Happy Birthday CD Sundays!

Today is the 6th birthday of the blog The CD Sundays Challenge, where every make needs to include something from a craft CD.

I've not been playing for the whole 6 years - this blog has only just turned 4, and it took me a while to pluck up courage to start joining in challenges. In fact I was a "lurker" at CD Sundays for some time before joining in, because although I owned a few craft CDs I was never really sure what to do with them, I couldn't imagine anything beyond printing a background paper and topper and setting one on top of the other.

However by looking at the DT inspiration and entries to the challenge, I soon realised what valuable and versatile crafting tools CDs could be, and thanks to what I have learned through the challenge,  since joining it I've been privileged to spend a year on the La Pashe design team and 3 months as Guest Designer at CD Sundays itself. And my ever-growing store of CDs now gets regularly used, and not just for entering this particular challenge.

For the birthday celebrations, we have been asked to backlink to our favourite of all the cards we have made for the challenge. I spent most of yesterday re-reading my old blog posts, and ended up with a shortlist of a dozen posts, but one of them stood out as by far my favourite (and not just because I was awarded a top 3spot for it!)



You can find the original post here.

Why is it my favourite? Well, partly because I tend to struggle a lot with making anything pretty, but to me this is one of the prettiest things I've ever made, but mostly because it - and the whole post - reminds me of an amazing workshop I did with Debbie Moore at the Make It Show in Farnborough, where she showed us how to make all kinds of beautiful fancy fold cards with no measuring or calculations. It was a real inspiration and whenever I'm running out of ideas for making cards more interesting, I refer back to this post and it reminds me not only of the folds I used in it but of all the others she showed us.

A very happy birthday to CD Sundays and I hope there will be many more of them!

Christmas pine cone

I used a pre-cut aperture card for this card, then realised once I'd covered the front with paper I was going to have to cut the aperture all over again so I might as well have started out with a plain card..... doh!

The conifer sprig is stamped on a circle of white card slightly larger than the aperture and positioned after making the card front, to make sure everything matches. And I resurrected a few peel offs to decorate it because I am predicting that this year will see a big peel-off revival. I've been seeing some great new ideas in the peel off ranges, and that is bound to rekindle interest in the more traditional designs. You heard it here first!

I am sharing this with 52 Christmas Card Throwdown where the theme is Christmas Foliage  and Uniko Studio where it is Metallics

It ain't necessarily so.....

Let me set the scene. Whenever anybody is particularly unlucky, Mark refers to them as a "Jonah". Well, I suppose getting swallowed by a whale is a particularly unlucky thing to happen to somebody, isn't it.

And when I printed out this glum-looking Grumps image from the  CD The Best of La Pashe 2014 I immediately thought he looked like a proper Jonah.  At the time, the rain was torrential and it was easy (well, easy for MY imagination) to imagine our rivers getting so swollen that an unsuspecting river angler might find himself swallowed up by a whale that had swum off course.

So I raided my snippets box for all kinds of blued and greys and die cut some waves and a whale, using dies from the X-cut Build a Scene Pirate Ship set that I won a while back in the Playground. I livened up the die cuts a bit by sponging on inks in greys, blues and white. I finished the image with Wink of Stella which as usual you can't see, to make the rain glisten.

I am sharing this with

Cuttlebugmania - Rain
Suzy Bee's Blooming Challenge - Make it Male
Pixie's Snippets Playground - week 225 (all the layering and die cutting was done with snippets)

Oh, and the title? It comes from the way my brain tends to play "musical word association"  - every time I see the world "whale" I start to hum the bit about Jonah living in a whale, from the song "It ain't necessarily so"  from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.

Take the Train

For this card I have used an image, word panels and ephemera all cut from a sheet printed out from Debbie Moore's CD "Shabby Chic- Vintage Discovery". The backing paper is a sort of tweed print that I found in my stash, and unusually for me, I have absolutely NO idea where it came from or how long I have had it! The cogs are cut from a piece of card that was part of the QVC "Elegant Vintage" kit many, many years ago. I cut everything out and then played around with it, collage style, until I had an arrangement I was happy with.

I am sharing this with

Ooh La La Creations - Words, Words, Words
Suzy Bee's Blooming Challenge - Make it Male

Body Parts at Twofers

Yes, you read that right - body parts! It's our latest theme at Twofers  - and we don't mean just human body parts, you could use part of an animal or vehicle body in your work.

I've chosen to do an elephant's bottom! I'm not sure how or why I have a stamp of an elephant's bottom, but here it is, complete with a tiny bird (an egret? I've only seen them on water buffalo but it looks like one) hitching a ride on his back.

I stamped, coloured and fussy cut the elephant, then my original plan was to make a watercoloured savannah scene and have him heading off into the sunset, but I was having a "nothing works" day and abandoned the watercolour in favour of a far more CAS design. Now he is heading off into a very stylised sunset created by inking the Gentleman Crafter's brushed circle stamp with yellow ink and then dabbing an orange inkpad around the edges of the stamp. The sentiment is one row of a stamped sentiment from a Dylusions set.

Let's see what ideas for body pars YOU come up with - pop over to Twofers to share them with us, remember that as usual we want  to see some stamping and no digis.

I am sharing this with
Craft Your Passion - Anything Goes
A Bit More Time To Craft - Anything Goes
Less is More - Use three stamps (elephant, brushed circle and sentiment)

Chloe again

One of my all-time favourite dies is the Memory Box Chloe Stem die, and I know from many of your comments that I'm not alone in that.

Today I've combined it with my favourite colours of cream, terracotta and light olive to give a card with an autumnal feel. I cut it from the terracotta card fist, then embossed the remaining card with a Crafters Companion embossing folder and sanded the surface lightly. before matting onto the olive card, I cut the olive Chloe stem, lining it up carefully to make sure the gap wouldn't show around the edge or within the die cut negative. The cream Chloe stem is cut from the remainder of the sheet of cream card I used to  make the card blank. The sentiment is a Tattered Lace die and I was lucky enough to find two terracotta coloured heart gems in my stash.

I am sharing this with:

Mod Squad - Make  a Negative a Positive
Crafty Gals Corner - Die Cuts or Punches
Craft Rocket - Favourite Colour Combo
Cardz 4 Galz - Use an Embossing Folder  

Rainbow City

 

Part of my decluttering, which is still ongoing, is to go through my pile of old craft magazines and see if I kept them because of any projects, layouts or colour schemes that I wanted to try, then actually TRY them before discarding the magazine. In one of them I found a project that used Tim Holtz's Cityscapes stamps, randomly inked with distress inks, spritzed with water and then stamped on watercolour paper. I didn't try it at the time, as I had no watercolour paper, but I've refreshed my supply now so gave it a go - here is the result. So far I've only used the Cityscapes stamps with black ink - the multi-coloured ones give the image a whole new, vibrant character.

I'm sharing this with C.R.A.F.T. Challenge - Clean and Simple

When I'd made the card, I thought what a great rainbow effect the random colours had made, and that made me think about the Over the Rainbow challenge at Naughty or Nice - could I stamp the image in "proper" rainbow colours, in the right order, and drop in for another entry into the challenge? Well, I didn't have any violet DI, and when I tried blending to get it, I got a pretty good indigo, so to make up for the lack of violet ink, I made a background for my stamping by die cutting a London skyline scene from violet card. So here we have it, London, the Rainbow City. I have lots of gay friends living in London and I'm sure they'd agree (especially as I don't have a San Francisco stamp!).