Childhood Memories

I’ve been having fun this Bank Holiday making this card. It’s not a colour scheme I would normally choose for myself as I am not a fan of the darker promarker colours. However, I am quite pleased with the way the colours go together and am glad I came across the challenge that set my imagination flowing.

I am entering her into

Our Creative Corner – Where I got my intial colour inspiration from following this scheme, or as close to it as I could get the promarkers. I actually found it quite challenging to stick to just those colours.

Passion for Promarkers  -  They have a sketch to follow and wanted Autumn colours, which I think these are. This is my first PFP challenge, and I hope they don’t mind that I flipped the side my embellishments were on, but there was nothing going on in that corner of the image and it would have swamped the design the other side.

Lili Of The Valley – Dotty About Circles – Each of my BPs have some sort of circular pattern on them, and of course my flowers are circles too.

By the way, the original picture does have some shading and colour on her little face, but as you can see from the shadows I took the pic in bright sunlight and it has washed things out a little. Her necklace is also a golden colour, but looks green here!

Oh, Alice! – A little girl theme, beautifully bought to life I hope by this gorgeous LOV stamp ‘Glamorous Gardening’. This was the first stamp that sprung to mind when I was reading the Alice blog about the wonder of childhood. Partly cos I haven’t long bought it, but mainly because I can still vividly recall that we had some sort of fete on the park opposite where I live when I was a young child. I had a thrupenny bit to my name and I bought a beautiful red velvet and fur trimmed dress on a clothes stall. It was obviously for a grown woman, and was a full length vision of loveliness. I saw it and fell in love with it, and even though the stall holder was wanting more than thrupence for it my little hopeful face won the day and I became the proud owner of that gorgeous creation. Oh the happy hours I had playing grown ups in that dress. I used to sing along to an old valve radio (that actually made no sounds) turning the dials pretending to be famous singers in my lovely red dress. Ahhhhhhhhh happy days! 

Cute Card Thursday – Dieing for a Punch – which is actually the opposite of what it sounds, as they want NO nesties or die cuts or punching on your project.

The Shabby Tea Room – Old Meets New – Old Papers (Basic Grey’s Porcelain pad), new stamp.

and finally

Pile It On – Farewell to Summer – The children are about to go back to school, the nights are lengthening, the days shortening and pretty soon the oh so green trees will start turning to the shades in my card, heralding the end of summer and the start of autumn.

Feeling rather whimsical this evening, remembering the long salad days of Summers of my youth, sadly long since passed, but thankfully I have my memories.

 

To Glitter or not to Glitter … that is the question

I made this card and before I stuck my flowers down I took a pic so I could get them back where I wanted them when I glued them. I find that when I lift the embellishments up to glue I move them and it ends up not looking the way I intended. Anyhow, after I looked at my pic I decided it needed more bling, so I glittered up the flowers and tilda’s dress and tiara.

Now I look at the glittered photo next to the non glittered one I am pretty sure I preferred it as it was! LOL

I like Tilda better with a bit of glitter, but I think the flowers looked better without it. One of them, as you can see, already had a very thin smattering of glitter and I reckon I should have left well alone. What do you think?

I did a bit of jiggery pokery with Tilda here, first I stamped her, then I scanned her so I could resize her. So she ended up digital! I printed her twice. Once so I could prick a pattern around her and one that I could cut out and decoupage on top.  The original stamp was just too big for the pattern so I had to do something to make her smaller. Before I stitched the pattern I pounced distress ink and some Whispers ink over the area that Tilda was going to end up so she wasn’t against a stark white background.

Tilda is coloured with my promarkers, the papers are Basic Grey’s Wisteria collection, and the stitching is all my own.

Entering this into

Stamp With Fun – A Card for a Girl

My Time to Craft – Glitter & Glitz

Basic Grey – Fabric – flowers are fabric and I guess the stitching is too!

Totally Tilda – Stitching

Lady GaGa Video Inspiration Challenge at Crafty Cardmakers

I didn’t think I was going to be able to post this. Sunday my PC decided to die on me and it took me two days to fix it. Good job I understand what goes on inside the case or I would have had an expensive repair job on my hands. Anyhow finally got a working pc again.

