Something Stencilled, Sponsored!

This week over at The Daring Cardmakers we have a pre-Christmas treat for one of you - a beautiful crafty gift you could win, thanks to our lovely sponsor,
 Bubbly Funk

who specialise in selling stencils and stencilling paraphenalia

The Challenge is simple:

Something Stencilled
Just use a stencil in some way on your card. It's not a problem if you don't have any ready made stencils - you could use a die cut, or the die itself, a doily, or anything else that you can paint, ink or trace through.

I used one of my favourite stencils to make the main part of this card (Winter Tiny Snowflakes), and just a little section of another gorgeous stencil (Flurries) along the lower edge

I used:

Stencils;  Tiny Snowflakes (Memory Box). 'Flurries' (Echo Park)

Dies; Trees (Sue Wilson), Green parts of Poinsettia (DieNamics),

 Sentiment tag (Creative Dies)

Various star punches

Red Poinsettia petals cut on Silhouette (own template)

Black card blank, red card, green card, white card, glitter card (red, silver)

Diamond and Silver Sparkle Medium (Imagination Crafts) 

Silver cord, Flower stamens (painted yellow), Red Stickles,

 Wired Berries; red, glittery and silver, Red glitter card "twirls"

 Caroline, of Bubbly Funk has put together this special prize pack;

3 stencils, chipboard mini albums, keychains,
 crystal flowers, ink and ribbon

As always with our prizes, everyone who joins in has an equal chance of winning as we use the links list and a random number picker to select the winner.

I used this same stencil on a couple of the cards I added to Bubbly Funk's own blog the other week, so thought I'd show those cards here today too. It makes such a beautiful background for all my Christmassy dies!

Going back to The Daring Cardmakers, though, this week the DT were each sent a stencil of their choice from Bubbly Funk to use on our cards, so please visit the blog to see how we've used those we selected.  We'd love you to join in this week!
Thanks for popping by

 

 

 

Crackers

This week on the Daring Cardmakers, we're  taking a small break from our cardmaking - it's all down to  Dawn's challenge:

   Anything But A Card! 

This could be a gift box, a hanging decoration, scrapbook page,
an altered item etc..In fact, anything you've made this week, except a card

I do love making boxes, books and other non-card projects, but its been a few weeks since I had the time, so Dawn's challenge made me very happy!
It was a brilliant excuse to get the fab DoCrafts cracker die out again, and ake this

After cutting the die, and an extra piece for the central panel, I stencilled some snowflakes in silver glitter paste before making up the cracker shape.  This beautiful stencil has just arrived in my eager mitts and will be added to the Bubbly Funk Shop very soon!

Info:

Red Bazzill card

Silver paper

Glitter card; Red, Silver, Black 

Glitter Paste (Sparkle Medium from Creative Imaginations)

Snowflake stencil available soon from the Bubbly Funk Shop

Silver cord and ribbon. Clear gem

Dies:

Cracker an A4 die from DoCrafts

Large Snowflake; cut in black at the back of the embellishment (Apple Blossom deis)

Silver snowflake in embellishment (Spellbinders)

Baubles (Crafters Companion)

Punches:

Poinsettia border die (DoCrafts) 

Snowflake on baubles (EK Success) 

Smallest snowflake in embellishment (Martha Stewart)

The red "petals" on the embellishment are made from the waste bits after cutting the cracker - it seemed a shame to throw them away so I glued the ends of 8 onto a small circle, made 2 of them and used them in my snowflake cluster embellishment.

Well, we may be called the Daring Cardmakers, but we don't just make cards,  and this week's challenge has give us the opportunity to have some fun abnd share some of the other things we make, I hope you'll head over to the blog and see all the goodies!

Thanks for visiting

Huggable, and Cuddlesome

Nat is our hostess over at The Daring Cardmakers this week and she's asking for a whole load of hugs!

:

"This week I'm challenging you to feature some
~ ~ ~ ~ Cuddly Creatures ~ ~ ~ ~
on your cards and bonus glittery stars if you include hugs in the image or greeting.

There have been some really great stamp releases of late featuring huggable pandas, bunnies and bears, so if you have any of those in your stash waiting to be used, now's your chance!

Your cuddly creatures don't necessarily have to be your regular cute animals, they could be a bit more unusual...

I was a bit stuck (nothing new there then) until  I remembered some lovely templates from Leo's old range of "Crafty Templates" - now morphed into the fab "Quirky Kits", but with the various templates saved safely on my pc and ready to pop up like this cute polar bear and help me out from time to time :)  

I've downloaded some paper sets from Pink Petticoat recently, and one of them features cute polar bear images  - how lucky was that then?

