Crafty Cardmakers 83 Belated Birthday

Today at Crafty Cardmakers we would like to see your take on the theme ‘Belated Birthday’, we are hosted by Kim and she said that she is notorious for being late with people’s birthday cards and so she wants to see what ideas we can come up with for belated birthdays, and they have to have a sentiment on them indicating that it’s a belated card we have created.

This couldn’t have come at a better time for me as I had missed a birthday when I had been unwell, and so a belated card was well in order.

  I started with a shaped card which I ran through the HappyCut with an embossing folder, and then I coloured it with PanPastels in the citrus colour range. I also shaded the flowers with the same range, and made the scalloped mat, and the butterfly also with the PPs. The pearls were ivory and I coloured them with copics to tone in and popped them around the outside of the sentiment mat and onto the centres of some of the flowers on the background. The swirl is from Memory Box and is called Chesapeake and I split it in two and hid the split with the flowers from Wild Orchid Crafts.

The sentiment I created myself and printed onto plain white cardstock which I then coloured to match the background. I decided to be ‘loud and proud’ and admit I was late with this card and I made it the focal point of my card.

I should like to enter this into the following challenges:-

A Gem Of a Challenge - #63 Emboss It

Amusing Challenge - Birthday

Chalk-ah-Lot Cafe - #27 Shaped Card with Chalk

Chalk N Stock - Anything Goes with Chalk

Daring Cardmakers -Embossability

Moving Along With the Times - It’s Birthday Time

PanPastel UK - #3 Nature

The Outlawz PAM - Bright Colours

Totally Papercrafts - Embossing of Any Kind

Wags ‘n Whiskers - #95 Celebrations

Lexi’s Creations 82 Fancy Folds

Our challenge today at Lexi’s Creations is ‘fancy folds’.
We are sponsored by My Heart Pieces with three digi images going to the winner.
I started with a base of plain A4 centura pearl card from Crafter’s Companion from the dark range, which I scored and folded into a Z card. It’s a lovely deep violet and I also used the same card to make the decorative mats from, which I cut out with Spellbinders Decorative Labels 8.
I matted and layered onto it some white card and some card from the Papermania DesignStax 6x6 pad. It’s more of a cardstock really, very good quality weight. I used the same pad to make the pin wheel flowers, which were another example of ‘fancy folds’, and to cover the back of the card.

You can’t see too well in this washed out photo (sorry) but the sentiment is actually very similar in colour to the mat as I maniuplated a Lexi’s sentiment and added to it the words ‘Give me a call I miss you!’ as the idea tied in with the image, which is of two little girls communicating down a pair of old food cans with a piece of string between them, down which the sound travelled. I can remember doing this myself as a child with my Sister. Oh the innocence of Youth. Of course these days we would likely have iPhones instead, loads of technical wizardry but not half as much fun. We also used to use old baked bean cans with string on opposite sides of the can, which when you stood on them and pulled tight on the string you made a pair of mini stilts for walking in.

The image is actually a double image from Saturated Canary called Secrets and normally has a string drawn between the two characters with the word ‘secrets’ strung along it in bunting, but for my purposes here I split the image into two separate girls and removed the drawn string.

To join them up I threaded through some twine which was sort of a string colour and knotted it behind the images.

My girls are coloured with copics, and trimmed up with a spellbinders die, which I edged with glamour dust to match the glamour dust edging on the main background of the card.

For the inside fold of the card I cut the Memory Box Riviera die, and trimmed off a bit to make it fit, in the same card as the base and decorative mats.

The white swirls are a Magnolia Doohickey die. This last picture has been taken with the flash, but the others are more representative of the original colour if a little too dark.

It was actually very difficult to get an overall picture of the card with both images looking roughly in focus as the camera couldn’t cope with the slightly changed perspective of some card being in front and some being in the distance and yet still keeping both images focussed.
I should like to enter this into the following challenges:-
Addicted to Stamps - #48 Use Material/texture (hope my twine counts?)
Color Me Creative Copic Challenge - My favourite colours (all shades of purple are my favourite colours)
Copic Marker Europe - #13 Anything Goes With Copics
Drunken Stampers - All That Glitters
DRS Designs Rubber Stamps - #56Tri-Fold Cards
I Love Promarkers - #151 Layer It Up
Speedy The Fox and Friends - #143 Use Twine
Stamping Sensations - Friendship
That Craft Place - New Year, New Goodies (all dies cut on my brand new HappyCut)
Whimsy Stamps - #55 Fancy Edges

Dream Valley 49 Girls, Girls, Girls

Wow it seems ages since I blogged!