Boy this one was fun. Our illustrious leader at Crafty Cardmakers came up with the idea of taking inspiration from a music video and she decided to enter the ever so slightly mad world of Lady GaGa and her Bad Romance Video. I have to tell you all, I have had that blinkin song going round and round in my head for days now. Can’t get rid of it, and then on Saturday night X-Factor had the most amazingly bad version of it by a wanabee group called Jahm! If you don’t watch this program you have no idea what you are missing with the audition stage. I am regularly in fits of laughter at how bad some people can be.

Anyhow to the challenge. So the idea is to use any part of the video to take inspiration for your project. I watched it through twice hoping for some purple, but sadly there was none. So I went for the red section for a colour, and the image I chose I thought went with the section of video where Lady G is clearly up for auction! Saucy or what. Anyhow Kenny K’s glorious digital images are perfect for this type of thing as he is racy and edgy and ‘out there’.

However, there is a reason I am not keen on red, it’s so darned difficult to match the tones, which can be widely different and actually look like they are clashing if you are not careful. Having had two attempts at colouring her in, in desperation I went back to the printing stage and filled her skirt section in digitally first and then printed her. The rest was coloured with a combination of prismas, promarkers and a silver gel pen for the chain.

The grid in the background was meant to represent the mesh in parts of the video, and the black mirri at the back was for the bling area, as was the red mirri forming the grid and scrolly bits. The papers came from some old sizzix books. I added a shrink plastic corset for an embellishment.

We are sponsored by the lovely Susie Sugar and her Die Cut Dreams with approx £10 worth of shoe die cuts. So come on over and join in the fun.

Entering this into

Stampin’ For the Weekend – Anything Goes

Creative Card Crew – Sparkle and Shine

Digi Doodle Shop – Anything Goes

Stamp Something – August Digi Day – Use anything digi

Pink Wars!

My Daughter and a couple of work colleagues, all hate pink and they are involved in a game called Pink Wars. They keep trying to out pink one another. If they have a trip away they bring back a pink gift, for example. Well one of them is having a wedding anniversary soon, 28 years I think! So the husband being a fun kind of guy suggested that they get me to make an anniversary card along the pink wars theme which he will sign and then when she thinks he has got her a pink card he will give her the other card, which has no pink at all.

Anyhow, sadly I don’t hate pink – it’s not my favourite colour, that’s purple, but I quite like it and managed to get really girly and pink with the pink wars card.

The image is a LOV, and I coloured it with both promarkers and prismas to give a bit of extra depth.  The flourishes are made with Marianne Creatables dies, the flowers are from my stash as are the lil pink heart gems, the ribbon came off of some underwear my Daughter bought. Told you she hated pink, so she cut off the pink ribbon and I snaffled it. Knew it would come in handy one day. The little hearts surrounding the image are the waste from a Nestie pendant die. The sentiment I made on the PC with a Dingbat font, well the scrolly bits anyhow.

The real card from him I first did in Lilac, but my Daughter told me it looked pink so I had to redo it in blue. The blue I chose is very definitely not pink!

Personally I prefer the pink card and wish I had made it blue as it’s only meant to be the joke card, but hopefully he and she will also like the plainer blue one.

The image and sentiment are from Elusive Images, as if the background rose. I stamped the main card up in Memories Pale Blue ink, the background mat in Distress Tumbled Glass, the main image in Broken China.

I am entering Pink Wars into

Challenge Up Your Life – Celebrations - In honour of their 1st Birthday they wanted a birthday themed card or something else you could celebrate.

and a second entry into

Order of the Opus Gluei – You’ve got to move it out of your stash and into a project – The gems have been sitting in my stash for an awfully long time and the stamp has been around a few months and as yet uninked! The BP is one of the very first things I bought and it came from a book which had paper, vellum and sentiments in and I don’t think, to my shame, I ever used anything from it before!

the Blue card I am entering into

ABC Challenge – B is for Blue – I think this qualifies lol

Now I have to go make a card with a coffee cup on it. People do ask for the strangest of things, lol

Spotlight on Spotlights!