Here's my card

The various layers for the Polar Bear and his hat are cut on the Cameo

Paws and banners are hand-cut

The Holly is from a Holly Sprigs die (Creative Expressions)

All paper designs, plus the sentiment are by Pink Petticoat and printed onto Bazzill white card

Embellishments: Red Stickles glitter glue, tiny black gems

Now I thought I'd add a quick catch up with my makes for Bubbly Funk this week.

I used the fab  Hero Arts 'Circle Trees' stencil and had such a ball playing around with it trying it out with different inks, paints and gels

This is the stencil in used in pretty basic form.  I stencilled first in a dark green. and then with gold 'Sparkle Medium'.  I thought the dark green would give more depth, but in reality it was an unnecessary step - what a speedy, but striking card this makes, you can't get much simpler than this one!

I was a bit peeved when I realised the inks had bled a little under the stencil while I trying to make a pastel version with Versacraft and other inks
(an amateur's ineptitude, I expect). Then I decided that I'd try to work with the mistake and do something with the image anyway. 
 I replaced the stencil to trace the circles with a black gel pen, then glued on a few  sparkly stars to add some bling.

 
As  I tend to use 12x12cm cards at Christmas the stencil is a bit big so I had a bit of an experiment with version 3 and masked off the lower section before stencilling.  I only stencilled whole circles, so had to go back and fill in extras to get the right shape, but this worked ok and I was able to make a batch of similar cards quite quickly



This last one is probably my favourite.

I stencilled directly onto the dark green card blank using acrylic paints (various greens and reds), gold stencil paint, and the glittery gold, red and green 'Sparkle Medium'.  I didn't really wait for things to dry, just built it up and let it all merge together.  I really love the colourful, grungy effect this made.  Might be fun to try with a cooler colour palette too. 
More info HERE

Thanks for Popping by today, I hope you'll check out all the other cards over on The Daring Cardmakers Blog - there are so many hugs to be had over there today!  It would be fab if you'd add your Cuddly Creatures and send some hugs around the world!
 

1-2-3 craft....

Last week I completely forgot to add on here the first of my cards using new November LO on the Sketch File, so I'm doubling up today.

This is the one that is on today's Update post.  There's something not quite right with it to my eye it looks a bit off balance, and I can't work out how to fix it - maybe the gold panel is too wide?

 I like the idea so may persevere with this one - I like the partial snowflakes on the squares, but the background I'm not so sure of

 

 For last week's card I used banner shapes for the two panels and added Mosaic punch baubles on silver cord for the 3 focus pieces

Here are a couple of views of the sketch, you can find more ideas HERE

Thanks for visiting, please leave a message ;)

November Elemental

When I first saw Gez's November Elemental Inspiration Picture I thought "Great, loads of things to choose from, there'll be no trouble picking my minimum of three."
As so often happens though, actually getting something made wasn't as easy as I'd thought. Not really helped by having the desperate urge to incorporate using the Blackboard paint that had recently arrived in a DT box..... Surely it was meant to be....

I started by using some masking tape around the edges of the card then roughly applying the chalkboard paint with an old, dried up baby wipe.  I rather like the way the paint bled out a bit in some places, and how the coverage is rather uneven,  looking a little like something has been rubbed off leaving a bit of chalk dust smooched around.
A piece of scrap card was also painted with the blackboard paint ahead of making the banner (element 2; the circles pattern of the paint box near the red box).  I scribbled with brightly coloured Gelatos on a piece of white card for the lower section of the banner
My third main element is the heart.  I wanted to tie in the colours in the "paintbox" banner so decided to die-cut several small hearts in bright colours to use as a border.  I just inked a few small pieces of card for this, and as there was enough left over I punched some tiny squares to make the short border stripes.  
Drawing the flowers with a white Posca pen echoed the hand drawn elements 

Here is November's Elemental Inspiration picture;

Wouldn't you have loved a room like that when you were small?

Tools and Materials:

White card blank, plus extra of the same card

Blackboard Paint 

White Posca pen

Gelatos

Inks - various

Dies: Contempo Border, HAPPY word set (both Memory Box),  

Small heart is from an old MFT Die'Namics set

Tiny Square punch (Xcut)

Sentiment - self made using decal paper from Crafty Computer Paper

That's it, I hope you'll visit the Daring Cardmakers blog to see how the rest of the team have used this picture - it really is worth seeing how the same picture takes different designers off in different directions.  I never fail to be inspired by the results every time we do one of these challenges. 

Thanks for visiting, have a great weekend