CCM #217 All Creatures Great and Small

Hi. Hope you can join us over on Crafty Cardmakers today for our latest challenge, All Creatures Great and Small.

I made my card with one of my favourite ever stamps, Cecil The Cow. I just love his quirky look from his long neck to his dotty boots! I stamped Cecil onto tissue paper and coloured him with various Zig Clean Colour Brush Markers.

My card itself was made with a Tonic die, Bowscale, and the various mats and layers with created with Sue Wilson’s Double Pierced Rectangle dies.

The lovely morroccan style background was stamped onto watercolour card with a Hero Arts Studio Calico Stamp, Lattice Background with a versamark pad and embossed with white detail powder from Stampendous. I randomly coloured each of the little patterns with different colours of the Zig Pens and then spritzed heavily with water. Some of it was left to dry reasonably naturally and some of it I went over with a kitchen roll to mop up the excess moisture which had the effect of leaving different gradients of the colours, and of course, some colours intermingled even across the embossed lines.

Cecil was then trimmed out of the tissue paper and stuck down to the background with modpodge. The happy birthday sentiment is a die in my stash, but sadly I cannot remember which one it is!

I am entering Cecil into:-

2 Crafty Critter Crazies - #18 Anything with a Critter
Always Happy Birthday - Sept: Anything Birthday
Artistic Inspirations Challenge - #206 Anything Goes
Crafty Friends Challenge - #91 Animals/Birds
Creative Craft Cottage - #110 No Patterned Paper
Heartful Stamping - Anything Goes and A Stamp
House of Cards - Sept: Birthday
Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge - Stamp It On
Sparkles Monthly - #107 Stamp Your Own Background
Stamping Sensations - Sept: Something Beginning with B (Background stamp and Birthday Card)
Sunny Day Crafting - Aug-Sept: Animal

CCM #215 At Least Two Dies or Punches

Our challenge at Crafty Cardmakers today is to use at least two dies or punches, or one of each.

My image is from a lush paper pad by Katy Sue from their Mermaids range, which I die cut with Sue Wilson’s new Festive Frames, Eve, die, that in turn was matted onto the outside die from the same set which I cut from plain white card.

The background was created with my favourite My Favourite Things stamp background, Whimsical Waves. I stamped it with versamark onto the same white card I die cut the outer frame from and embossed in clear powder. I then used a combination of Spectrum Sparkle and Tonic Aquaflow pens and a spritzer to create a underwater background. I fussy cut out the mermaid, sentiment and the three patterned fishes from the same pad as the original image. The two shimmery fish just peeking out from beneath the diecut frame, and the tiger shark are all tiny die cuts by Marianne Designs. I edged the background with a green copic marker to give the illusion of a thin mat, and decoupaged up the extra elements of the image. A sprinkling of glamour dust around the water elements of the image and the mermaids tail completed the design.

I have a second picture to show the shimmer, as it doesn’t show up well on the camera in the normal light!

I am entering this into:-

2 Crafty Critter Crazies - #16 Anything Goes with a Critter
Animals Friends - #64 July In or On The Water
Blank Page Muse - June: Let’s Go To The Beach
Card Mania - #106 Anything Goes
City Crafter - #418 Seaside
Classic Design Team - #27 Anything Goes
Crafty Friends - #87 Fairy And/Or Fantasy
Cupcake Inspirations - #449 Under The Sea
Kitty Bee Designs - #121 Under The Sea
Pause, Dream, Enjoy - #26 Mermaids

DV #182 All Things Bright and Beautiful

Welcome to Dream Valley’s challenge for the next two weeks, All Things Bright and Beautiful. Today’s challenge is just for fun, as there is no actual prize.

I started with a blank sheet of Clarity 7” Stencil card, and a blank sheet of Crafters Companion A4 black card, a sheet of scrap card., some Tim Holtz dies and some Spellbinders Border dies.

With the scrap card and border dies I cut two fancy edges, which I then taped down over the stencil card to create my own stencilled shape between 1/3 and half way up.

Using Distress Oxides I inked in between my two edges making my own stencilled shape.

Then I stamped some random stamps from Marianne’s texture range.

The little pot with the wildflower is from Tim Holtz, and was lurking in my spare diecuts box. I liked the plain black against the brightly coloured shape. I originally stamped the clarity Congratulations stamp directly onto the card but it fell off the block and made a mess, so I stamped a second time and faux matted it up by going around the trimmed out sentiment with black ink.