If that is confusing you, imagine what it did to my ME fuddled brain when I was told that was an option for the Crafty Cardmakers Design Team this week! Basically we run a spotlight every fortnight which can tie in with, or not, depending on your mood, the previous week’s theme. For example I could have made a card birthday themed but following the spotlight. This week the spotlight is on Spotlights.

The spotlight technique is where you emphasise something on your project, usually with the majority of the image being black and white and then you pick an area you want to have coloured so it stands out. I, however, decided to do a reverse spotlight. That is where I coloured the image and then stamped it again on plain white card and cut out areas, in my case three, and then placed them over the corresponding coloured area on the image below. I did a tiny mat and layer for each spotlight area to make it pop even more.

I knew what I wanted to do almost from the off but could I find an image of a medieval knight, who might be going to fight a dragon. Nope!! They were either too cutesie, or in rubber and I didn’t have time to order the stamp and wait for it to arrive so in the end I went for some pre-coloured clip art which as luck would have it I think is meant to be St. George, as he has an England flag for his shield. Sadly, to my mind he looks a little solid or flat, but hopefully you get the general idea. I could just have done the dragon on his own but I really wanted to use the quirky little sentiment ‘Meddle not in the affairs of Dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup’ – a principle I intend to abide by; that came with the stamp sheet from Elusive Images.

I coloured my dragon in with prismas and OMS and edged the whole thing with DIs in Dusty Concord – and thereby lies a cautionary tale. NEVER put off replacing your lid on your inkpad. Obviously they can dry out, but horrors, worse than that I seem to have placed my uncovered inkpad ink side down on a pile of paper and then wandered off and left it. A  day later I found a pile of purple paper and an almost empty inkpad!!!!! I bet S!r T!m of Holtz doesn’t make that mistake.

The image is matted onto some DCWV cardstock cut with my MS PAPs and that in turn is layered over some rather lush backing paper which I got as part of my Guild Membership at Graphicus, suppliers of the EI stamp sheets. The sentiment has been cut out with Nellie Snellen dies.

For some other gorgeous samples please pop on over to Crafty Cardmakers and have a look at my Teamies’ creations. There is a really funky one with a post box on it, and some other yummy inspirational ideas.

I meant to put page pebbles over my spotlighted areas which would emphasise them even more, but I forgot. One of these days I am not gonna know who in the heck I am!

I am entering this into two challenges

Stamp Something – Fairytale Somethings – Fairytales are often dark as is the tale of George and The Dragon

Order of The Opus Gluei – You’ve got to move it out of your stash and into a project – Both the stamps and papers have been sitting in my stash for an awfully long time

Cute lil Faeries

I spotted these at the bottom of my garden, or did I?

My neighbour certainly has a pond and it definitely gets frogs in it ‘cos on occasion they don’t respect the boundary and sneak into my garden, and ‘horrors’ on one occasion in my house. If only I had had these cute little faeries on hand to weave their magic and turn it into a handsome prince. Knowing my luck though it would remain green and slimy, and very definitely un-kissable.

Anyhow the image is a combination of three separate faerie images that Mo Manning has designed and come in a set of 5 little sweeties. All three fairies are surrounding the Frog Prince from Meljen Designs. I like to think this is a moment in time captured just before the air goes smokey and ‘poof’ a handsome devil appears in place of the frog.  Let’s face it the frog stands no chance with three wands pointing at him (Oh dear I really must get out more …..)

It has been coloured in with my promarkers, and it was very difficult as in order to be able to fit the image onto a card I had to shrink it down quite small, which meant I was only just touching the pen very lightly against the paper in the smaller places, like limbs etc. As it is the finished thing is still around 7” square, the card that is, not the image.

The flowers came in a bargain basement lot from QVC, and the bps are very old Pocket Full of Posies from DCWV.

