Please.....Colour Me Happy

Hello

A quick post because I'm very late with my Daring Cardmakers project for Friday's challenge.  The whole "Winter" thing has finally caught up with me and I'm fighting a fit of the Glooms  - and not being very successful with it either.

You would think Ruth's 'Lots of Colour' challenge would be just the ticket for cheering up a grumpy mood but apparently even that didn't work.

Hello!  It's Ruth here and I'm your hostess for this challenge.  Lets banish the dreary, wet and cold January blues with

lots of colour

I want to see lots of colour in your creations!  The more the better!

To see the Design Team creations, just click HERE 

 Enjoy!

I wasn't really happy with how my card turned out - it looked different in my head! The bit I really enjoyed though, was making the littler coloured 'blobs' I used for die cutting the hearts later!

Info

Scrap card and lots of different inks used to make the coloured scraps for die cutting

I cut the hearts using the smallest of the Tonic Nested Hearts die set

The lettering was made using my hot foiling machine.  I used grey foil on black gloss card, the alphabet set is from CraftStashUK  It took ages because of needing a few repeating letters!  Maybe I should invest in a second set....

I've had the brightly coloured hearts twill ribbon literally for years, so it was good to actually use some!  

To finish I added some matching coloured gems.

As I said, I wasn't especially keen on the finished card, so I used some more hearts to make this Thank You card

 The hearts have small pieces of chipboard behind them to give a bit of dimension,  The heart panel is matted onto black gloss card and I used another scrap of the same card to cut the sentiment - which is one of those on an ancient Cuttlebug plate

The tiny hearts are cut with a border punch and the tiny confetti dots are made using the tiny berries die from a Mistletoe set 

So that's it for this time.

I hope you had a great weekend and that the Winter Blues are

 staying away from your door

Happy Crafting

Stamping and Me.....

Hello

Gosh it's a chilly one today, our outside thermometer was reading -7 at 8am this morning.  A frosty start, but bright and sunny. 

 I'm writing this while waiting for my grocery order to arrive - so if I disappear in the middle, you know why 😆 😂

Stamping and me are definitely not best friends, not downright enemies, but more the "rather not be in the company of"  kind of thing, so imagine how my heart sank when Dawn issued this challenge to the Daring Cardmakers

Its Dawn here with this weeks challenge and its called
Just Stamping
I would like to see just stamping on your cards this weeks.  This means no embellishments, die cuts, papers etc...
For me this was a hard challenge so if you need to add something maybe a sequin or two please make sure that the stamping is the main focus of your card
So get out your stamps and your favourite ink pads and create.

 

Now it would have been easy to throw my hands up and say "No, too hard!" and opt out, but I don't think we've had a challenge I've missed through cowardice yet, so..... out came the box of stamps - yes, I do actually have some, though most have never actually been used.  Some have arrived in various DT boxes and their use avoided wherever possible, some came free with magazines and some I actually bought (shock, horror)

To cut a long, tedious, story of failed backgrounds and stamping attempts in the end I decided to keep it really simple and use this rather lovely text stamp by Spellbinders which nicely fills up most of my card!

I even have one of those MISTI things because occasionally I use sentiment stamps and it helps a lot!  I stamped it on a separate piece of card, it's a big stamp and a bit of a tight fit for the frame of the gadget which made it a bit tricky to do. Next I trimmed it to the right height and adhered to the card front.

The little hearts on the side were done using a Memory Box stencil

I 'used' to have a set of mini alphabet stamps but I'm blowed if I can find them, so instead, I used my GoPress & Foil gadget and hot foil alphabet stamps from CraftStashUK to make the tag - it still qualifies as stamping, right? 
 😉😉

I used black gloss card and silver foil and matted the piece onto red gloss card. adding silver and black twine and narrow red ribbon in a loopy bow.

I probably cheated a little bit with the tag and twine, but oh, it looked so FLAT and dull.  So I had to do it, didn't I?

Sorry Dawn......

So, are YOU up for the challenge this week? We would love you to join in and give it a go!

Thank you for popping by

Happy Crafting

Christmas Round Up 1

Hello

These Mondays come round quickly, don't they? 
 A sunny one here, but jolly cold.

Things got a bit hectic towards the end of 2018 and I didn't get to blog much in the last few weeks.  Now that things have settled down I thought I'd catch up and so a bit of catch-up Christmas card blogging. 

I've mentioned before how I love digital papers, and this time I'm sharing a few of the cards I made using lovely papers from MaryDdigital

Reasons I love digital papers:

You can have them on your pc and ready to use almost immediately

You only need to print as much as you want

You can crop and resize to exactly what you need

You can print on loads of different media

They don't take up any room on your shelves

And you never run out of your favourite designs!

I wanted to use these paper sets to cut some of my favourite little tree and stocking dies.  As the dies are small, I started by simply resizing the papers so they printed out 3 on an A4 sheet.  Then I printed them on textured cardstock.  That way you get a little dimension and a more interesting finish

I made loads of cards with these paper sets - but I forgot to photograph most of them.

Tiny Trees and stockings cut from this gorgeous Blue Glitter Christmas paper set

I made lots of cards on a variation of this theme.....

 and even more variants on this kind of card

They were all made using this Christmas Mix set - these are my favourite Christmas colours ever!

 

Both of these paper sets are fab and they print beautifully.  There are lots of designs in these sets that aren't out-and-out Christmas too - check out all those spots stars and stripes!, so I'll get loads of use from them.  

