Home Sweet Home

I wanted to make a quick new home card for a friend recently. I bought this stamp at Ally Pally and thought it would be great for quick cards. I was wrong though, it was one of those stamps that just did not want to stamp properly!!!

After about 10 attempts I got a mostly decent image, which I set about ink shading with Distress Inks. Once I had done it, it looked a bit dull, so I cut out some elements, including the door and shaded them separately and in some different colours.and stuck them in place and was pleased with the result. I fussy cut the edges and then mounted on a panel I had stamped with the Stampin' Up Hardwood stamp and then rubbed over with white pigment ink to give a softer impression.

Hopefully next time I try with the stamp it won't be such a battle to get a good image.

Hope you have a good weekend.

Elaine x

A secret place

It was a special birthday for my OH earlier this year and this photograph of our garden taken early one March morning inspired the card I made for him.

Our garden and its wildlife is very special to us. We have an acre of wildness where we do our best to let nature stay in charge as much as possible without everything becoming completely overgrown!

I started by making one of my leafy backgrounds in yellows and greens, and added a Memory Box die cut branch. The leaves were all punched out of a sheet I had coloured with Brusho in shades of brown, orange and green, and I inked the edges of each one. The birds, squirrel and rabbit are DoCrafts, Technique Tuesday and Deep Red stamps respectively. I finished my design with some finds from the garden, a bit of bark, some lichen and a mossy twig and some paper daisies. The sentiment is a Jo Capper Sandon Stampotique stamp.

The card went down a treat and still has pride of place on the mantelpiece nearly three months on! That must be a first!

I have been getting back into crochet and have been making a rainbow ripple blanket using yarn that was in my stash. Inspired by Lucy at Attic 24 I ordered the kit for her Coastal ripple blanket. I realised I was struggling a bit to get the ripple right despite numerous efforts, so this was a trial run.

There are a few weird bits where my pattern has gone a little astray, but generally I am quite pleased with what I have managed. I have a sequence of 28 colours repeated twice. I am at the stage of sewing in all the ends now ready to start the edging. It will be just right to keep my cosy on the sofa during winter evenings.

It has been lovely getting into crochet again and I think I should be able to cope with the larger ripple blanket now.

Hope you have some nice plans for a crafty weekend.

Elaine x

Diamond Wedding Anniversary

My MIL went to a diamond wedding anniversary party at the weekend. I offered to make her a card as I don't think I will get many opportunities to make one! Needless to say there is a bling alert with this design!!!

I am sorry the pic is rather dark, it was really hard to get a picture that wasn't all reflections!!!

There were two elements that popped into my mind immediately as my design came together. I knew I wanted to use a quilted embossing folder with diamonds at the intersections and I wanted to use one of the Sue Wilson French dies. These were both on my wish list, so it was a good excuse to bring forward buying them!!! Choosing the size of the gems for the background was a surprising challenge. I had teeny weeny ones, square ones, larger self adhesive ones, various coloured ones - clear, greyish and aurora borealis tinted versions and all sorts out. I had stuck the "normal" size self adhesive ones all over and then when I stepped back the effect was just far too heavy. So those all had to be very carefully removed to ensure no tearing happened. My heart was in my mouth at that point I can tell you. In the end a DoCrafts gem wheel with different sized diamond and gold gems came to the rescue as I could work my way through the various sizes until I found the one that felt like it worked the best. The only problem was that they were not self adhesive and I couldn't risk escaping glue showing so I had to apply glue very carefully with a fine embossing ball tool, pick up the gems with a gem picker and press them down with the pokey tool. Thankfully I love that sort of painstaking work, it is sort of soothing somehow and in the end it was worth the effort as I got the effect I was looking for.

The sentiment was a challenge though because I really wanted it to be embossed rather than computer generated and I knew I wanted to add the little gem over the "I" in diamond. So I started to hunt for an affordable stamp ( I doubt I will use it again) and thanks to the wonders of Google I found exactly what I was looking for at Stamping All Day here. This couldn't have been better for me as I love stamps that mix script and plain fonts so it was just the ticket. In fact I loved them so much I ordered the silver and golden wedding anniversary versions too. I embossed in Stampendous detail silver powder which is my all time favourite silver EP and added a tiny Mei Flower gem.

The card is 8 x 8. I struggled to decide whether to use plain, linen of pearlescent white card and which kind of silver to use too. In the end pearlescent won the day as it looked best embossed and I used quite a dull silver pearl card behind the die cuts.

I added lots of additional die cut embellishments using two colours of silver - pearl and mirri, iridescent pearl vellum for the flowers. The leaf dies are from Dees Distinctively, the swirls and mirri flower heads are Memory Box, the flowers are two sets of Doo Hickey dies. I added some little diamond heart buckles on some white velvet ribbon and various gem centres for the flowers.

Once again the brilliant Cosmic Shimmer Specialist Acrylic Glue came into its own with this card, I cannot sing its praises highly enough, it sets off so quickly and makes this sort of fine positioning so easy. It has now almost completely displaced red line tape in my card making. I buy the bigger bottles now and decided it would be better to keep the bottle upside down. I asked my OH for some help in designing a solution and five minutes later this was the result!

It works perfectly - sometimes the simple solutions are the best!

Goodness it is suddenly very chilly here, We have lit the wood stove for the first time today, it is so wet and windy and generally unpleasant, the glow has made things much more cosy. My slipper boots are out and I am planning an afternoon in the craft room!!!

 

Have a great week!

 

Elaine