Woofers and twofers

Hello, crafting friends!

I am so delighted to  be guest designing along with Donna at The Twofer challenge this month, but it's a bittersweet kind of delighted because this will be the final one. Darnell has made the difficult decision to close the challenge. You can read her message about it on the challenge website and I know you will want to leave her some love.

So, here is the final Twofer challenge: Make two different designs of card, for two different occasions, and use the same stamp, stencil or die on each featuring a cat or dog.

I decided to bring out my favourite Holiday Huskies stamp set by Clearly Besotted, choosing as my stamp the little dog that was doing a nice Sit. I love this set because all the dogs remind me of Eva, my adorable Golden girl!

CARD ONE

I made a clean and simple Christmas card for my first card.

The edges of the card base were masked off with sticky notes and I positioned Funky Fossil's Fancy Trellis stencil over the centre and brushed blue ink through it. After removing the sticky notes, the dog was stamped, coloured and fussy cut, then glued to the stencilled area.

To finish, I stamped one of the sentiments from Holiday Huskies in festive red and added a Santa hat from Mama Elephant's Gingerbread Cookies, which fit my little pup perfectly!

CARD TWO

For this friendship card, I allowed my little pup to have a play date with a pal and they bounced off into the countryside for a lovely romp! 

I used Clearly Besotted's Tear Away stencil for the cloudy sky and am really pleased with the result. The trees were fun to make too. I used the leafless, wintery trees from Stampin' Up's White Christmas, stamped them in light brown ink then scribbled tree shapes over them with alcohol markers. These were cut out and glued to my scene and I added some die cut grass using Lawn Fawn's Grassy Border die.

Here's the pup - looking exactly like Eva does! People are always stopping me in the street and asking "Is your dog SMILING?!"

Here's her pal - looking like Eva does when she's just smelt a exciting smell and needs to investigate! Both dogs were stamped, coloured and fussy cut and popped up on dimensional pads. I thought this sentiment from Stampin' Up's Water Front was perfect for this card :)

BOTH CARDS TOGETHER

So now it's your turn! I know all the talented Twofer Team designers will be pulling out all the stops to inspire you as always, so do pop over to the Twofer Challenge website to check out their samples. You will find the Linky Tool there too so that you can join in the fun with your own creation.

CHALLENGES

CARD ONE - I'm entering this card at Stamping Sensations where the challenge is to Celebrate Any Occasion; also Happy Little Stampers Stencil challenge where Anything Goes; and CAS on Sunday where the theme is Favourite Stamps.

CARD TWO - I'm linking up with Chocolate Baroque where the challenge is to use our Favourite Stamps; also As You See It where LeAnne's challenge is to complete the phrase My Favourite Animal Is... and I think you can see that mine is Dog!!

AND IN OTHER NEWS

I thought you'd like to see a photo of my own little doggy pal, Eva, the Golden Retriever...

Oops! She's an upside down pudding! This is a favourite position of hers and I definitely think that Clearly Besotted missed a trick when they forgot to include an upside down pup in the Holiday Huskies set. Perhaps there could be a new set called This Is How I Roll!

Sending hugs,

Happiness is...

Hello, crafting friends!

Sometimes a card challenge really sends you off down a rabbit hole! I am just emerging from the one Time Out has sent me down with its challenge of 'Create a card inspired by the word 'You'. It was very therapeutic, got me thinking and I definitely recommend you try it!

The first thing I did was write down the things that are important to me. I decided on:

1. Family and home 

2. Friends and activities that bring me joy

And here we are! The background represents nature in my preferred summer form - blue skies, flower-studded grass, trees, birds. I'm so grateful that I'm able to go out walking in nature every day and in the summer I spend time in my tiny garden. The strip of striped paper is to represent colour, which I love. In the centre I've placed the house, decorated with a heart, which represents my beloved family and home. Around that are my other passions - arts and crafts, books and dogs. The dog in the foreground is Eva (only with pointy ears!) and although of course she is part of my family, she is here representing all the other dogs I love too, the ones I walk and look after. All these activities have brought me the loveliest friends - including lots of crafters here in blogland!

The strips of designer papers are from Stampin' Up and the easel is cut from a snippet of SU paper. The house and tree are from retired SU sets (From Our House to Yours and Sheltering Tree respectively.) The sentiment is from Waffle Flower's Books and Coffee, as is the pile of books, coloured with alcohol markers and fussy cut. The adorable dog is from Clearly Besotted's Holiday Huskies.

I arranged my images collage-style and once they were glued down, trimmed the panel with a stitched rectangle die from Heffy Doodle before adding it to the card base. I hope you like this card and are inspired to join in with a card that illustrates you. I'm going to enjoy finding out a little bit more about my crafting pals!