Check out MaryDdigital on Etsy HERE

Ok, that's it for today, thank you so much for coming by - I hope you'll leave a message before you go 😀

Happy Crafting!

January's Elemental Inspiration Picture

Hello

Hope this Friday finds you well!

The Daring Cardmakers are back today after our Christmas break and for our first challenge we have a beautiful Elemental Inspiration Picture board to work with.

All you need to remember is to select at least three elements from the picture and use them when you make your card - it could be the colour palette or the, the Layout as well as any of the things you can see on the board, whether big or small.

Here's what I've made this week

 I hose the hot drink, the chevron texture and  the gorgeous colour palette from the mood board Sylvia found for us:

Hi everyone, Sylvia here, I am hosting the January Elemental Challenge this week and would like to see you use at least three elements from the picture below. 

As we are beginning a new year a "New Beginnings" theme came to mind - New Year, new job, new baby, new home etc. but you can make whatever you like. 

 I chose the blues and browns, the bear, blue and brown textured fabric and the bow in the laces.

I love this mood board, it has such a warm and comforting feel to it - just right for chilly January!  I love the shabby-chic feel, and all the different textures.  I was tempted by the chair and nearly made a cosy armchair as the focus, then of course it was hard to resist that gorgeous teddy! Or those cute little baby shoes.....

In the end though it was the cup and saucer that I went for.  It looks like hot chocolate in there, which is always tempting, but as I had brand new, never used die sets which have been waiting since before Christmas for an airing, I decided on a coffee theme. 

And, by the way,  spelling 'Bean' that way was intentional - a bit of a pun to go with the little coffee bean die cuts.  I'm not so sure it's obvious enough, but it was the best I could come up with!

Info

White card blank and extra for embossed background piece - the Chevron Embossing folder is by Crafters' Companion.

The embossed panel is matted on to brown scrapbook paper

Cup and Saucer die set (also has the coffee beans), Coffee Pot die set by Spellbinders.  The Spoon is from the Baking Utensils set, also by Spellbinders

Cups and saucers cut from various plain and inked card, some of the cups were

embossed with the same folder as before

I die-cut the cafetière from silver card, then coloured a piece of white card with pale blue for a glass effect, and added the 'coffee' on top of that using brown and cream card.  I cut this piece by hand to fit behind the silver die cut

The stack of cups were glued together, then I made a 'vox' hinge to put between the cups and the card front so that it stands out from the card, but lies flat for posting - this picture shows how it works

The sentiment piece was computer generated, trimmed down and matted onto a piece of the card used for one of the cups. I die-cut some coffee beans for detail and added a coat of Glossy Accents to each.

To finish I die-cut a couple of spoons from silver card and tucked them in the saucers

Click HERE to see what the rest of the team chose from the board to use for their cards this week - and then, we would love you to join in with us!

That's all for this time, thank you so much for popping by

Happy Crafting

Happy Birthday!: Hot Foiling Adventures no 4

Hello

As this is my first post of 2019 I want to wish you a (rather belated) Happy New Year -  I hope all your crafty (and other) dreams come true, that the Bad Fairy of Procrastination stays away from your desk and that your crafty mojo is always there for you.6

I hope all that for me too, of course!

A couple of months ago we started a Handmade Card group on FB, mainly to swap birthday cards, but there will be other swaps along the way, I'm sure!   Anyway, my first card make of the year was a birthday card for Andrea, one of our group and I couldn't resist finally trying out some of the new hot foil plates I bought late last year and hadn't had time to use, plus one of those my OH gave me for Christmas

I must apologise for the photos, I've not got the hang of photographing foiled items and I was in a hurry too!

 The dotty background turned out better than I expected.  The foil is one of the 'pearl' finishes and to be honest I've found them rather disappointing when I've tried them before.  The colours look stunning on the roll but when you actually use them the colour hardly shows up at all, which is a shame.  I can't remember whether I've tried the pearl foils on coloured card so I should add that to my foiling 'to-do' list!

I'd just tried out this same pearl finish turquoise foil with another regular hot foil plate using white card and the image was really poor, so when I tried it with this lovely dotty background plate I didn't really hold out much hope - but as you can see, it worked really well and the tiny coloured dots show up very nicely.

The flower is from a foil and cut set by Spellbinders Glimmer.  It's lovely!  You get four sizes of flower along with the cutting dies for each, and also two foiling plates only for some leaves - I didn't use the leaves here as I wanted to tuck some die cut leaves behind the flower head for this card.

I foiled two of the flowers in shiny turquoise then used the cutting dies to cut the shapes out.  The cutting line wasn't as close to the foiled images as I wanted, so I just hand-cut around to make it closer

The sentiment is another Spellbinders Glimmer plate and I used lots of scrap foil, cut into strips to make a multi-coloured sentiment panel.  I'll tell you more about making these next time, and have more pictures to share too

Hot Foil Plates:

Background; Swiss Dots by Couture Creations 

Flowers; Foil Flowers by Spellbinders Glimmer

Happy Birthday Faux Script also by Spellbinders Glimmer

Hot Foil rolls all Couture Creations

Other: 

White card blank plus extra for foiling elements

Turquoise card for matting

Leaf die Spellbinders

Turquoise satin ribbon to finish

 

That's all for today.  Back soon with more Hot Foil Adventuring and other things from my crafty journey too.

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Happy Crafting