Hello stencils and dies!

Hello, crafting friends!

 

What's the crafting stash that you just couldn't live without? Let me know in the comments section!

 

My first love is stamps and ink, but I also love dies and one of my favourite crafting products in recent years is the stencil, and I seem, ahem, to have built up rather a large collection! I use them for fast cards, subtle backgrounds, showstopping centrepieces and, now that layered stencils are a thing, whole detailed scenes. Today's card uses one of my most used stencils, a gorgeous leafy design from Uniko called Natures Treasure.

 

I used it to create a background pattern over a card front with sage green ink. Then I pulled out the snippets! I covered some of the design with a snippet of textured card in a similar green to the ink. Then I added some flowers from the Greetery and from a magazine freebie that I die cut from small snippets of white card and sponged with distress oxide inks in shades of pink.

 

The sentiment is a favourite (but sadly retired) die from Funky Fossil, cut several times from black snippets (the top one a glossy piece from a magazine!) and stacked for dimension. I finished by added black centres to the smaller flowers with a fineliner, and enamel dots to the three largest.

 

Here's the little pile of snippets I used :)

CHALLENGES

I'm hopping over to the Snippets Playground where I'm hoping there might be a Magnum lolly left in the bottom of Sarn's satchel! I'm also linking up with the Stencil Fun Challenge where there's an optional theme of Shades of Blue. The colour palette for this card actually came from Color Hues, but I am so late posting it that they've moved onto a new and exciting combination now, white and aqua!

 

AND IN OTHER NEWS

The ghastliness of the wettest, rainiest and muddiest winter I can remember has begun to fade from my memory and when we had rain today I didn't immediately take to my bed with the smelling salts! The golden girls seemed to enjoy a refreshing romp in the rain and came back wet but thankfully not muddy.

 

You can see Eva's toe (she's on the right) has been shaved but all the swelling has gone and it doesn't trouble her in the slightest. She is inclined to lick it when she's indoors ( I think that's because it's exposed) but I keep it scrupulously clean and dry and she wears a protective sock. She doesn't seem to mind this but sometimes, when she and her sister play together, Lulu naughtily takes it off her leg! When this happens, Eva immediately carries it to me as if to say: "Mummy, Lulu's taken my sock off again!"

Sending hugs,