A silver wedding celebration & a White Christmas Challenge!

Well today is a special day for my lovely crafty friend Judith and her OH Terry - their 25th Wedding Anniversary. Here is the card I made for them.

I wanted to keep the colour scheme simple in white and silver, so used texture a fair bit. This is an 8 x 8 stepper card. I backed the card with some Swiss Dot embossed card and the front panel with a silver foiled DP. I added two hearts embossed in silver from the lovely Chocolate Baroque Damask Hearts sets, I think this is a favourite of Judith's. I added some pearly swirls. On the front panel I used a lovely white ribbon which has hearts woven into it, just visible in the picture. The sentiment is from a small clear stamp set from Studio G which I thought was perfect. I finished off with a little charm as I know how much Judith likes them on cards.

On another subject here is a lovely chance for you to win a delcious Christmas treat for yourself, just when many of us have to curb our crafty spending and turn our budgets to Christmas shopping!

How would you like the chance to win a £10 voucher to spend on Chocolate Baroque rubber stamps? Or would you prefer a £20 voucher or how about £50? Glenda over at Chocolate Baroque is sponsoring a little challenge hosted on her blog and the more people that play, the bigger the prize.


Basically, Glenda will add £1.00 to the value of the gift voucher for each person who submits an entry to the challenge via the link form below. So if there are only five entries, the prize will be £5.00, but if there are 35 entries, the prize will be £35.00, with a maximum prize fund of £50.00, and the winner will be drawn at random. So do join in and encourage all your challenge-holic buddies to join in.

The theme is WHITE CHRISTMAS and how you interpret the theme and what kind of artwork you produce is entirely up to you – cards are obviously welcome but feel free to do anything from ATCs to jewellery, canvas to crochet. As a bonus, any pieces which showcase Chocolate Baroque stamps particularly well will be featured in full on the Chocolate Baroque Design Team blog over Christmas with a link back to your blog.

The closing date is DECEMBER 15TH 2011 and the winner will be chosen at random from the list of entries.

Click on the link in my side bar to find out more and to put the link on your own blog.

Feeling festive now?

Have a lovely day - especially Judith and Terry.

Elaine

Two Roads

Here is a card I was pleased to make as a sample for the Chcolate Baroque Design Team using their lovely new Woodland Dreams plate. It was bound to be a hit with me because of the nature theme.

I used a few of my favourite inking techniques on this card to build the image. First I stamped the trees in plum archival ink and then masked it. I cut a hill shaped mask out of scrap paper to match the curve on the trees and then cut two path masks from Eclipse tape. I then added shading with Spiced Marmalade and Vintage Photo Distress Ink in this bottom portion of the card. I then made the sky using my leafy background technique which I show here and here on my blog. I used a mix of Adirondack dye inks- Sunshine Yellow and Watermelon, plus Spiced Marmalade DI, I always use this in preference to the Adirondack orange which I find a little harsh. I finished the inking with edging in Eggplant ink. I love to add layers of ink to an depth to the image.It is so satisfying! The sentiment was stamped in Plum Archival to finish and matted onto black. 

Thanks for popping by - have a greet weekend. 

Elaine x  

Deco lady

I saw the stamped image on this card in the Aug/Sept 2010 issue of Stampers Sampler and felt one of the strongest yearnings I had ever had for a stamp. Recently my crafty friend Judith picked up this and some other Stamp Camp stamps for me at the Happy Stampers show in Port Sunlight. I was a very happy bunny.

I decided to let this striking image speak for itself and keep the overall card layout simple, so just stamped it in black archival, added some shading with Milled Lavender, Victorian Velvet and Dusty Concord Distress Inks. I mounted the panel onto a gorgeous dusky mauve My Mind's Eye paper. The final touch was some gems on the eyelid. I cannot take any credit for this idea for embellishing the image. This touch was added in the original project by Hedy Husarzewski in the magazine article I orginally saw. I have tried to see if Hedy has a blog, but haven't been able to find one so I haven't been able to thank her for her inspiration, but I want to acknowledge it here.

It's nice to have something else to blog again and my OH said he liked the card too, that's a once in a blue moon event! 

Elaine x

Back at last!

Well at last I have something to blog. Just a few Christmas cards assembled using ready made toppers would you believe! I made these cards when I was on holiday in Kent recently. I needed simple elements I could take away with me, without needing the entire contents of my shed and these were the results.

The background papers are from a Marianne A5 pad I bought on my recent visit to the craft show at Ally Pally. I love these papers as they are very Scandinavian feeling. I added various toppers, including from East of India, some buttons, hearts, bakers twine and pretty ribbons.

We had a great time in Kent. We visited some special places, including Great Dixter, a garden I have always wanted to visit.

It was a great time to visit Kent, the Garden of England, as the orchards are bearing their fruit right now and we indulged in plenty of local fruit and delicious local apple and pear juice. We had some juice made from a variety of apple called Red Pippin, it was truly wonderful. We fitted in a visit to the national fruit collection at Brogdale, which includes over 2,200 varieties of apple alone.

