Opalescence

It's DCM day again but I'll get to that in a minute - first a little bit about what I've been up to lately!

We've been away for a little holiday - we had a fabulous week  in N. Yorkshire staying at the English Heritage holiday cottage at Mount Grace Priory - what a special place to stay!  Once the Manor House and Priory is closed to visitors you get the grounds to yourself and even the sounds from the A19 at the bottom of the hill can't take away the peace and tranquillity of your surroundings.  The photos will be along shortly - be warned!

It was a treat to stay in the area as usually we're just passing through on our way to Northumberland and don't really have the time to stray far from the A1 or A19.  We've visited Mount Grace a couple of times and knew it would be a wonderful place to stay, but we took the chance to revisit Rievaulx and Byland Abbeys during our stay and also the terraces and temples above Rievaulx, Helmsley and Middleham Castles.  We saw lots of the countryside, driving over the moors via all the little "white" roads that have me panicking about their narrowness - and their steepness (I'm a wuss) One day we came across a "Tractor Run" in aid of Marie Curie - 170 old tractors driving around those weeny lanes - there were tractors around every bend, much reversing into stopping places and squeezing our car into the hedges to let them past!  Good job we weren't in a hurry to get anywhere!

Anyway, enough of that for now - I promise to get some photos ready to show soon.

As we finished off our holiday with an extra few days in Northumberland there wasn't much of September left when I got  back to my crafting - it was a bit of a shock to realise that I had a few things to do, and not much time to get them ready for the start of the new month!

• The new challenge on Get Funky! was announced this morning but I'll save my project till tomorrow - if you want a pee before then click HERE to find out all about this month's challenge and see what the Funky Hand Gang have been making.
• The October LO on The Sketch File blog will be appearing over the weekend so keep an eye out for that too!

But today is DCM day and we're returning to our 2010 series of using the Monthly Birthstones for our inspiration.

October's birthstone is the Opal - one of my favourite stones but it's supposed to be unlucky if it's not your birthstone - not that it stopped me buying a pretty Opal triplet ring when we were in Australia - which is where most opals come from.  We're used to seeing the pale and pretty shades of opals, but mine is very deep bluey colours - I'll try and remember to do a photo later and add it.

Anyway, I've gone with the pale pinky-bluey-greeny shades for my card this week and used opalescent cards and papers for this one - I apologise for the rubbish photo - the Glossy Accents didn't dry in time to do the photo when the sun was shining - and then one of the bulbs for the mini photo studio blew and I had to use some that we keep as spares as they are rubbish!

I tried to emulate the colours and sparkle in an opal by using glitters and kaleidoscope embossing powders for the flower centre, which was then covered with Glossy Accents.

The cream opalescent paper used for the upper fancy border was also used to make the flower.  I heat embossed some swirly designs on the petals using the kaleidoscope powder but tbh I don't think it really added anything!  The edges of the petals were lightly inked in aqua and pink then crumpled up to get some movement and shape.

I used:

Opalescent card (pink, cream, aqua) and paper (cream)

Glitter (pink, white, aqua), Embossing powder (kaleidoscope), Glossy Accents

Inks, Ribbon, MS border punch, home-made rub-ons

October is our anniversary month - we're celebrating a whole FOUR years of the Daring Cardmakers! It would be wonderful if you'd join in with us this week - after all the opal is our very own "birthstone"!

You can see the cards the team have been making HERE

I'll be back soon with more stuff to share - thanks for visiting today, please leave a message to say you called ;-)