Birthday card for a special friend

It was my lovely friend Lesley's birthday last week. This is the card I made for her.

Lesley's favourite colour is green, so I started with this green and pink paper from the Prima Firefly collection. These papers are so lovely, they were in danger of being kept in a box and only taken out and stroked occasionally, but I tool the plunge and put it into the guillotine before I lost my nerve, cutting the backing for an 8 x 8 card!!!

I added more green Distress Ink with a Stamps by Ryn Maidenhair Fern stencil. I added another stencil in the upper right corner. Butterflies are another favourite of Lesley, and these butterflies were cut out with a Tim Holtz die and matching embossing folder. This were coloured with more DIs and highlighted with some Treasure Gold. I felt the bodies needed more focus, so I cut out additional bodies which I shaped with an embossing tool and also added antennae using a Memory Box butterfly die.

The sentiment is stamped using a Carabelle Studio stamp and seems very appropriate. Sadly we get together IRL very rarely, so sending each other special birthday messages is all the more important.  I finished off with a couple of bling swirls.

I wish the photo was better, I just seem to be struggling to get the colours right at the moment.

Thanks for popping by! Your comments are always appreciated.

Elaine

A shaded landscape card

Life has been chucking a lot in the direction of me and my OH recently and two dear friends have helped us get through this time in so many ways - their love and support has been just wonderful. I wanted to make them a card to say thank you, but I had to wait until things settled down a bit to give me time to do some a decent job with my inking!



I love making cards in this way. I find building up the ink shading can be really soothing. This is an 8 x 8 card, one of my favourite sizes. I started by cutting a sun mask out of Eclipse tape with a small nestie die. Once in place, I added lilac ink from  Paris Trunk ink pad - this newish range has some gorgeous colours. All the ink shading is done with Cut 'n' Dry foam. Then I added a landscape inking over a torn piece of paper, first in Tumbled Glass and then in Stormy Sky Distress Ink. I added a little more Stormy Sky around the sun, before removing the mask.I added all the stamped images in black archival ink. The stamps are a mixture from different companies - one of my favourites the Lavinia vine edging the design, grasses, trees and small birds from Inkylicious, large bird stamp from Tim Holtz and the wording was a loose stamp I bought from the Rubbernecker stand at Ally Pally. I added a little more shading on the paler layer of landscape using my paper mask with just tiny areas of shading. Finally I added darker edging shading with Chipped Sapphire Distress Ink on the bottom half and Eggplant Adirondack dye ink on the top half. I finally matted the inked panel on black to give sharper contrast and definition.

We delivered the card yesterday and I am pleased to report they both really loved it and asked me how I had built up the image. I promised I would show them how it's done some time.

We are hoping life is beginning to settle down a little now and I might have a bit more time for crafting again really soon.

Thanks for popping by

Elaine xx