You may need your sunglasses

I wanted to cover several challenges with one card - big challenge in itself. So I picked the Just Tracys Crafts Challenge, Creative Inspirations Challenge and Sketch Saturday. Well, the creative inspirations challenge was to just use yellow and white (you can use skin and hair colours as well, otherwise that would be just weird!), this was a perfect opportunity for me to use my new Spectrum Noir pens as there is a yellow set - so armed with only 6 pens I set to with this lovely Molly Blooms freebie stamp from a magazine a while ago. Finding yellow backing papers was a bit more difficult, but with a bit of digging I found a DCWV 12x12 pad, Nana's Kitchen, which a lovely yellowy/orange paper with the hearts and flowers, the paper strip across the middle is from some freebie papers, again from a magazine. I used my lovely EK Success border punch to create the flower strips. The sentiment is a LOTV and everything else is from my stash.

I started this card while my lovely friend Alison was round on Saturday - I always have a great time when Alison is over and manage to get loads of ideas, so hopefully I should be able to create more (fingers crossed).

Anyway, I really ought to go and get ready for work - the start of another week, hey ho...

Happy Birthday WWW

Well, according to the news this morning, it is the birthday of the World Wide Web - this day 20 years ago, a very clever man, called Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir) came up with a very clever way of connecting people/computers to the internet. He didn't charge for this invention and gave it to the world for free (I believe he is doing rather well for himself anyway), and it is thanks to him that I am able to produce this blog for the world to see (or the two or three people who look at it anyway).

This card has taken me all week to produce, and considering the image was already coloured and ready to go, that's not very good. I find that the more cards I make, the easier it gets to produce them, but recently I've not done many and so they are more difficult to compose and hence take longer.

The image is one of my favourite, but very old, Tilda's which I've coloured with my Spectrum Noirs (PMs now gathering dust), the papers are various from my stash (one is from Kate Knight, the others are Papermania ones I think). The flowers I made myself and glittered, the lace I've had for years (never throw anything out), the leaf is a Sizzix Sizlets die and the birthday wishes stamp is Stampin Up one.

Anyway, I'm getting ready for my good friend Alison who is coming over to do some crafting for the afternoon - you might like to visit her blog here - she updates much more often than me & even includes recipes (there's a rather good Baileys Cheesecake on there at the mo).

Hope you like, and see you again soon - Oh, I'm entering this in the Magnolia Inspiration challenge this week, which is for round cards.

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!

Popcorn

I made this card at the weekend using the Sketch Saturday challenge sketch. The image I'd stamped and coloured last week with no idea what I was going to do with it, I love the Sketch Saturday sketches, they always give you something wonderful and it gets the creative juices flowing.

Not only did I use a popcorn stamp, all the papers were from the Popcorn kids CD too - really falling in love with all the Crafters Companion products, but then I did get a whole load of them with some money I was given recently, so kind of have to make use of them to justify having spent so much. Anyway, I have to say I can highly recommend them if you are looking for another crafty purchase, they have just brought out a CD and set of stamps of The Snowman - haven't got these yet, but they have to be on the wish list!

I'm trying to get back into blogging after having a bit of a break (sorry about that, some horrible stuff going on at the moment that I can't talk about on here at the moment). Crafting is my release but sometimes the mojo disappears just when you need it the most, well mine does anyway.

Hope you like the card and I'll try and make it a more regular occurrence!

I Love Humphrey

When Humphrey was released I had just been given some money to spend on whatever I wanted - no contest really, I bought all of the stamps and the CD, and for someone who hates decoupage, I have been having a great time cutting out and layering up these lovely images.

This one with the strawberries is so lovely I just had to have a play, now this was a quick play and probably not one of my best cards, but I have found out that what I like and what everyone else likes is not always the same thing, so I hope you all like it. I've just added some ribbon, used some freebie paper from a My Minds Eye stack from a magazine and used a Strawberry stamp that I just happened to have lying around. The bow on the ribbon I made using my bowmaker on the Ultimate Pro from crafters companion (love that bit of kit, especially with the new boxer and enveloper boards).

Anyway, I wanted to get this card online quickly as it fits in with the Just Tracy's Challenge this month, which is strawberries and cream, and the challenge is about to close (skin of my teeth time - thought it had already closed, note to self, be more organised next month!).