Summer is Here!!!

Wow, the weather is lovely, so warm, fab, but I'm still lilly white! maybe it's because I stay inside and craft, but there are always so many lovely stamps and paper to play with.

Anyway, my latest card is a really unusual one for me, IT DOESN'T USE ANY STAMPS!!! I made a card using the freebie paper on the Get Funky Challenge blog, and having made the card I looked at the rest of the paper and it reminded me of the beach huts you see at some seaside resorts, an idea came to me and I just had to run with it. The roof is made with some brown wrapping paper, the clouds are just printer paper - the beach paper was from a Joanna Sheen CD (Jayne Netley Mayhew first CD). The words were created with my Moxie Alphabet for the Quickutz - I had so much fun making this, I even put silver linings on my clouds! and a few little seagulls in the sky.

As I can only enter one card for the challenge, I would like to enter this instead as I really love it and it's such a complete departure from my normal cards. Hope you like....

Black & White Christmas

Yes I know it's properly spring now, but if we don't start the Christmas cards now, by the time we get to December there will be no time, what with the shopping, cooking and decorating needing to be done, so I decided to enter the Die Cut Dreams Christmas Club Challenge this week, which had a colour and sketch challenge - with the colours being Black and White. Boy was this difficult, I so wanted to add some Christmas Red or Green to this, but I resisted!

I also wanted to enter the Crafty Catz challenge this week, which was 'furry friends' and so I dug out this lovely house mouse image - he's one of the smaller one's in the set, but as I wanted to make an A6 card, he fitted perfectly. I did 'colour' him in with grey and black watercolour pencils to give him some additional shading and then just layered him up in line with the Sketch. It was also difficult to find papers without any colour on them, but hey I love a challenge!

I added some texture using a cuttlebug embossing folder and had to add some bling with glitter and gems (the mouse also has some glitter on his hat) - hope that doesn't class as colour?

I'm entering this for the following Challenges:

Die Cut Dreams Christmas Club Challenge

Crafty Catz Weekly Challenge

Just for fun

Well, I don't really know where I will use this card, who it's for or even what occasion but I enjoyed making it and I suppose that's really all that matters when you're making them for fun.

I wanted to enter the second Challenge over on the Just Tracy's Challenge Blog and spent ages thinking about what I could do with the theme 'Rainbow' - I was going to use one of Tracy's lovely new images, but she'd already done that on her example card so I didn't want to be copying something that had already been done. Then I remembered a sheet of paper I've had for probably at least 6 years, which had a rainbow already across it, so I dusted that off and used it as my jumping off point. It struck me that this was very tropical and so I dug out my Kanban birds of paradise set and started to stamp onto the paper. Once they were cut out I needed to think of how to put them together onto a card.

What I decided to do (and this didn't work out quite as planned), was to stamp in versamark using one of the bird on a vine images, directly onto a card blank, then clear emboss - I did this so that the whole card was covered, then I got some chalks on to cotton wool and put a rainbow onto the card - I was hoping that the chalk would not go where the embossing was, but it didn't quite work out like that, but it does still add additional texture to the card. I used the flowers to create corners on the card and then realised that I couldn't just put the bird straight onto the card as it would disappear into the background, so I decided to mat it onto some lovely yellow card I had lurking in a draw - I used my Xcut shape cutter to make the oval, which looks a little like a wonky sun.

Like I said, I have no idea where I will ever use this card, but I love it anyway - think I've found my summer!

Spring has sprung

Well, I think all this lovely weather has gone to my head, the only cards I seem to make at the moment are ones that require sunglasses to even look at they're so bright. I wanted to combine several challenges with this card and my jumping off point was the challenge over at Get Funky, which was Zing into Spring, where they wanted to see the colours Green, Yellow and Lilac, and of course I used the beautiful floral backing paper that they had as a freebie - I still have half an A4 sheet of this left, and I'm sure it will be making another appearance very shortly.

I used the Sketch from Sketch Saturday for my layout and also wanted to include the Crafty Catz challenge this week, which was to use embossing on your card, I used a lovely cuttlebug folder (couldn't tell you which one as I've thrown away the wrapping & it doesn't have the name printed on it - how silly is that?!) and the yellow card is embossed with a freebie embossing folder I got with one of the recent docrafts magazines.

The image on my card was a freebie on the Bugaboo website (in fact it still is until Friday) - I wonder if there's a blog challenge out there for using freebies, think I might win it this week, until I started writing this I didn't realise how many freebies I'd used - stingy or frugal, you judge!

The image and layer were cut with Nesties, and the border punch is one of the new XCut range. The ribbon and flower gems were from my stash.

Anyway, hope you like the card - try wearing sunglasses to view, sure it will be slightly less painful on the eyes!

I'm entering this for the following challenges:

Sketch Saturday

Crafty Catz Weekly Challenge

Get Funky

April Showers

Okay, skin of the teeth time, this card is for a blog challenge, which closes in half an hour!!!

The stamp is from the new range at Just Tracy's and as the challenge was April Showers, this particular image of the ladybird splashing through puddles seemed absolutely perfect - not too sure about the colours, but I wanted it to be bright and summery, and I really feel like it fulfills that.

The papers are from my stash - mostly from the Claire Curd signature range (still working through those 200 sheets!), the flowers were from a seller at the Exeter craft fair last september as were the dewdrops which form the centres of the flowers. My apologies if the photo looks a little dark, it was taken in my dining room, which does not have the best lighting of an evening (even with the light on).

Hope you like, I'm entering this into the Crafty Catz Weekly challenge and I would enter it into the Saturday Sketch Challenge, but I used last week's sketch (did like it though!).

Happy mother's day!

Okay, I know this was yesterday, but I wanted to make sure the recipients had their cards before I posted them online (not that either my mum or mil know about my blog, so hopefully would have been safe - just didn't want to take the chance!).

Both the cards were made using images and papers from the Crafters Companion Flower Fairies CD, my mum bought this for me when it first came out so I thought it was about time I made something for her using it. I tried to make both cards different, but use similar elements, think they turned out okay - they were both really pleased anyway.

I found the instructions for the book card here, sorry they are in a foreign language but there is a translation button at the side - not that you will need it, the pictures are fairly self-explanatory, and if I can follow them anyone can, this is the first time I have tried this method as well and I didn't do a dry run first! (really pleased with myself, can you tell?). The other card is a double easel, I just made it with an A5 card base, which I divided down the middle to the centre fold, then I cut back the two pieces so they were square and then scored across them diagonally from the middle to the outer corners, you then treat each side as a standard easel, but you can use a single central piece on the bottom to act as your stop (in my case I used a copy of the Rose Fairy poem from a Cicely Mary Barker book I happen to have).

Mum's card:



























Mother In Law's card: