I saw this rather cute card by Yainea on the Lawn Fawn blog:
And it inspired a punny sentiment, perfect for my cousins husband:
I don't own that Lawn Fawn yeti set but I found this cute yeti digi stamp by Lil Musings. The rather limp twine is meant to be a knot to replace the bow…
I have this cute top pinned to my Pinterest board:
It got me thinking about the watercolour craze that has hit card making and lead to this:
The whale and wave shape are from a X-Cut Pirate themed set – one of the first dies I bought – and I created paper masks from them. Then liberal application of distress inks and pearlised water – Simples!
Hopefully you can make out the shimmer the perfect pearls leaves behind.
As for the title… why is everything “an area the size of Wales?”
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Hello internet, its been a while…
Just in case you were wondering, I haven’t been completely idle these last few months, just spending more time away from my desk than at it. But I have been creating, mostly Christmas cards, which I’ll share with you in the coming weeks.
It seems deer are a big trend again this year, from furnishings to wrappings and, of course, paper crafting. There are a fair few stamps and dies out there featuring these cute/majestic creatures. I created this stag head in Silhouette studio:
And teamed it with a bit of wood grain digi paper which I recoloured in Photoshop and found that the frame from my bargain £2 stamp set from the NEC was just the right size!
I also used the negative space:
Running the panel through an embossing folder and again pairing it up with the wood grain paper. I think an argument could be put forward for these to be quite masculine cards but I would love to receive them too, so… maybe that says more about me?
 | I think I got a little carried away with the falling backgrounds, I ended up cutting quite a few! I do like the colour combination on this tho! I think I need more practice with the blending but I still think its fairly realistic. I tried to mimic the sky colours with the cardstock skyline and I’m pleased with how that came out too: This other one was intended to be snow, rather than stars, but if I do it again, I’ll make the dots a lot smaller! |
 | My parents went to a Golden Anniversary party recently and requested a card. I had seen a couple of cards on Pinterest and the blogs I read with this angled “topper” layout. In hindsight, Im not sure I like the angle of white panel, it kind of slipped from its original placement.. but then it shows more of the gold backing card that way, so maybe it can be excused. The tree is a memory box die cut into double sided adhesive paper and covered with gilding flakes. The birds are an old SU stamp and I printed the banner and fussy cut it from vellum. |
| Before I went the circle route, I tried cutting a Robocop panel with “falling stars”… it is SO hard to make something look random!! The Memory Box village die got a lot of use during this particular week, mainly cos I convinced my mom to buy some Marianne Christmas Village dies to make her cards with this year… so naturally I had to have a play with them, right? Is this a church or a schoolhouse? Not really sure - u'll see it again tho! Again no sentiment – its too early! |  |
I. Love. This. Card!
I had something like this is my head when I saw Christina’s card and was galvanised into action! I blended my trusty old Dylusions onto tissue paper - to see what would happen mainly and I liked it! I cut the Simon Says Stamp sunburst directly out of the card front and mounted the tissue panel behind it. The sentiment is spelt out with alphabet stamps from Ali Edwards/Technique Tuesday and Kasiercraft.
And I really wasn't sure about it til I added the birds (from SU’s Up, Up & Away) but that was just the perfect finishing touch!
There is not much I can say about this one, you either get it or you don’t! I inked the background with a combination of Dylusions and Distress Inks then ran it thru the printer to print the Doctor/planet/TARDIS image… and it barely showed up! So I printed the main elements again onto white, fussy cut them and foam mounted them over the top of the first print. The paper already had a ‘notepaper’ edge to it so I went with a larger card base and mounted it like a scrap of paper. The sentiment is a quote by River Song (I think).
p.s. the image came from Pinterest, if its yours please let me know so I credit you!
Loraine gave me a sample of embossed card after she’d been playing with her new Stampin’ Up embossing folder and I immediately thought of honeycombs and bees:
I’ve had this honeycomb collection from Pink Petticoat for a while now so it was just crying out to be used on this project. I have a bit of a thing for creating fades/gradients in Photoshop (you should see the design work I do at work, I sometimes think an intervention is called for!) so it seemed kinda natural to print the pattern to this card front and fade it out to stop it detracting from the focal elements.
Maybe it was a fluke or maybe it was cos I’d read about the Daring Cardmakers challenge earlier that day and the thought had lodged in the back of my brain, who knows. I’d like to enter this for their Ombre challenge tho!
I was asked to make two teacher thank you cards for my bestie. I knew they had to be more towards the cute than the fashionable end of the scale, but I’ll admit I was struggling with ideas.
I decided to fall back onto my old favourite sketch, which required a pictorial element.. which got me thinking about flash cards – they’re educational, right? So I downloaded a set of digital images… and didn't like any of them! So I made my own! The background (digi) papers are from Jessica Sprague.com, a set called School Daze by Dani Mogstad. I like the pencil design so I managed to clip it out of one of the papers and turn it into a flash card style image. Pretty chuffed with the end result and so is the “client” so all’s good!
Have you been following this years Paper Crafts Connection Gallery Idol? One of my favourite cardmakers made it to the top five with this beauty and as I follow her on Pinterest too, I told her how much I like the card and how hard I find that grouping of elements style of cardmaking… well of course I planted the seed didn't I? I had to give it another go – lets face it its not like I don’t have pots & boxes & packets of bits lying around my work space! Enough to meet the 10-items-on-a-card challenge a few hundred times over, I reckon!
This may well have been a fluke… we’ll have to see!
