Remembering George 10 years on

Those of you who regularly read my blog will know that I am a Beatles fan. Of the four of them George has always been my favourite and the 29th of November will be the tenth Anniversary of his passing from this world. I created the card above to stand in my home in his honour. I was going to wait until tomorrow to post this image but I won't be about as I will be busy in Liverpool taking part in the events that have been planned to remember George and celebrate his life and music. 

I guess there is only one thing left to say and that is Thank you George - for the music and for all the friends I have made over the years due to a shared admiration for you as a musician, a film producer and a humanitarian. I miss you.

I am now nearing the end of my Christmas card making for another year and for this one I decided to experiment a bit with some of the materials I had around the house.

As you may have gathered I love the vintage look, so was delighted when a few weeks ago I found the Marianne die for a Christmas lantern in my local craft shop. This was the starting point for the card.

I cut it out of plain green card stock and then ran it through the sizzix on an embossing mat to bring out the detail. Having done this I dabbed it with Momento ink in Cocoa and then used copper and gold inks to highlight it to age the piece.

Once done I went to work on the backing which is from the Papermania range – called ‘At Christmas Time’ I cut it to A5 size and used a pair of scissors to distress the edge before rubbing with brown ink.

I used a piece of plain brown wrapping paper that we happened to have in the house and ran this through the sizzix using a musical score embossing folder. The edges were then torn and rubbed with brown ink and the surface was rubbed against a copper ink pad to highlight the pattern.

I had some strips of brown glitter paper left over from a previous project which I used Marianne dies to cut into flourishes.

I cut a small piece of parchment paper to cover the aperture in the lantern and cut a small piece of white glitter paper to make the candle which I added a brown paper flame to the top and one side of the candle was then coated in pearlescent paint, to give the idea of the melted wax and the flame was coloured using gold metallic ink and red paint

I coloured a white card tag using Tim Holtz Antique Linen distress ink and stamped a greeting in brown ink and edged the tag in brown ink before adding three small copper coloured pearls with pearlescent paint.

The lace was an off cut I had in my stash as was the striped ribbon which I used to edge the lace and add the bow to the tag.

The flowers and leaves have a velvety texture and are left over from a Christmas decoration for my mantelpiece.

Overall I was quite pleased with the look of the card as when I started I wasn’t sure if the brown paper would work, or if the idea for the candle would work.

I am entering this card into the following challenges

http://2sisterschallengeblog.blogspot.com/ - Anything Goes

http://craftyhazelnutschristmaschallenge.blogspot.com/ _ Whatever Lights your Candle http://onestopcraftchallenge.blogspot.com/ - Ribbon and Lace

http://frosteddesigns.blogspot.com/ - Embossing

http://totallypapercrafts.blogspot.com/ -Victorian

Welcome to the World Isabelle.

I made the above card yesterday in response to the news that my Godson's wife had given birth to a little girl, Isabelle on 11/11/11.

Having found out just before I did my regular Saturday morning blog hop through all the challenge blogs that I follow I was delighted to find the sketch below on the http://sketchsaturday.blogspot.com challenge for this week and decided to use this as a basis for the design.

I have made a few baby cards recently and knew my stash of baby toppers was at an all time low so I needed to visit a local craft shop (well that's what I told hubby and he agreed to take me into town). Whilst browsing I came across the pretty striped and spotty vellums and the glitter card in candy pink, as well as the beautiful little pram topper and the charm which says on it 'A New Blessing'. So armed with my new stash we set off home.

I already had some card blanks in silk art card from Hunky Dory and the shade 'Marshmallow' was ideal for this project. Having cut the glitter card and the spotty vellum using the two largest oval dies from my set of X cut nesting dies, I settled at my craft table to play.

Using Papermania colour capsule collection card in pink I cut a tag and added the greeting using peel offs from my stash. I cut al the papers and laid them on the card starting with a plain pink panel for the top left which I then decided to run through my sizzzix in a hearts and swirls embossing folder to add interest.

I felt that the stripey vellum looked a bit flat so used border peel offs to highlight the pink stripes and edges and used the same borders on the oval and the border of the embossed card.

I used double sided adhesive film to stick down the vellum so there would be no tape marks to show through.
The pram was then centred into the circle. Three roses from Wild Orchid Crafts, were frosted by dabbing the edges of the petals with PVA glue and then dropping them into a plastic bag containing white glamour dust glitter and a a white frosting which had been a freebie from one of the card magazines, and giving them a shake. Once these were dry they were added to the lower right of the Oval

The final touch was to add  a bow and teh charm to the top of the greeting tag before adding it to the top right of the card.

