Engagement Card

An engagement in the family was the reason for this card, or at least the reason to make a card of some sort, but what to make? I recently bought some of the Britannia Flower Dies and have been playing with making roses, and fuchsias etc so it seemed like I good idea to have a go at using the flowers on a card.

Before being made into flowers the die cut flower shapes were painted with Twinkling H20 paints, English Lavender for the petals, Mustard Green for the calyx and leafy stems. When dry both paint colours have a lovely golden shimmer which I hope you can see in the photo.  The "Celebrate" sentiment was stamped and heat embossed in gold onto the die cut in the centre. The stamp is one that came in a kit years ago from Hot Off The Press and the die is from Marianne Design Creatables. The card stock is ivory and gold pearlescent card, the gold being Moondust card from Southfields, the ivory was just some I had in my stash.

Thanks need to go to Joanna Sheen Ltd for posting this helpful video on YouTube as I am sure I would have struggled making the flowers without the clear instructions here.

Apologies and a Tiddley card

I just want to say sorry to friends who's blogs I have not been visiting a lot recently. My old 'puter was getting very wobbly, dying on it's feet actually. Anyhow I had to nurse it along and avoid having it turned on for too long as it was running too hot and getting ready to fry itself. Thankfully the guys in my local computer shop are very cool guys, they kept my old 'puter running for about a year longer than I had expected and they have now built me a nice new one for not too large a number of pennies. Well not too large in the scale of 'puter stuff, but enough pennies to buy rather a lot of rubber stamps with if I hadn't needed the new 'puter.

Anyhow here is a "tiddly" card I made for a swap on Craft Telly Forum recently - the swap theme was to make a small card.. The card is what we refer to in the UK as A7 size - I know I have some American freinds who drop by occasionally so for you guys the card size is close to 1/4 of your American Letter size card which has then been folded in half to make a little card.

The whole thing was made from a piece of lovely pearlescent Moondust card - the butterfly was cut and embossed from some of the Moondust card with my Cuttlebug using one of those dies that has a matching embossing folder. I brayered some ink over the embossed butterfly using a Kaliedacolor ink pad - Calypso if I remember correctly - and finished by adding some sparkle with Stickles glitter glue.

The layer underneath the butterfly was stamped with a small text stamp which I had inked using the same Kaleidacolor pad and the daisy border at the bottom was stamped and embossed with gold EP then painted with Twinking H2Os. I can't recall who made the littel set of text stamps, but the border comes from a set made by Crafty Secrets. The other matting layer was simply another piece of the moondust card which I had coloured with the brayer in the same way as I coloured the butterfly. I did find it was best to give the ink a gentle heat set on this kind of card.

Fab's Christmas Challenge is Back!

Last year my freind Fab ran his Big Christmas challenge all year and joining in as many challenges as I could certainly helped me to have a stock of cards ready for Christmas just past. If like me you have made a resolution to be ready in plenty of time for Christmas 2009 then why not visit Fab's new for 2009 Christmas Challenge blog and join in this year - there is a link on the right hand side of my blog right at the top where you can't miss it - just roll over that and click or click the link in this post. I certainly plan to join in again this year and here is my first card - well 2 actually! As the colour scheme is Red and Green and the whole card is based around a the stamped greeting these also fit the terms of the current challenge over on Christmas Cards All Year Round - a twofer!

The stamp is from The Artistic Stamper and was stamped and heat embossed onto ivory pearlescent Moondust card using Green Sparkle EP on one card and Red Sparkle EP on the other. I painted in the text using gold Twinkling H2Os. These were then mounted onto foil card, using red foil card with the Green embossed stamped greeting and green foil card with the red embossed stamped greeting. I chose red card to mount these onto. For one I used a small left over piece of paper I had printed from the Artylicious Season's Greetings CD, and for the other I used Versamark and Perfect Pearls to create a background using the same stamp. I think the one with the printed paper background is my favorite, but both were really quite quick cards to make.

Favorite Flower Challenge

This was a really tough challenge on Rainbow Lady's Challenge Blog! Why? Well because it was so hard to decide, Roses or Daffodils? I love both! So how did make my final choice, well I chose my favorite flower stamp. I adore this Rose Script stamp from Elusive Images. I think if I could only own one stamp, then this would be it.

The card is a simple one, I stamped and embossed in fine detail gold embossing powder onto some ivory Moondust card, Moodust is a beautifuly shimmery pearlescent card, very similar to Stardream card. I used fine detail EP because the script on the stamp is very fine and delicate and looks smudgy when heat embossed with regular EP. I painted my rose using Twinkling H2Os and then matted this on to some red Moondust card and mounted the finished topper onto more of the ivory Moondust card. The text stamp is also from the same Rose Script themeplate. Finally I added some peel-off corners in gold.