Make a Splash

 

 Hello

  Hope you had a lovely week. The weather is improving at last, which is a bit of a shock as its a Bank Holiday weekend!

They're now doing walk-ins at out local Covid Vaccination centre for the 2nd dose of the vaccine, so we're going to get that done asap instead of waiting till mid June for the appointments we were given.  It will be good to get that all sorted.

This week's Daring Cardmakers' challenge was a tricky one for me,
 but a challenge is a challenge and opting out just because its not an 'area' I'm into would be cowardly!

 it's Jenny here to host this week's challenge and  I wanted to squeeze this theme in before June comes along.  

 You're Mermazing!

May is a month to celebrate mermaids with artists and crafters sharing their projects using the hashtag #MerMay.  I'd love to see your mermaid inspired cards this week, check out the gorgeous makes form my design team colleagues just in case your imagination needs a little spark to get started.  I can't wait to see all your mermazing makes!

 Click here to see this week's design team inspiration  

 

Info

A smooth white square card blank, with a square of the same card coloured with a few aqua shades of Nuvo mousse, edges inked in black then adhered to the base card.

As usual when there's a tricky challenge, I turned to Etsy and hunted out some suitable digital papers.  This one comes from a fabulous collection of fish scale patterns by PixelJungle

Using  an image from the web as a guide I drew the mermaid tail shape and made a template.  I resized the digital paper before printing then used the template to cut the tail. I made a sentiment piece, glued it in place then finished the card with some glitter glue and some dew drops in clear and turquoise.

 

Thank you so much for visiting today, I hope you'll leave a comment, I really appreciate it when you do!

Happy Crafting, and please take care of yourself.

Hot, Steamy and Totally Tropical

 Hello

  Hope you had a lovely week.

We've been having crazy weather all this week.  Bright sunshine, downpours, hailstones, thunder and now its very windy too.  I'm sure my calendar says that its May, but.....

Ots quite nice that this week at the Daring Cardmakers we've put the cold behind us to play with more tropical themes

It's Rizwana here with this weeks new challenge and I've decided to go all tropical. I'm hoping it'll bring some warmer weather.  

 Tropical Paradise.

So for this weeks challenge I would like you to create a tropical card with your favourite tropical animal or bird. Lets see some vibrant colours and some tropical plants too.

 Click here to see this week's design team inspiration  

Info

A smooth white square card blank, with some blue ink shades smooshed around the central area.   

A piece of green Bazzill card, smooshed with various other green shades. A circle aperture was cut from the centre and the green layer adhered over the base card.

The tropical elements were cut using a Spellbinders die set.  I either inked some white card scraps, or used scraps of various bits of green card from my scrap box for the leaves, and inked white card for the flamingo and pineapple.

The large flower was made using a punch and some bright card, plus the flower centre from a Tonic die set

Finally I hunted out the smallest of my flower dies to cut in bright colours, and tucked another of my home-made white on black sentiments in among the foliage.

There's quite a lot of dimension to this card as I added bits of chipboard between the various layers, and the flamingo's wing stands out on a little 'hinge' of card

 

Thank you so much for visiting today, I hope you'll leave a comment, I really appreciate it when you do!

Happy Crafting, and please take care of yourself.

Proud as a Peacock

 

 

 Hello

  Hope you had a lovely week.

Just a quick post today as I'm very late; we were away for the weekend and despite having this nearly ready to post I just didn't get around to finishing it.

Joanne set the Daring Cardmakers' challenge for this week:

Proud as a Peacock

This week, I would like you to take inspiration from the beauty of the peacock 

for your card. You might choose an image of the bird itself, a 

beautiful “eye” feather or simply the gorgeous iridescent

 colours of a peacock’s plumage applied to other images

 - think rich blues, greens, purples and even a little bronze. 

Extra brownie points if you can work in a “proud of you” or “you did it!” theme!

 Click here to see this week's design team inspiration  

 

I decided to go with Peacock colours for my card, and circles to echo the 'eyes' on their feathers

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My base card is a smooth white square card blank covered with a piece of royal blue Bazzill card

Using lots of inks in peacock shades I covered an A4 sheet of smooth white card, then used a foam brush to cover it all over with a thin layer of PVA.  

While this was still tacky I added a few streaks and sprinkles of copper glitter.

Once totally dry I arranged various sized circle dies on the different  coloured areas and ran through the die cutter.  I repeated this until I had enough to arrange on the card.

The words were cut using a lime green card and a couple of die sets.  The numerals were also die cut, but I then coated them with adhesive and dowsed them with more of the copper glitter and allowing to dry before gluing in place

 

Thank you so much for visiting today, I hope you'll leave a comment, I really appreciate it when you do!

Happy Crafting, and please take care of yourself.

May's Elemental Inspiration challenge - more hot foiling

 

  Hello

  Happy Friday, I hope you've had a lovely week, its been very windy here at times and not very warm. The wind plays havoc with my hay fever, so its been a very 'drippy' week for me,

This week over at The Daring Cardmakers Miri has chosen the board for our monthly Elemental Inspiration challenge

Welcome to May!