The card is now dry and just waiting to be popped into the envelope and be posted to Terry and Donna to celebrate the arrival of baby Isabelle.

I am entering the card into the following challenges.
http://lilredwagon.blogspot.com/  - Congratulations
http://thepapervariety.blogspot.com/ - Family
http://thesecretcraftersaturdaychallenge.blogspot.com/ - spots and stripes
http://sketchsaturday.blogspot.com

Lest We Forget

The card says it all really.

Made using Nancy Watt papers and the sentiments printed from the computer onto Parchment.
thank you to all those who made the ultimate sacrifice so I might be born into a free democracy.

Recipe Card

Here's the card I have designed using the recipe over at http://diecutdreams.blogspot.com - 4flowers, 3 gems and 2 brads. The paper topper and greeting are all from a selection of free papers from Making Cards Magazine, designed by Nancy Watt. The glitter paper was from a pad I received as a part of a prize from teh same magazine. The silver roses were recycled from an old Christmas decoration the ribbon, brads and feather were from my stash and the pearls I made using pearl paint.

This was a really quick and easy card to make. I have recently discovered pearl paint and now make my own gems using it, I started by making the three gems just squeezing blobs of the paint directly onto my craft mat and leaving them to dry, they hold their shape and once dry just peel off the mat and can then be stuck to the card. I find it really versatile and it comes in so many colours.

Whilst the pearls were drying i trimmed a piece of the green glitter paper to just smaller than the A5 card blank I had chosen to use, I used a black card blank to make the glitter paper really stand out. I trimmed the pink backing paper, and matted it onto the green glitter paper to leave a thin border all the way round. I cut the topper and greeting by hand and then mounted these onto green glitter paper and trimmed again to leave a narrow border.

the border panel of green glitter was cut so that it overlapped the pink paper in the base panel and then a strip of pink paper was cut long enough to wrap around the base panel and wide enough to leave a green glitter edging. I used a piercing tool to make two holes in the pink border strip at equal distances from each end using the pattern on the paper as a guide, and then inserted the green brads before wrapping the pink strip around the base panel and fixing it at the back using double sided tape. The whole base panel was then fixed to the card blank using double sided tape.

I used glue gel to fix the topper and the greeting to the card to raise then slightly from the base, pushing the feather behind the topper and into the wet glue gel underneath. The flowers being metal were also stuck down using glue gel and a small ribbon bow was underneath the greeting. Finally once the pearls were dry I added these at the top right hand corner.

I enjoyed making this card as it has a fresh spring colour scheme and it gave me a nice break in between crafting Christmas Cards.

Glitter everywhere....

I usually avoid using glitter if possible as I do tend to get in an awful mess with it, no matter how carefully I protect the work area and work over a glitter tray I still end up with it in my hair and on my face. However on a recent sort through my stash I found some left over glitter paper from last Christmas and having recently added to my collection of Marianne dies I decided to give it a go.

I wanted to create a card without using patterned papers and using die cutting and embossing for the design. I decided to keep all other elements of the card black and white to really show off the deep red glitter paper.

It took about an hour to cut out all the pieces using a sizzix big shot. I started by cutting the bird and a circle from black gloss card using the Marianne bird on a branch die and the second largest Circle from my Nestabilities - plain circle set. As these were the biggest shapes to cut I placed them onto the card and using the leaves and flourishes from another set of Marianne dies I filled in around them to minimise waste. Having cut the first set of shapes I placed them to one side and cut further leaves and flourishes from the remaining card until I had used up all the card from a single piece of A4 sized card.

The flowers were then cut from the pieces of red glitter paper I had found in my stash I cut 6 pieces and pinched each individual petal between my thumb and fore finger to give them some dimension. I cut a circle from white glitter paper using the third largest circle from the Netsabilities set and cut three further flowers using a smaller Marrianne die from the off cuts.

The greeting was made by running a piece of satin art card through the sizzix using the happy birthday embossing folder from one of my sizzix sets.

Having cut all the pieces the fun could start. I used a sponge dabber to apply silver metallic ink to the Happy Birthday greeting to give it a metallic look and put this to one side to dry. Whilst that was drying I layered the white glitter circle onto the black circle and then edged the whole thing by pleating a strip that I had punched from plain photocopier paper using a Martha Stewart border punch, and sticking this to the back of the largest circle. Once this was done I used a thin layer of glue gel on the back of the bird to stick it to the white glitter circle and added a self adhesive crystal for the eye. I set this to one side to dry whilst I worked on the background.