I’m entering this into:-

Addicted to Stamps - #297 Make Your Mark
Aud Sentimenys - #206 Anything Goes + A Sentiment
CAS-ual Fridays - #202 Inspiration Photo (the bright colours)
Crafting With An Attitude - #40 Anything Goes
Crafty Catz - #422 Anything Goes option Beautiful Blooms
Create a Smile - Moodboard (I chose the colour palette)
Create and Inspire - #75 Anything Goes
Dare2BArtzy - June: Bright Colours
Inkspirational - #163 Use Small Stamps
Less Is More - #374 Bits Box Items
Sheepski Designs - #15 Embellish It or CAS
Simon Says Wednesday - Bright and Cheerful
Simply Papercraft - #58 Anything Goes

CCM #214 Wet or Dry Embossing

Our challenge today at Crafty Cardmakers is Wet or Dry Embossing. You can enter any project you like, it doesn’t have to just be a card, as long as you have some wet or dry embossing on it somewhere.

I decided to go for both on my card.

My dry embossing is the white panel behind the die cut elements, it’s a Sue Wilson Pinpoint Embossing Folder called Cross Stitch.

My wet embossing is the flower design die cut. I stamped it in three different shades of Tonic Nuvo Inks, but because these dry fast and aren’t really suitable for embossing I decided to try to let those inks dry and them emboss over the top with versamark. Before the various stamping platforms were released (I have the Tim Holtz one), this would not really have been possible. But because I could leave my image exactly where it was and let it dry and then apply versamark to my stamp and restamp over the already coloured image it worked a treat. I was originally going to colour the flowers in but changed my mind as I liked the outline look instead.

The stamp has a matching die  and I used that to cut two green mirri shapes and then used the decorative element to that die to give a lovely lacey effect.

The centres of the dies are from Spellbinders, the two white centres, and the green mirri ones are from a Marianne die set.

The sentiment is, I think, Penny Black, but I couldn’t swear to it, lol.

I am entering this into:-

Allsorts - #472 Use At Least 2 Dies
Back To Basics and Beyond - #5 Heat Embossing
CCEE Stampers - #1824 Blooming Flowers
Color Throwdown - #497 (Couldn’t see that I had to use all four colours! If that’s not correct just delete me)
Crafty Calendar - June: Use 3 of Something
Creatalicious - #141 Anything Goes With Optional Flowers
Dragonfly Dreams - Anything Goes
Happy Little Stampers - June: Anything Goes With Dies
Heartful Stamping - Anything Goes + a Stamp
Just Add Ink - #413 Colour
Penny Black and More - June: In The Garden
The Crafty Addicts - #49 Say It With Flowers

DV #181 Add Some Bling

Today at Dream Valley we are sponsored by Dies to Die For with a lovely £15 voucher for the winner, and our challenge is to add some bling.

I started with a lovely new stamp from Craft Buddy’s Gem It range. I did think I didn’t like the idea of specific stamps designed to add gems to but this feather is just so ethereal I fell in love with it. As you can see I didn’t add gems to every little circle. I inked it up with Tonic’s Nuvo Hybrid ink in four different shades as I had intended originally to add some pixie powders to the background, but I loved it on just a plain background so I could have used different inks!

The image is matted onto purple mirri paper and then onto a green satin mirri card. The gems are coloured with copics to tone in with the Inkpad shades and the sentiment is cut from the same paper/card I used for the mats and layers. I used the fabulous Sticky Roll from Wild Spider to back the paper and make the sentiments sticky. I was concerned it might make these small sentiments more difficult to cut but they still cut like a dream and it was so easy to stick them down. No more messy glued fingers and blobs of glue appearing where I don’t want them!

A close up pic so you can see how ‘blingy’ it is.

I am entering this into:-

A Bit More Time to Craft - #69 Anything Goes
A Perfect Time to Craft - #06 Anything Goes
Classic Design Team Challenge - #26 Anything Goes
Crafts Galore Encore - June: Anything Goes
Dare 2B Artzy - June: Bright Colours
Eclectic Ellapu - June: Anything Goes
Heartful Stamping - June: Anything Goes and A Stamp
Love To Craft - #23 Anything Goes
SheepSki Designs - #15 Embellish It or CAS
Stamping Sensations - June: Anything Goes
The Color Sisters - #56 Colour Palette
The Corrosive Challenge - June: Anything Goes

DV #179 Summer Colours

Our challenge today at Dream Valley is Summer Colours. We are sponsored by Star Stampz.

At the time I was preparing this post it feels like Winter still here in Hampshire and I still have my heating on in early May!!!! Anyhow, hopefully by the time this is published it will be feeling at least like Spring.

