling about here - it's time for the new challenge at Sparkles Christmas, and this month we'd like to see a CAS (Clean and Simple) card. There is a prize this month of a $12 voucher for Di's Digi Stamps

 

I've made a very easy card, inspired by something I saw on Pinterest. I die cut a pine branch (the die is quite an old one and I can't remember the branch) from a snippet of green card and cut the houses by using the bauble die that was the covermount on last Christmas's issue of Die Cutting Essentials and a snippet of red card - I just taped a small piece over the area with the buildings on rather than cutting the whole thing. Then I cut each building away from the rest of the die cut, assembled everything on a card stamped with a Studio G sentiment and hand-drew the strings for the house-baubles to hang from the branch by.

This idea could be adapted to all kinds of other "decorations" - I've seen a very similar thing done with buttons. Snowflakes - perhaps that snowflake confetti that we all hoarded about 15 years ago  - large gems or candy canes would work too. It would only take a few minutes to create a set of "same but different" cards, in fact I think I'll go and do that right now!