Birds of a feather

Hello, crafting friends!

 

Where has the week flown off to? Very little crafting has taken place and my fingers have been feeling quite naked without their usual coating of ink! That was remedied today as I scrolled through Challenges for Days and was instantly inspired.

 

To start this card, I watercoloured a pale green square directly onto a thick cardbase (I've found that as long as I don't use too much water the card doesn't buckle.) I topped this with a circle of vellum, diecut with a Waffleflower nesting die, then added some stamped and fussy cut flowers from The Greetery's Fleur Expressions. The birds are from Robin and Wren, also from The Greetery, and also stamped and fussy cut. 

 

I had fussy cut the birds without a white outline but decided they needed one so, instead of starting again, I glue-dotted the birds to a snippet of white card and fussy cut around them. I quite like the dimensional look it gives them. I positioned them so they look as if they're having a nice chat so decided a Hello sentiment from an Altenew set would be appropriate :)

CHALLENGES

Narelle's beautiful sketch at Freshly Made Sketches was my starting point for this card, along with The Card Concept's gorgeous inspiration photo and colour palette - I have made a Clean and Layered card. I'm also playing along at Allsorts where the optional theme this week is Fur or Feathers, as well as The Snippets Playground where Miss requires us to make a project using snippets. I forgot to take a photo of my snippets but the vellum was a small offcut and I stamped and fussy cut the birds and flowers from white snippets as well as the sentiment.

 

AND IN OTHER NEWS

I love watching the busy little garden birds, fluttering about gathering nesting materials and preparing for their families but, meanwhile, the pigeons are like drunken nightclubbers behaving disgracefully and disturbing the peace!

 

Here's a portly chap cooing sweet nothings into the ear of a flighty miss. Hmmm! Be off with you or I'll release the Beige Beasts!

Sending hugs,

Out on the tiles

Hello, crafting friends!

No, the title of this post is not a reference to any wild evenings out! I've been thinking about tiles lately and remembered a stamp set I have that I thought would make interesting backgrounds for flowers. Have I created any cards like this? Er... no! Time to put that right!

The tiles are from a retired Stamping Up set called Today's Tiles. It's a layering set - you stamp one pattern and then line the stamps up in a stamping platform and add the detail stamp. I chose my palest yellow ink and a light orange, stamping them directly onto a card base. I topped them with a pretty rose from WPlus9's Modern Roses, which I stamped, coloured with coloured pencils and fussy cut.

But oh dear...! Even though I'd used pale inks for the tiles, they result was far too intense to show off the rose. After a little thought, I decided to mute the tiles with a panel of vellum. I cut this to size, stamped it with the sentiment using Stazon ink and glued it over the stamped tiles using spray glue. This worked well and the rose became the focus of the card I'd wanted it to be!

CHALLENGES

I'm linking this card up with Less Is More where we are CASEing Elaine's fabulous card in celebration of her birthday; also playing along with Time Out where there's a beautiful quote to inspire us; and Allsorts, where Anything Goes with an option to include roses; the challenge at Happy Little Stampers CAS is Off The Edge, so I'm joining in there too.

AND IN OTHER NEWS 

Did you know that the word 'tile' was slang for hat in 19th century Britain? I thought it might be Rhyming Slang but apparently it was coined because some wag made the analogy of the roof tiles on the top of a house and the hat on the top of a person! This has amused me no end and I shall be looking into more slang!

Sending hugs,

The new Stampin' Up vellum? Sheer Perfection!

There's nothing like an exciting new product to set me off and the new Sheer Perfection vellum has done exactly that! Come and see what I've been making with it:

For this card I used three designs of the beautiful vellum, choosing two to layering as a background and cutting a butterfly from the third to top it. The back of the butterfly was coloured with Stampin' Write markers - keeping the background to cool grey and white allows it to really pop!

This is my favourite way to add a sentiment at the moment. Stamp with a beautiful greeting from Crazy About You, punch out with the Ticket punch, attach with the hand held stapler! It's quick, easy and clean-looking which ticks all of my boxes!

So, what could be better than a new, exciting product? A FREE new, exciting product of course! Spend £45 on Stampin' Up stash and this vellum is yours absolutely free as part of the Sale-a-bration promotion!

BUY THE SUPPLIES TO MAKE THIS CARD NOW!
Click on any item to be transported to my online shop!
Don't forget you'll get a free Sale-a-bration item for every £45 you spend

Card Stock A4 Smoky Slate £6.25	Crazy About You Photopolymer Stamp Set £22.95	Handheld Stapler [EU, UK, AU] £8.95
Silver Mini Staples £3.75	Ticket Duo Builder Punch £15.50	Regals Stampin' Write Markers £23.95

My shop is open 24/7 so you can buy Stampin' Up products from me any time, day or night.

