Male Birthday? Nailed it!

Hello, crafting friends!

 

It's Thursday and hopefully you are on the edge of your seats for the latest board at the Tic Tac Toe Challenge! I put this board together and there are some ideas that might help you make a masculine card or two - after all, the guys have birthdays too!

 

What do you think? I chose the left hand column (Slimline card/Tools/Die Cut) to make a card for my brother whose birthday is coming up. He is an amazing inventor and designer and has all the skills to bring his ideas to fruition - he blows my mind!

 

I started my card by masking off the edges of a slimline card base and sponging pale grey ink into the centre. With the mask still in place, I held Funky Fossil's Brick Wall stencil over the sponging and added more browns and greys to the bricks in a random pattern. This makes a subtle background.

 

The die cut tools are from Sweet Dixie. I cut them out of snippets of white card intending to colour them, but I thought the look of the white against the background was actually pretty cool! I played around with the layout of the tools until I was happy, then glued everything down. The sentiment is from Altenew's Birthday Wishes and was coloured with a metallic blue pencil. I added a few lovely shiny enamel dots and the card was done!

 

So, now it's your turn! Do hop over to the Tic Tac Toe Challenge site to check out the amazing inspiration from my team mates. When you're ready, choose a column, row or diagonal from the board, use it to inspire your own creation, then use the Linky Tool at the bottom of the challenge post to share your card with us. We can't wait to see what you make this week!

CHALLENGES

I'm linking this card up at the Snippets Playground which is where I was lucky enough to win this set of tool dies a little while back :) I'm also joining in at Make My Monday where Meg has chosen a Masculine challenge and TGIF where the theme is You're The Man.

AND IN OTHER NEWS

Unfortunately the skills with tools has not passed to all the members of my family and although I would back myself to put up a shelf or some pictures, that's where it ends.

 

source: pinterest

Sending hugs,

Spring in the country

Hello, crafting friends!

 

I've been having such a lovely time playing with the 3D embossing folders I recently acquired! Today's card started life as an experiment and I kept adjusting it and adding to it until finally I think it works!

 

I started by embossing a card base with the Daffodil Delight embossing folder by Altenew, letting the image hang off the edge. I wondered if I could watercolour it and so I coloured the flowers with water and inks, adding a wash of colour on the background and finally some splatters of ink. I let this dry. Of course the main problem was that I had used a standard card base and the image warped badly so I left it under a pile of heavy books and forgot about it :)

 

When I eventually came back to it, I was surprised at how well it had flattened. It looked all wrong though; the top of the card was all empty and not in a good 'white space' kind of way! I came up with the notion of scoring a pair of lines to separate the coloured area with the top of the card but it wasn't a great solution. That's when I suddenly thought of raiding the snippets drawer!

 

I gave the card a country look with a snippet of fabulous gingham paper and added a strip of coral card. I found a sentiment which fit the space perfectly and coloured it with a marker. The final touch was a bow, die cut from another snippet of coral card with an MFT die.

 

Here are the snippets I used.

CHALLENGES

I am linking this card up with Four Seasons where March sees the shift to spring! Happy Little Stampers Birthday is back with an Anything Birthday-themed Goes challenge so I'm playing along there; and This card is also my homework for the Snippets Playground where I hope there's some hot chocolate left because my hands are freezing!

 

AND IN OTHER NEWS

Isn't springtime wonderful? The flowers, the sunshine, the animals becoming frolicsome...

 

Here is a frolicsome dog for example. She is dripping wet because she has just frolicked in the river and now she is about to frolick in the earth. That face is saying "Promise me extra meaty chunks for tea, or I roll!"

Sending hugs,

When is a daisy not a daisy?

Hello crafting pals!

I've been hunting out challenges having become addicted to the fun of thinking out card ideas. These two challenges seemed to go well together - I love that sketch from Freshly Made Sketches and the Addicted To CAS theme looks interesting...

... but the problem is that I don't have a daisy stamp. Or do I? A rummage through my small stash of stamps revealed a retired Stampin' Up Christmas set called Cheerful Tags:

See that little stamp on the bottom right? I snipped away the extra dots and was left with a daisy image! Come and see what I made with it:

The background was made by scribbling on an acrylic block with markers, spritzing with water and stamping. When it was dry, I inked up my new daisy with Versamark and stamped twice onto the background. I heat embossed with white embossing powder (yes! I have acquired a heat tool and some basic embossing powder!) and polished my daisies with a dauber.

I repeated this process on a separate piece of card, snipped the daisy out and added punched yellow centres to all my flowers. The card was finished with a stamped and cut out sentiment from Alte and New's Birthday Wishes. (This close up does reveal a bit of a dodgy ink up - oops! But my new ink pads are on their way *throws hat in the air and cheers*)

Sometimes the more obstacles there are, the more the fun these challenges are!

Daisies are such friendly flowers aren't they. Who remembers making daisy chains as a child?

Sending inky hugs,

Making stamps work harder

Hello crafting pals!

I've been looking more closely at my new Beautiful Branches set from Concord & 9th. It's full of nature images - flowers, leaves, berries, branches... and paper lanterns! Pardon? I hear you say! Yes! One of those leaf stamps works beautifully as the kind of paper lanterns people hang in trees at celebrations :) Come and see:

I used the round leaf (pointy bit up) to make my lanterns. They were inked up with Daffodil Delight, Melon Mambo, Coastal Cabana and Pumpkin Pie markers and I used the thin end of the markers to add horizontal lines to give them that lantern-ish look!

The lanterns are hanging from the gorgeous large branch in the set. I used the tiny leaf to add summer foliage, repeatedly inking up with an Old Olive marker... and I will be glad when my ink pads arrive, let me tell you!

ONE FOR THE BOYS
I thought I might use the lantern look for a more masculine card too. The Rainbow Card Challenge is looking for cards using the colour blue and/or inspired by this graphic.

Here's my take:

I love the lanterns in shades of moody blue! I kept things a bit simpler on this card, opting for a doodled string to hang the lanterns from, sponging in the suggestion of a sky and adding thin strips of card stock to frame the sentiment.

The sentiment, on this card and the previous one, is from the perfect birthday sentiment set - Birthday Wishes by Alte & New. It's a set that says happy birthday in various ways and in a variety of fonts - that's it! Just what I've always wanted!


It's raining in the heart of England today. I thought I'd enjoy the novelty after the searing temperatures of last week but no, all things considered, the rain is a bit wet! Excellent crafting weather though, am I right?!

Thanks for visiting me here today :) I'll be back soon with more to show you from my new stash!