We paid a return visit to Canterbury Cathedral.



For me one of my special moments, was a visit to Camber Sands on the coast, the place where I went on my first every proper holiday with a school friend and her family. The day we visited it was quite blowy and the sand was blowing in patterns along the beach. I also collected some of the same sort of shells I had collected when I was about 8.

We went past Prospect Cottage at Dungeness where the late film-maker Derek Jarman made an amazing garden in the windswept shingle.



We had been to Sissighurst before, but very much enoyed our return visit on a perfect day and we managed a day in France stocking up on smoked garlic, Normandy cider and my favourite mint tea bags!



We also went to Whitstable, where I spotted these bikes, completely covered in knitting. I couldn't resist a picture!

It was a really great holiday, and an added bonus for me was managing to visit some great craft shops, The Craft Barn, Pickleberry Papercrafts and The Glitter Pot. Needless to say a little self induglence was in order.

Since being at home, we've had a busy time, getting the harvest in and preparing for what promises to be another cold winter, splitting logs and making jam and chutney and enjoying the last few warm days of autumn. I can already feel the chill in the air, winter draws on methinks!

Thanks for popping by!

Elaine x

Apologies

Sorry, sorry, sorry for being so neglectful on the blogging front. Life is very busy for me lately on so many fronts. Work, harvest time in the fruit and veg patch which means chutney and jam, visitors and decorating. I have taken on a job as a craft demonstrator doing things I can't share here, plus my DT stuff for Chocolate Baroque so projects to share are a little thin on the ground right now. I am also behind on blog commenting and there are some I still don't seem to be able to comment on for some silly reason. Very annoyng when I do try and find the time to comment , so please forgive me.

I have managed to fit in a couple of breaks. I went to spend a couple of days with my special crafty friend Jo in August and we visited Wightwick Manor. This house is a favourite destination of Arts and Crafts fans like myself as it houses a wonderful collection of William Morris artefacts and interior design. It was a perfect place to visit and I would never have got there without Jo and her husband taking me. We also had a day with another of our dear Quartet friends Lesley. Our planned day out in the country was rained off so we managed a day of crafty shopping. I also managed a visit to one of Jo's local craft shop. It was a great trip - thank you Jo!

This weekend I have another treat I am meeting Jo and Judith for a weekend at Ally Pally. As so often is the case with our Quarter get togethers we are only three quarters. It is always bittersweet as we feel an important person is missing and this time it will be Lesley, who knows we will be thinking of her. We love our trips to Ally Pally and we will be staying all weekend to make the most of it. I have to try and not spend too much, but I know I will really enjoy the experience.

Hopefully I will have some real crafty stuff to share here before too long.

Elaine

A butterfly card

This is a card I made recently for a work colleague who was leaving.

This is a green and purple colour combination inspired by the main papers which are gorgeous designs from My Minds Eye. I added a stamped panel using nesties, which are stamped in Imperial Purple Versafine on a Quietfire word stamp with a little Crafty Individuals butterfly added. The die cut leaves use a Crealie die, the butterfly edging is an X-cut border punch cut out of pearl green parchment. The purple butterflies are cut using a Martha Stewart punch. I added olive green ric rac, purple gros grain ribbon, purple paper roses in two different colours and a few green gems. 

Life is pretty hectic right now, so I don't seem to be posting so often at the moment or managing to visit many other blogs either. Hopefully, things will settle down a but soon.

Elaine

Home Sweet Home

This is the name of a gorgeous new set of Chocolate Baroque stamps launched this week and we girls in the Design Team have had the pleasure of playing with these behind the scenes for a while.

Between us we made several cards inspired by the work of Clarice Cliff. Of course everyone made something that reflected their own favourite approaches and styles so we ended up with a real variety of interpretations. My card used masking and quite intense coloured dye inking to make the sun rays and the cut out cottages to make the layers of a stepper card. The full instructions for my card and how to make the mask and folding dimensions are available in the July issue of the Chocolate Baroque Guild newsletter. If you want to know more about the many benefits of joining the Guild you can find out more here.

You can see several of the different projects on both the DT blog and the personal blogs of the Design Team members which are all linked from the DT blog too. Just click on the DT logo in my side bar to get there. There is a really good reason to pop around and visit the blogs of all my teamies, because one random commenter on one of the blogs (both DT and personal) gets the chance to win this scrumptious little set of stamps. Not only do the cottages have a wonderful vintage feel, but the words are a wonderful stylish font too.

For more inspiration, Glenda has made two videos with instructions of how to make a masked sunburst panel and I was really thrilled when she told me my card had inspired her to work on the videos. Pop over to Glenda's own blog here to see the two videos, including how she used lovely Coloursoft pencils to build up colour in her design. 

Thanks for popping by and please visit the other girls to be in with a chance of winning these gorgeous stamps.    

Elaine