Using a plain white card blank I started arranging the flourishes on the card without sticking them down until I had a pattern I was happy with. Some of the flourishes were trimmed to fit and the trimmings were added into the overall design to fill gaps. All the pieces were then stuck down using a quickie glue pen to ensure accurate placement of the adhesive and prevent it getting on the black face of the pieces.

Once all the background flourishes were stuck down I placed the bird panel at the top left and then used the flowers to cover some gaps in the flourishes. The red flowers were made of two layers held together with black brads that had then had red adhesive gems stuck to the centres and the white flowers were a single layer with a red gem centre.

Finally I cut around the embossed sentiment and stuck this to the bottom of the card using blobs of glue gel to give a more 3D effect.

I am entering this card into the 'Lashings of Sparkle' challenge over at http://cinspirations.blogspot.com/

I still ended up with glitter in my hair and on my face but I really enjoyed putting this card together and am off to wash away the glitter.

A Sketch with a twist.

I really do like working with sketches, so decided that as I had a bit of spare time this weekend I would seek out and enter a sketch based challenge.

So the obvious choice for me was http://sketchsaturday.blogspot.com, I wasn't disappointed I found this sketch there for this weeks challenge.

As currently my crafting space is a sea of festive themed papers and I am still making Christmas cards for family and friends I decided I would use the sketch to create a Christmas card design. I also decided that having just made up a batch of flat square cards for Christmas I wanted to challenge myself. I flipped through a few magazines and noticed that there were several cards using the 'twisted easel' design so having never made one I decided that I would give it a go and use the sketch as the basis of the main face of the card. Here is what I came up with.

The base card was created by using a 6x6" cream card blank and having folded the front of the card diagonally across the middle I cut another 6x6" square of cream card to act as the face. The main backing paper and the image of the poinsettia on the main card face were free papers in the November issue of making cards and designed by Nancy Watt - one of my favourite designers. I made up the decoupage panel an gave the flower a very thin coat of glossy accents to make it shine. whilst that was drying I went through the pile of off cuts of card and paper I had from other projects. I found the gold card, the vellum script and the lace in my off cuts pile.

I used an embossing folder on the gold card and ran it through the sizzix bigshot to get the musical notes pattern, this matched in with the background layer of the decoupage which has both musical notes and script on it. I aged all the panels by tearing thin strips from the edges and then used a dabber to add Tim Holtz distress ink in tea stain and a mixture of gold and copper metallic pigment inks to the edges.

The vellum looked too white against the other papers so I inked the back of this with the tea stain and wiped it on a paper towel to take off any excess to give it a more aged appearance.

I layered the gold musical note strip and the decoupage panel onto the background paper and added a corner element of torn vellum to the top right.

I then wrapped the lace around bottom securing it at the back and used some pretty red and green ribbon from C Art to add a border to the top of the lace.

Once the panel was completed I used a piece of gold card that was recycled from packaging and mounted the whole panel to this before using double sided sticky tape to fix it to the card blank.

I used a bow maker to tie a bow using the same ribbon and I used a small greeting tag which I brought in Lakeland a few years go, the bag contained about a hundred of these tags and they are lovely for just adding a small detail to a card.

The Holly leaves I made myself a few weeks ago, I had used some silk roses in a floral arrangement I had made for someone and had a bag full of silk leaves left over I sat and cut the edges of the leaves to turn them into holly leaves and coated them with 3 layers of glossy accents to give them the tough prickly feel of holly.

The inside of the card was also covered in the Nancy Watt backing paper which has again been torn and distressed using Tim Holtz inks. To keep the continuity of the design I added torn vellum as a corner accent to the base as well, the pine branches are from 'Craft Planet' and whilst intended for children's craft projects I find them really useful for Christmas themed cards. I added a velvet poinsettia to the base to act as the stopper for the easel.

I am quite pleased with the results and having made one I now have several other ideas for twisted easel designs, not all of them for Christmas either.

I am entering this card in the following challenges
http://sketchsaturday.blogspot.com
http://craftycatzweeklychallenge.blogspot.com/ - Anything goes
http://thesecretcraftersaturdaychallenge.blogspot.com/ - Flowers ribbons and lace
http://abcchristmaschallenge.blogspot.com/ - vintage

and have also used it as my entry into the design team call at
 http://ooh-la-la-creationschallenges.blogspot.com/