A couple of weeks ago when I was about to start my New Year’s blogging I had a very bad stomach bacteria that laid me flat and left me weak as a kitten. Thankfully I am now over it and champing at the bit.

So my first project of 2013 is on behalf of the Dream Valley team and we would like you to create something on the theme of Girls, Girls, Girls. I don’t know if whoever chose this particular one is an Elvis fan, but that silly song keeps coming in and out of my head. ‘Goin swimming, in bikinis, a walkin’ and a wiggling by, yay, yay, yay ….. I’m just a red blooded male and I can’t stop thinking about girls’ Look how the world has moved on since the 60s when that was a hit, but boys still think mainly about girls and I guess they always will.

Anyhow I was rambling there for a bit. We are sponsored by Robyns Fetish Digital Stamps with 5 digital stamps from their extensive range.

For my card I used an image from the Crafter's Companion Swalk range of stamps that have just been released as digital images on a CD. These two little girls are meant to represent my best, and lifelong, friend Pam and I when we were children, she is the soft brown haired girl and I am the darker haired girl, and here we are swining away on the swings outside my old home. I have coloured ‘us’ in with copics, with some chalks for the background.

The papers are from Memory Box’s viola pad. The flowers were cut with Marianne dies in my new Happy Cut and the butterfly and small dragonfly are Magnolia DooHickeys.

The pin and the Magnolia berries are from my stash as is the crystal stem. The fabulous swirl diecut is a Memory Box die Riviera Corner.

I matted a layer of the Viola onto 6x6 cardstock and then trimmed up another in the pad using the Martha Stewart flourish punch, which I had been after for ages and ages and luckily they re-issued a short while ago.

I edged that layer and the layer beneath the image with glamour dust. Some faux stitching completes it.

The butterfly has ended up with different coloured card where it’s filigree patterns should be as I was trying to save time and cut two butterflies at the same time. When I peeled them out of the die, the filigree bits from the top piece of card had transferred themselves onto the bottom butterfly. So I left it there. Pam later told me that some of them had popped off in the post, so I should perhaps have added a little glue to keep them in place.

I’m entering this into the following challenges:-

Card Crafter’s Circle - #58 Layers

Color Me Creative Copic Challenge - My favourite colours (all shades of purple are my favourite colours)

Copic Marker Europe - #13 Anything Goes With Copics

Crafts and Me - #116 Something New (all dies cut on my brand new HappyCut)

Drunken Stampers - All That Glitters

I Love Promarkers - #151 Layer It Up

Stampin’ For the Weekend - Something Girlie

Stamping Sensations - Friendship

That Craft Place - New Year, New Goodies (all dies cut on my brand new HappyCut)

The Corrosive Challenge - #166 Put a Pin In It

Happy New Year and ABC E is for ……..

Good morning everyone. Happy New Year. I hope you haven’t woken up with thick heads and sore stomachs!

We have a brand new challenge for you over at ABC today, E for Embossing, and we are sponsored by Stamp and Create with a $25 voucher and The Pretty Little Ribbon Shop with a lovely prize of ribbons, charms and pins.

My card was made with a stamp very generously sent to my by a friend as it was a freebie on the latest Creativity magazine from Docrafts and it was not something she could see herself using. I stamped and embossed the art deco lady and also the four small corner motifs in gold detail powder and then coloured each of them with my copic pens. All the other gold rings are from the Loopy die from Memory Box. The paper is from Joycrafts’ Vintage pad 2, and the top layer I put through my BS with an embossing folder and then went over the top with some of those metallic rub-ons, which I must have had in my stash for years and not used, to accentuate the embossed area left by the folder. (by the way be careful when using those, I forgot to scrub my hands and couldn’t work out why everything I touched was dirty!) The mats are gold satin mirri, and the sentiment was created on my pc.

By the way, the image isn’t blurred, just my photography!

I am entering a couple of Old/New Challenges with this one so the old are the gold satin mirri card and the metallic rub-ons, and the new are the image, the paper and the loopy die)

I should like to enter this into the following:-

Aud Sentiments – Anything with a Sentiment

Bunny Zoe’s Crafts Challenge – Celebration

Dutch Dare Card Challenge – #197 Celebration

JellyPark Challenges – Old And New (see above please)

Paper Play Challenges – Out with the old, in with the new (see above please)

Pixie Dust Studios – Any celebration will do

Shelley’s Images TTT Challenge – Out with the old, in with the new (see above please)

Stampotique Designers Challenge – SDC 80 Out with the old, in with the new (please see above)

Whoopsi Daisy Challenge – Celebrate