Festive baubles

Now that my Christmas cards are starting to reach their destinations I can start to share some of my special cards that were made for my friends in the card making community. Making something for such talented people is always a little daunting. Here is one inspired by using the Chocolate Baroque Indian Textiles stamps which I felt lent themselves to covering baubles.

Once again I am struggling to take decent pics in the dull light this time of year, so I apologise for the poor picture quality.

I die cut the baubles with a Marianne die, using the hanger from an Impression Obsession bauble set as I prefer that one. I then pressed the die cut to the stamp, rather than the other way around to try and get the positioning of the stamp as central as possible to the bauble. I added colour with Distress Ink shading with highlights added with DI markers. The pine branches and sentiment are stamped with the Stampin' Up Ornamental Pine stamps, with the branches embossed in a WOW platinum sparkle powder and the sentiment in silver detail EP. I mounted the baubles with some teal coloured fine velvet ribbon and finished off with a few random gems.

I hope all your Christmas prep is going well. I have thankfully finished my present shopping and most gifts have been wrapped now. It seems like work is going to be very busy for me in the run up to the holiday so I am having to be well organised. I just have one mammoth present project to finish, but I think the finishing line is finally in sight with that one! I have until Sunday when I am doing a present delivery run for completing the task, so please keep your fingers crossed for me. Then I will look forward to getting my decorations up and final finishing touches done for our quiet Christmas at home in the country.

Elaine

A watercoloured birthday!

It is one of my special friend's birthdays today and it is always a challenge to try and make a special card for a talented crafter. This is the card I made.

As with so many of the cards I have been making recently, it is hard to get a good pic. I have been watching a number of videos of people making watercolour backgrounds. This was inspired by some cards made by Jill Foster for Penny Black. I started with a piece of thick smooth watercolour paper and added some different watercolours onto a wet background. I had roughly marked out the areas with tiny pencil marks to guide my planning with the stamp I was to use for the design. When thoroughly dry, I ironed the panel to make sure it was flat to stamp on. I added the Penny Black stamp Woodland Wonder  in black archival ink. The deer from the Penny Black Nature's Friends clear stamp set.

I finished by mounting the panel onto a patterned 6 x6 paper and then onto an 8 x 8 black card base. The Inkylicious sentiment was embossed in a metallic EP and the die cut leaf, cut with a Prima die, was decorated with Onyxite and Amethyst Treasure Gold paste.

I am currently really enjoying my crochet. This is my first ripple blanket made to try and master the pattern. This is a lap blanket which used a mix of yarns I had in my collection. It is not perfect, but I was quite pleased with the result. I am sure everyone who makes blankets has sections where the colour scheme appeals more that another. but overall, I feel happy with it and if I am feeling under the weather, I do find snuggling on the sofa with this blanket makes me feel a little bit brighter. This pic was before I sewed all the ends it.

Whatever you have on your agenda this week, I hope you have a good one. Time for me to get back to writing those Christmas cards!

Elaine

Die cut poinsettias

I wanted to make Christmas cards for our Mums and decided the central focus would be poinsettias. These cards are the result, entirely die cut except the sentiment.

The background panel is cut with a Sue Wilson die using white linen card from the Range. I find this excellent card for die cutting as it almost seems to have a plastic coating that gives a nice clean cut. I backed the filigree panel with a background of dark green for a nice contrast. The poinsettias are a Tim Holtz Bigz die Tattered Poinsettias and I cut these from red velvet mirri card. This is hard to come by so I used it sparingly. The fir leaves are a Dee's Distinctively die that I really like and use a lot. I added a die cut centre from the Memory Box cherry blossom die. I finished off with a heat embossed sentiment in gold using a Stampin Up stamp from the Ornamental Pine set.

My posts are few and far between at the moment. Although I have been making quite a few cards, most cannot be shown here because they are for people that read my blog! These secret squirrel projects will have to wait until they have arrived at their planned destinations!

Autumn continues to give some lovely colour in our garden and a great cluster of toadstools appeared on a log recently.

Hope you are keeping warm and dry!

Elaine

A die cut scene

I recently had to make a card for a two year old. I always struggle with this sort of thing and decided that an idea I saw on Pinterest would be ideal. In the end mine turned out fairly differently though!

 

The dies I used were Taylored Expressions trees, Memory Box branch and deer family, Impression Obsession squirrels, Poppy Dies grass and Joycraft toadstools. Most were cut out of white card and ink shaded. I struggled to find the right colour of backing paper and the one I found had a small design on the edge, so if you knew it was there you could just about see the edge of an upside down bicycle!!! The sentiment is from a Woodcraft clear set and I have to say it looks seriously wonky in this pic, which it didn't do in real life I am sure! 

The autumn weather is really upon us now. We managed a gorgeous walk the other day, I had to snap these lovely pink spindle berries against the blue sky. I had my first porridge of the year today, I can't eat it in the summer, so I know my body is going into winter mode now! I don't relish the cold parts of the year living in a draughty house, but I am glad we can enjoy the cycle of the seasons. Life would be pretty dull without it wouldn't it?

I hope whatever you have planned you are enjoying your weekend.

Elaine

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