I am entering it into the following challenges:-

Mo’s Challenge Blog – Things with Wings – Obviously the faeries

Flutterby  Wednesday – Open Challenge, provided it has a butterfly, faerie etc.

Crafty Creations – Winged Things – Again the faeries

Papertake Weekly – Old, New, Borrowed, Blue – The old here are the papers

Bee Crafty – All about the image – Clever use of digital images. I have used four here and had to overlay them to make them fit so a degree of image manipulation was required

By The Cute And Girly – Animal antics – The frog

Crafty Cardmakers’ First Birthday

I am thrilled to announce it’s Crafty Cardmakers’ First birthday, and whilst I have not been there from the beginning I am absolutely honoured to be part of it’s lovely team.

Being part of the DT has given me a new desire for cardmaking as I was finding it difficult to keep motivated and keep my blog going. Now the only reason there might not be so much on it, is cos I am doing the rounds commenting on our lovely challenge entrants’ works of arts.

Anyhow I had fun creating a birthday card to celebrate our first Blogversary.

I merged three Mo Manning digis which all seemed to me to epitomise a party theme and coloured them in with promarkers. There are from left to right Angelina’s Balloons, Georgie Cartwheeling and Bella Carrying the Cake. I love the fact that Bella is giving that backwards glance, which obviously is to Bronte who is sitting on her sash and presumably about to cause a disaster with the cake! But in this case, she could be taking in Georgie as he goes cartwheeling past her or be fascinated with Angelina’s static hair do. Who hasn’t rubbed a balloon on their head and loved it when their hair stood up on end as a result. In my house you would have been hard pressed to hang onto a balloon long enough as my lovely old dog Tilly had a thing for balloons. She would catch them by the very tiny tag bit that is dangling when you tie the knot. I would sit there shramming up waiting for the ‘bang’ but she would have made an excellent gun dog as she never burst one balloon.

Anyhow enough of my waffling. The BPs are both from Karen Neuburger and the top one I ran through the new Go Kreate embossing folder called Happy Birthday, and then went over it with Memento ink in Sweet Plum and Lilac Posies. I also edged the image with the same inks.

I made the flowers myself using three different lengths of coloured lace and topped off with roses. The flourishes were cut from the same mirri card that I used for backing on the card and cut out with Marianne Creatables dies.

I am also entering my card into some challenges as follows:-

Cute Card Thursday – Whateva! Sounds like a stroppy teenager, but means whatever you like

Creative Inspirations – Something recycled – My flowers started off as lace and have been recycled into flowers

Cupcake Craft Challenges – Lace – As in the flowers

Stamp with Fun – Lilac and Blue – Which is the main colour scheme of my card, as anything in purple does for me! I love it

Please pop on over and join in the fun with our Birthday Themed Challenge  at Crafty Cardmakers which is sponsored by Joanna Sheen, and you will be in with a chance of winning £10 t0 spend in Joanna’s shop. We all know how stuffed to the gunnels that is, and as she doesn’t charge PnP your tenner will go even further.

I scream, you scream we all scream ………

I had fun creating my latest card with a digi from Mo Manning called Lacie with Ice  Cream. I coloured her with promarkers and then I cut her out with a nestie shape which was scalloped like the background, but it didn’t match, properly, so I trimmed her up again with a plain oval, but that also went wrong, so I cut her out and stuck her on with foam tape. See you don’t always have to put it in the bin if it goes wrong!

I can just taste that lovely chocolate and strawberry ice cream, sadly in my dreams as I am now diabetic. Pah, too many years eating rubbish …

Anyhow enough waffling I am entering this card into the following Challenges

Friday Sketchers – The sketch

Quixotic Paperie – Life’s a Beach – As soon as Lacie has eaten that huge ice cream I bet she is off for a paddle

ABC  Challenge Blog – A is for August – I think Lacie here is on her school holidays in August!

The Pink Elephant – something yummy – I’m sure everyone agrees how yummy ice creams are

Stamp, Scrap and Doodle – Clean and Simple – Look Ma not a flower or embellishment or fancy fussy thing in sight

Meljen’s Designs – Clean and Simple as above