EDIT; Spring has finally sprung!!! Thank goodness.

As soon as I saw this image I imagined her floating away over a rainbow, and I had just the perfect die to match my thoughts. I diecut the colours of the rainbow with Sue Wilson’s You are my Sunshine rainbow die and the Sun is also from Sue’s Rain or Shine, part of the same Necessities collection. The clouds are from Memory Box. The sentiment I printed myself and the background paper is from Wild Rose Studio from their Blackberry Lane pad.

The image was coloured with a combination of Copics for the hair and skin and Zig Clean Colour Brush pens. Unfortunately I went over the balloons with some varnish in a pen and it bled the colour of the orange balloon onto the tip of the green one! I guess because the colours are water based it shifted. And after all that there isn’t even any ‘wet look/shine’ from the varnish which is what I was trying to achieve!

I am entering this into:-

A Perfect Time to Craft - #5 Anything Goes
Crafting With Friends - #67 Anything Goes
Crafts Galore Encore - May: Anything Goes
Crafty Hazelnut’s Patterned Paper - May. Anything goes with Patterned Paper
Creative Craft Cottage - #107 Dies and/or Punches
Fab ‘n Funky - #393 Garden Or Outdoors
Happy Little Stamper - May: Anything Goes With Dies
Jo’s Scrap Shack - #233 Anything Goes
Love to Craft - #22 May: Anything Goes
Pause, Dream, Enjoy - #19 Anything Goes
Tic, Tac, Toe - #46 Centre Line - Scene, Red, Something Digital

CCM #211 No Patterned Paper

Our challenge today at Crafty Cardmakers is No Patterned Paper. Please stop by the team’s blogs and leave them some love.

I started with a blank A3 white card which I created an approx A5 landscape card blank from. I stencilled onto that from an Imagination Crafts A4 stencil called Distressed Letter using Wilted Violet, Shaded Lilac, Broken China and Cracked Pistachio Distress Oxides. The blue/green frame is an Intricutz die, cut out of mirri card.

The feathers were a lot of fun to create. They are from Chocolate Baroque from their I shall Be Your Wings stamp sheet. There are several different styles and sizes of feathers and these two are sort of zentangled. I wanted to use the Colourcraft Soft Relief paste to make some textural feathers, but I wanted them to be multicoloured instead of the plain pearl of the paste, so before applying the paste I spritzed each stamp with water and then added some pixie powders. At this stage the stamps were very wet and I wasn’t sure that the paste would ever dry applying it to wet stamps so I mopped a little of the coloured water up with kitchen roll. In hindsight it might have been better to have made a paint from the powders and applied that as it would not have been so wet I think.

Anyhow I then added the paste with a palette knife, spread reasonably thinly and left to dry. Because it’s so hot at the moment it was dry in about 12 hours, but I’m guessing it would normally take closer to 48 hours. At that stage you bend the stamp a little and peel off the set paste and this is what I got.

As you can see, at this stage they were very pale and there were some areas where there was no colour at all. Whilst the paste was drying a lot of the colour leeched right through to the reverse side, the non patterned side of the paste feathers. So as I had wanted them to be much brighter I used my versamark pen and instead added some Cosmic Shimmer sparkle pigments in similar shades to the Pixie Powders I used to start with.

This is what they looked like after - I forgot to take a pic until they were on the card!

As you can see, they were now much, much brighter, much more what I was after.

The final part of the card is a sentiment, ‘A Heart Without Dreams is like a Bird without feathers’ from the same stamp sheet which I stamped with Kaleidacolor Riviera inkpad.

The feathers and sentiment were backed with foam tape to give them a little height.

I am entering this into:-

A Inky Mess - #20 Anything Mixed Media Goes
Artistic Inspirations - #199 Anything Goes
Calling All Sistahs - #12 Encouragement Card
Classic Design Team - #25 Open Challenge
Creatalicious Challenges - #138 Anything Goes, Option Add a Sentiment
Create and Inspire - #73 Anything Goes, Option use a stencil
Creative Artiste - #38 Anything Mixed Media Goes
Heartful Stamping - #38 Anything Goes + a Stamp
Just For Fun Rubber Stamps - May: Use More Than One Stamp
Polkadoodles - #18 Anything Goes
Quick Quotes - #87 Add A 3D element (feathers are VERY dimensional)
Stamping Sensations - May: Close to Nature
Stamps & Stencils - Let’s Fake It (clearly my feathers are not real!)
Use Your Stuff - #310 Mood Board (Bottom Left bird, or rather his feathers!)
We Love 2 Create - #8 Anything Creative/Mixed Media Goes