I Made a card!!!

Well, it's been a while, but I've finally made a card!!! I've been playing with lots of things, not least of which is my wonderful new set of Spectrum Noir pens

(they are soooo gorgeous, I may just have to rob a bank so that I can get the other 96!).

Anyway, today is the last day to enter the Crafters Companion Challenge & as usual I'm cutting it fine, but hey, I work well under pressure. The image is a Greetings Farm stamp - Skater Ian, and he's one of the few 'boys' images I have (funnily enough I bought him with my daughter in mind - she's a huge skating fan - complete with the A&E record to prove it!). I've coloured him with my Speccy's, as they are now affectionately known - you really must get some, they are truly fab, very reasonably priced AND REFILLABLE!!!! The papers are from my stash ass are the candy dots. I used the sketch from Katy's Sketch Challenge over on Docrafts for the layout, and I think it works as I seem to prefer very clean lines on mens cards - well, they don't really want loads of flowers and flourishes do they?

Hope you like it & I'll try and be back a bit more often as I'm going to try and regularly enter challenges (she says hopefully - until life gets in the way).

It's never too early to start thinking about Christmas!

Now I know loads of people are saying that it's too early to think about Christmas cards, but I say - it's never too early, there's so much to do by the time December comes around, any head start I can get is much appreciated.

The inspiration for this card came from Katy's challenge over on Docrafts, and it gave me the chance to get out my lovely bauble stamps from Waltzingmouse which are designed to sit inside the bauble nesties, together with the lovely sentiment, which also came from Waltzingmouse and the snowflake background stamp, which came from Papermania. The background was created by stamping the snowflake background several times in versamark and then covering with perfect pearls so the background has a lovely shimmery finish. The sentiment was also stamped with versamark, but this time covered with detail white embossing powder. I cut out the bauble twice and used a silver glitter embossing powder to give that lovely Christmasy finish - I put silver thread between the two baubles so that no matter how you look at it you get that beautiful sparkly look.

Anyway, hope you like it...

More Crafters Companion

This is becoming a bit of a theme with me (I've made even more than I've posted with Crafters Companion stuff, but time keeps getting away from me!), I do seem to have fallen in love with the style of their stamps and CD's - the quality is amazing and inspiration seems to come very easily when using them.

This card was made for a friend to give to her daughter for her 5th birthday, sorry for stating the obvious since the card says 'Star 5' on it (Doh!). I used one of the Popcorn kids stamps for the front and the humphrey conga elephants on the inside - seemed appropriate to have them partying on the inside. The stars are a combination of a Sizzix paddle punch and a tiny Xcut star punch - they did mean cutting into my two favourite sheets of paper, but hey, it's no good unless you use it, is it? (did still bring a tear to my eyes though!).

The card is 5x5 when closed and I made a box envelope to store it using my Envelobox maker for the Ultimate Pro, this is an amazing bit of kit, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Anyway, hope you like it - really must try and post more often, but in between working, cooking, cleaning etc, etc, I'm surprised I even manage to make cards at all!