I picked this picture for our monthly inspiration:

 Choose at least three elements (colour scheme counts as one element) from the picture to kick start your project.

 Click here to see this week's design team inspiration  

Having been quite pleased with my hot-foiling exploits last week, I thought I'd use the same hot foiling plate again - after all it looked to be a perfect match for the various dotty patterned squares on Miri's mood-board.

So, my chosen elements were; Squares, Dotty pattern, Blue flower and the heart

 

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My base card is a smooth white square card blank

The blue paper is a gorgeous heavily textured paper from Tonic Studios.  I glued some onto scrap cardstock before hot-foiling with the Spellbinders dots Glimmer plate then cutting into squares. 

The flower is made using the same paper and one of those fab die sets from Spellbinders which have several dies of varying sizes  . 

The heart is also from a multi-sized pack, cut in Tonic mirror finish card, 

For the flower centre I used a blob of Glossy Accents, added some shiny gems, then filled any gaps with those teeny weeny gold micro beads that manage to go everywhere you don't want them, and just occasionally in the place you do want them.

To pull all the components together I added a tiny sentiment, and a gold thread bow, plus some of the blue and gold jewels around the flower

Thank you so much for visiting today, I hope you'll leave a comment, I really appreciate it when you do!

Happy Crafting, and please take care of yourself.

Anniversary Hearts

Hello!

Today I'm heading back to March for this Anniversary card - yes, I am that far behind on my blogging!

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I started with a smooth white card blank and masked off a wide border using torn Washi tape as I wanted an unstructured square background.

 Using ink and Nuvo mousse I filled in the square quite roughly to get a random colour coverage

The hearts pattern was cut in silver using a Studio Light die, then I used the same die to cut extra hearts in black, silver and pink glitter card.

To finish I added some silver thread and a white on black sentiment created on the pc

 

 That's all for today, thank you so much for visiting, I hope you'll leave a comment, I do love to read them!
 

Happy Crafting, Stay Safe,

Hot Foiling on Vellum

 

 Hello

  Hope you had a lovely week - didn't April go quickly?  It's been so dry that the ground is already cracking around our 'lawn'. Seems mad to get the sprinkler out already, but I think we may have to.  And if saying that isn't tantamount to making it rain ceaselessly for the next two months I don't know what is.  Sorry!

Its Dawn here with this week's Daring Cardmakers challenge.  

There is one product that I am not a big fan of and find it very difficult to use and that is  

VELLUM

So we would like you to use a little or a lot of vellum on your cards this week.

We can't wait to see what you create and it may inspire me to use it more often.

 Click here to see this week's design team inspiration  

I gave my hot-foiling gadget an outing (after so long I had to look up the instructions!) to foil the vellum panel with gold foil - I was very pleased at how well the foiling worked on Vellum.

 

Info

My base card is a smooth white square card blank

The aqua card is pearlescent embossed card from Tonic Studios. 

The Vellum panel is hot-foiled in gold using a Spellbinders dots hot foil stamp, then secured to the card with tape - which is concealed by the aqua panels.

The fancy gold swirl was cut in gold card with an old Memory Box die. it was marred onto another strip of the aqua card, on which I'd used an

 EK Success border punch.

I wound some gold thread around the upper panel and made a couple of tassels to dangle from it.

Next I used a Spellbinders die set to make the flowers, adding a couple of punched circles from the gold card as the centres.  The petals and circles were shaped with a ball tool before adhering in place.

I added a home-made decal sticker sentiment on 

white then gold card to finish

 

So, confession time: 

I spent Wednesday searching for the plates for my old Cuttlebug as you need to roll the hot-foiling gadget through a die-cutting machine and I've never had much luck getting the 'sandwich' right with my eBosser.  Anyway, I failed to find them and was not happy.  

Next morning I found them straight away, set everything up to do the foiling......only to find that the foiling platform itself was all that needed to go through the Cuttlebug and I'd spent an entire day searching for plates I didn't need.

I told you it was a long time since I'd done any foiling didn't i!  What an idiot, though

 

Thank you so much for visiting today, I hope you'll leave a comment, I really appreciate it when you do!

Happy Crafting, and please take care of yourself.

Shop Window

 

 Hello

I'm extra late with my card for the Daring Cardmakers this week. I started last week with a few really bad nights, and when I don't get enough sleep I'm totally useless!  Everything was a struggle last week and I don't think I managed to tick anything off my list.

By Thursday I'd realised that I wasn't going to get my card done in time to post Svenja's fab challenge on Friday morning. 

celebrating books - and their heroes

So, make a book related card: celebrate books themselves, getting lost in a good book or some classic book heroes - and heroines. Or maybe you even want to create a book?