EDITED TO ADD AN AWARD

I was thrilled to see that this card was the Emerald Winner at Color My Heart Color Dare and  that it got an honourable mention at Time Out!

CHALLENGES

I'm linking up this card with Time Out Challenges with its theme of You; I used the colours from Color My Heart Color Dare challenge 427 (Smoothie, Glacier and Sage with extra Canary.)

AND IN OTHER NEWS

A frost happened in the middle of the mud fest! Here's a young lady that was very excited to see the frosty grass and got straight down to making puppy dog frost angels!

Sending  hugs, 

Huskies, dashing through the snow

Hello, crafting friends!

What could be cuter than a husky? The answer is obviously five huskies! These particular huskies are from Clearly Besotted's Holiday Huskies, a set that made me realise just why this company is called Clearly Besotted! I am utterly besotted with these adorable pups romping about in the snow! 

I'm not really a fan of the slimline card (I know I'm a stick-in-the-mud!) but in this case I thought it would work well for my happy pack of huskies :) The background is really quick and simple: I masked off the bottom of a slimline card panel, sponged in a sky and added some fir trees from Stampin' Up's Waterfront.

The sentiment is one of several fun punning ones from Holiday Huskies. I stamped it in a bright red and added falling snow with Clearly Besotted's Snowy Day stencil and a white Posca paint pen. This is how happy Eva looks when it snows!

The huskies were stamped in grey ink, coloured with alcohol markers, fussy cut and arranged on the snow along the length of the card. I have melted with the cuteness of them!!!

CHALLENGES

I thought the huskies dashing through the snow would be perfect for Time Out's Quick challenge; I've used Blue, Snowflakes and Trees from the inspiration list at Festive Friday; and I also used the header at Jingle Belles for inspiration: the snowy sky, the fir trees, the red sentiment... but the bells have been replaced by cute puppers - sorry not sorry!!!

AND IN OTHER NEWS

The husky on the left of today's card reminds me of Eva when she went to Agility classes. We were given a block of six classes as a thank you gift and when I took Eva along, she picked everything up very quickly. The only thing was, all the other dogs raced around the course in a competitive way; Eva ambled about, wagging cheerfully, hopping over jumps and having a good sniff in the tunnel, coming to me for treats but not having any sense of urgency whatsoever! There was a general atmosphere of disapproval but bless her, I was secretly rather proud of her independent thinking!

Sending hugs,

A birthday in the park

Hello, crafting friends!

It was my gorgeous daughter's birthday at the weekend and Eva and I made a card to help her celebrate!

I made a background by stamping the bench from WPlus9's New Home, then covering it with a mask made from a sticky note. I was then able to mask off, and sponge in, a sky and some grass. I added the tree from Stampin' Up's Sheltering Tree (and if you're reading this Gill, I bless you every time I use this set - thank you!) colouring the leaves with autumnal markers before stamping. I  added more leaves to the grass too before removing the bench mask and trimming the panel with a stitched rectangle die by Heffy Doodle.

Now we needed a pup to sit on the bench. I nearly died from cuteness overload when I saw Clearly Besotted's new Holiday Huskies stamp set; the dogs have been drawn by a human who clearly knows dogs very well! Eva thought one of the huskies could pretend to be a golden retriever, only with pointy ears instead of floppy ones. She asked me to help her demonstrate the look and, since she looked very cute with her ears up, I stamped the dog, coloured her with alcohol markers and snipped her out before popping her up on the bench. The sentiment is from Concord and 9th's Enjoy it all.

CHALLENGES

This card was inspired by the beautiful colour palette at The House That Stamps Built (this is the challenge blog of Repeat Impressions Stamps and I enjoyed having a browse there too!) I'm also joining in at Animal Friends Challenge where the theme is Dog/Cat; I'm also sharing at NBUS (never before used schtuff) with my new Holiday Huskies and New Home schtamp schets - thank you for bearing with me Darnell!!!

AND IN OTHER NEWS

One of the dogs I walk has to be kept on lead at all times sadly, but she and I have made friends and we have lots of fun together. Once while walking her, I had a text that I had to deal with immediately, so I sat down on a handy bench. The little dog hopped up and sat solemnly beside me until I pressed send and continued our walk. I was amused by this so I sat down at the next bench to see what she'd do, and she came up and sat beside me again! It gave me the idea for today's card but, since my job is to be walking and not sitting about, I now use the benches (which are just narrow seats, no backs) as sort of agility equipment for her to jump over. She loves this :)

Sending hugs,