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!