 Click here to see this week's design team inspiration  

 Now, I hate to miss a challenge, and I's had an idea I wanted to use for this one but although I made a start, I couldn't seem to pull it together in time on fact its taken till today to get it finished and in all honesty its not as I envisaged!  Oh well, at least I tried

My little 'shop window' card is inspired by a book I listened to on Audible recently.  I found it one of those books I have to be strict with myself and not just have plugged into my ear all day long - a paper book is sometimes hard to put down, but its harder still with an audio book - with your phone in your pocket and your earphones in your ears, you have your hands free to type, to cook, to take the bins out......

Anyway, I loved this book and all the stories woven through it.  In the book after a traumatic discovery, Nora ends up leaving London and returning to her late grandparents home in Dublin which is filled to the brim with things unique, unusual, bizarre and wonderful collected from all over the world by her Grandfather and all with their stories.  Now though, both grandparents are gone and the house needs to be cleared and sold.  

Nora decides she could set up a shop and use her artistic talents to display and weave wonder and mystery around all these objects, and of course find them new homes.

 Info

Originally it was going to be a shop window on a plain card blank but in the end it became a shaped card instead.

I started by ruling out the lines to make the window pattern then cutting the apertures.  Another piece of card the same size was cut to be the inside of the window.  I coloured both sections appropriately then using some pieces of chipboard between I stuck the layers together.

Next I made the canopy and the windowsill sections.

The really time consuming part was making all the little elements to put into the display - they are a mix of printed elements, die cut bits and bobs and some sticker type things from my stash of things that might come in useful!   I also added in some books to add another link to the challenge theme.

That's it for this time, at lest I got there in the end.  I still like the idea, but with hindsight I'd probably have approached it differently

Thank you so much for visiting today, I hope you'll leave a comment, I really appreciate it when you do!

Happy Crafting, and please take care of yourself.

All because he Loves ....... Maltesers!

 

   hi there

Yes! Another a midweek blog post - are you shocked?

Once again I'm heading back to February for this birthday card made for my Malteser-loving hubby.  

Honestly the things I let myself in for! Especially as I had to make this with him in the same room as we share the study and he's working from home of course!

 I won't even try to explain how I made this as it was very much a "Let's give it a try and see what happens" kind of thing!

It's got a pop-up 'box' inside it, and although its  not a box but a flat image, I cut the lid shape carefully so that it lifts up to reveal a Maltesers image underneath.

 

 

Basically, its a lot of layers and plenty of printed images.

Hopefully the pictures will give you the idea of how it works.

 

 

Materials:

Glossy photo paper for printing images 

 White, Black and Kraft card

Alphabet die set

 

 That's all for today, thank you so much for visiting, I hope you'll leave a comment, You've no idea how happy it makes me when someone leaves a message, and I'd really love to know what you think of this one!!

Happy Crafting, and Stay Safe,

Black & White + 1

 

Hello

 

Hope you had a lovely week, here its been another sunny, but chilly week with a few frosty mornings.

We're  thinking about colour this week for the Daring Cardmakers challenge, which has been set by Miri

Black & White +1
This week Miri challenges you to use just black, white and 

one other colour on your cards!
That extra colour is up to you and you can use it just as you

 like; a little,  a lot, or add different shades of your chosen colour

 Click here to see this week's design team inspiration  

 Info

My card is a smooth white square card blank

I started with some spare white card and coloured it with orange Tonic Nuvo Embellishment mousse - this mousse colours with a lovely sheen that the light catches, rather than being just a flat colour

 Next I used a Spellbinders die set to cut a whole load of gears from some glossy black card saved from some packaging, plus a few from the orange coloured card. 

The BIRTHDAY letters were die cut from the rest of the orange card and glued onto a piece of dotty card already in my bag of Black and White bits

The 'Happy' is from one of my home-made stickers sheets

I have a load of 'boy' cards to make for family birthdays coming up soon, so this was a great challenge to get another one done and dusted - Thanks, Miri 😀

Thank you so much for visiting today, I hope you'll leave a comment, I really appreciate it when you do!

Happy Crafting, and please take care of yourself.

Birthday Stars

  hi there

Yet again its been a while since I managed a midweek blog post, and I'm definitely not expecting it to be a regular thing - I know my limitations, but I will try to be better!

heading back to February for this birthday card made form my cousin's teenage son

Info

I started with a smooth white card blank, 1 square of the same card the same size as the front and another piece to use for extra stars and letters.  Masking the very edges, I coloured the front of the card blank with ink and Nuvo mousse, then die cut the star swirl using a Sizzix die. This piece was adhered onto the card blank so that the colours showed through.

The extra card was coloured in the same way, and I used  a couple of alphabet die sets to cut 'HAPPY' and 'SAM', and an old Tim Holtz sentiment set for the 'birthday' word.  From the remaining card I used various star die sets and punches to cut extra shapes to decorate the card.

 

 

 That's all for today, thank you so much for visiting, I hope you'll leave a comment, You've no idea how happy it makes me when someone leaves a message!

Happy Crafting, and please Stay Safe, especially if you're going out and about now things are opening