If you have any queries, or prefer to speak to me, I'm happy to help.

You can contact me by email or phone on 01280 820593.

It's been so warm over the weekend and it's been such a pleasure walking my lovely pup with NO COAT! In March! The blue skies and warm sunshine brought out some early butterflies too - ones I'd never seen before.

I think they were these, the Clouded Yellow - and they definitely inspired me. Watch this space for some more butterfly cards with a zing of yellow!

See you tomorrow,

Boho Blossom flowers in vellum vase

Today's card is all about colour. I fell in love with this dramatic paper and thought Summer Sun would really sing with it!

I had the idea of a vellum vase at the weekend when I was away, but couldn't think how I'd adhere it to the card invisibly. After experimenting for a while I found that if you cut thin strips of double sided tape to the shape required it is barely noticable. I do like the way you can see the 'stalks' through the vellum. The vase is cut with a 1 3/8" circle punch on the edge of the vellum to get a flat base, then run through a crimper. The stalks are thin strips of card stock and the flowers are made by layering two of the Boho Blossom punched flowers and fastening with a gold brad. The leaf is from the 2 step bird punch.

Supplies:
Stamps: Happy Moments (sentiment)
Ink: Night of Navy, More Mustard (to sponge the edges of the flowers)
Card stock: Old Olive, Summer Sun
Other: Boho Blossom, 1 3/8" circle and 2 step bird punches, Night of Navy designer series paper (hostess gift), gold brads, corner rounder, crimper (non-SU)

The Night of Navy designer series paper I've used today comes in a stack of different colours and is one of the gifts you can earn by hosting a Stampin' Up workshop. Hosting a workshop is simple - you invite friends and family round to your house, I show them how to make gorgeous cards and other items and then they get to play themselves! I've never known a dull Stampin Up workshop - everyone always has great fun!

I was introduced to paper crafting when I was invited to a Stampin' Up party and I am so pleased I was because it has brought such a lot of pleasure into my life. I'd love to come and host a workshop for you so why not check your diary and book a workshop with me today!
Hope to see you soon.

Autumn Splendor male birthday

Surely you knew it would only be a matter of time before I produced another masculine birthday card using Autumn Splendor! When I sit at my desk and look up at my stamps, my eye is immediately drawn to these graphic leaf images. Today I teamed leaves and grasses with the fabulous Hodgepodge hardware:

I'm hooked! Look at the way the sentiment from Vintage labels fits perfectly into the  metal frame!

There will definitely be more cards coming up that use this embellishment - watch this space!

I've been experimenting with vellum this week and here I've layered it over stripes and torn it on the diagonal. The vellum is fixed to the striped paper using the hodgepodge and a glue dot under the leaf - that's enough to hold it and it means you don't see any adhesive. I used faux stitching on the striped paper to give the edge definition and added thin strips of Old Olive card stock to represent grasses.

Supplies:
Stamps:Autumn Splendor, Vintage Labels
Ink: Old Olive
Card stock: Whisper White, Old Olive, heavyweight vellum
Other: Hodgepodge hardware, Sweet Pea designer paper, paper piercer, Chocolate Chip marker

I've also been planning my card class today and am very excited about the cards we'll be making. If you'd like to come along, check out the details on the bar at the top of this post.
Hope to see you soon!

Fine Flourish thank you

Earlier this week I talked about the tradition of sending thank you cards - much nicer than sending a text or email! I've been making a collection of little notelets and this card is part of that set:

There are four new background stamps in the new mini catalogue and this one - Fine Flourish - is one of them. It works really well as a simple one colour print but could also be coloured in to make a big impact. The others are basic dots and stripes and there's an alphabet one too - all really useful building blocks for cards and scrapbooking that you'll want to use again and again. 

The flowers and leaves are all put together using punches. Have you spotted where the leaves come from? They're the wings from the two step bird punch! They've been folded in half, run through a crimper and sponged with ink. It means that with that punch, not only do you get a bird but you also get two completely different kinds of leaf as well! (Have you noticed - I love to find lots of uses for my stamps and punches!)

Supplies:

Stamps: Fine Flourish, Happy Moments

Ink: Night of Navy, Certainly Celery, Ballet Blue

Card stock: Whisper White, Ballet Blue, Certainly Celery, Night of Navy, Vellum

Other: Two step bird, scallop circle, Boho Blossom and 1/2" circle punches, Certainly Celery grosgrain ribbon, Ballet Blue brads, crimper

Thanks for visiting me today.

Hope to see you soon!