WI card

 This is the card we made at WI this afternoon, after the excitement (not) of the annual meeting.
It had to be something simple, so I borrowed Moira's Hobby Art penguin stamps - nice big penguins, and very easy to colour in - admittedly not quite so easy to cut out, but no-one moaned about it!
I had two versions, one with the penguins on a thread to twizzle round, and one using acetate - everyone managed to do the thread version. We did use smaller A6 cards, as I could get those in trifold, so easier to die cut matching holes, and they didn't get the snowflakes, or the brusho lining - I did print out a snowflake backing paper from the Artylicious Seasons greeting cd for them though (now on special offer)

They had a choice of white or blue base cards and round or fancy oval apertures, and I stamped out the penguins in advance, as we only had about 30 minutes to do the cards in. It was very peaceful when they were busy colouring in!









This was the acetate sample card, still had the reverse of the penguin inside, just quicker to do

dragonfly tag

the challenge this week for CD Sunday is 'tag it', and I combined this with the Make my Monday challenge 'butterflies and dragonflies'. I had plenty of tags cut out to use for the Chocolate Baroque alphatag swap, so used one of these as the base of the card. The stamp is an ancient one from Aspects of Design, that hasn't been used for ages - actually, that will qualify it for Judith's Forgotten Friday too! - stamped in smoky grey versafine and clear embossed. It was then swooshed through distress inks splodged on my craft mat and spritzed with water - mostly tumbled glass and peeled paint, but there was some broken china in there too. I coloured the dragonflies with H2Os - practically all the blues and greens I had just splodged on fairly randomly. I distressed the edges of the tag, then sponged broken china round the edges to give it a bit of definition, added some fine ribbony bits that must have come from a mystery parcel at some point, as I  am not noted for buying ribbon., and stuck it at an angle onto a card covered with paper from the Artylicious Butterfly bliss cd - something else that hasn't been used for months. I did go round the edges of the paper first with some more broken china ink .
The butterfly from Chocolate Baroque was stamped onto white card with black versafine, clear embossed, then coloured with watercolour pencils before a quick spray with spray & sparkle in silver and cutting it out - I did chop off the antenna as it was just too fiddly to cut out!

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to everyone, hope that yours will  be  all you could wish!
Bah humbug was my salvation last year - I actually ended up with a few spare cards, almost unheard-of before, although I have to admit to buying some charity ones for general use. Unfortunately for me, Ann and Max have decided to have a well-deserved break - then (thanks to Val) I discovered a similar new blog here, so I shall still have something to push me into making Christmas cards...............
Anyhow, this was using up one of the housemouse images I had already cut out but not used -  otherwise I would only lose the bits! I thought that this would also make a nice New Year card. Very simply matted onto green and gold, then onto a card blank covered with holly paper from the Artylicious Seasons greetings cd (from Chocolate Baroque)- and a new year resolution is to buy a new blade for the paper trimmer, as the current one seems to be catching................

Christmas housemouse

Way back in the summer, I used part of a gift voucher to get a set of Christmas housemouse decoupage from the wobbly shelves- I used one image, carefully stashed the rest away - they surfaced last week, so I thought I ought to use some more! As luck would have it (it has to work sometimes!) , several challenge blogs all have themes that would fit these little meece, so this is for the last Bah Humbug of the year (cute critters), CD Sunday (things with whiskers), Make my Monday (seasonal glitter) and the new Joanna Sheen challenge (Christmas).

I spent a happy afternoon at the weekend watching tv and cutting out meeces, finally deciding to use this pic of two snoozing  meece. I matted it onto some green glitter card, added a bit of glitter to the snow on the roof, mounted it onto a square card over a square of snowflake paper from the Artylicious Seasons Greetings cd (from  Chocolate Baroque, there may still be some in stock). The snowflakes were from a Sizzix die, cut from white card (wouldn't you know I didn't have any white glitter card ?) then glittered with Art institute crystal glitter - I now have a glittered carpet as well after dropping the tidy tray I was using ............and will probably soon have a glittery cat, as there is bound to be some I missed still there.
Now to start using up the others I have cut out................

bah humbug 33

Bah Humbug 33 is to use something new - the stamp by Wendie Rhodes is new to me, it was part of the set of stamps I borrowed to use for challenge 25, penguins - I quite liked this scene, so stamped a few images before returning the stamp set to Moira. The one that made it to the card was rhe 3rd attempt, so I may be asking to borrow it again!   I coloured the image with promarkers, then covered it with versamark and clear embossed it. The background was brayered and masked. The sky began with  the waterfall big n'juicy pad, then stampin up night of navy over the top - I found that the waterfall on its own was too bright, and the navy too dull, but both together was fine! The sand dunes in front were done with stampin up crumb cake ink.

After I had finished the colouring, I thought that my new top note die would go well with the oriental image, so cut it out, with fingers firmly crossed that the cut would be in the right place! (I did mark the die first with white marker so I had a fighting chance of getting it right). The matting layers were cut freehand, 2 in linen-effect silver and one from paper from the Artylicious decadent brocade cd (from Chocolate Baroque) and mounted onto an A5 dark blue card.

Have reloaded the photo, hope the zoom works now - Blogger was playing up when I did the original post, and didn't want to load the photo at all

                                                                                          

snowflakes

this is a very quick and easy card for challenge 19 on Bah humbug - the dp covering the card blank is from the Artylicious Season's Greetings cd, and it printed out a little paler than I remembered - could be something to do with my printer being short of ink! The snowflakes were cut from white glitter card using a borrowed spellbinders die set the other week - one got accidentally sprayed with blue glimmer mist, but I thought that a white one got lost in the bottom corner, while 3 blue ones would have been a bit much.

three kings

The challenge on CHNC this week is for a square card, so lots of options there! This stamp from Elusive Images turned up during the week, when I was looking for something else - I printed outt he starry paper from the Artylicious Season's greeting cd, stamped and embossed the kings in black below the large star. I then stamped them out again onto 3 Artylicious papers in yellow, orange and brown and paper pieced the image - it is a very detailed image, so quite hard to colour in, and I had run out of the gilding flakes I usually used with this stamp.
Apologies for the scan, have had to fiddle the image so that the colours show up better, the background is a bit darker in real life
Elusive Images stamps and Artylicious cds are now available through Chocolate Baroque online.

christmas tree

Having used trees on the last few Christmas challenges, I thought that I ought to use a different tree this time - still an Elusive Images stamp though! I stamped it in versamark onto a scrap of Artylicious bp, embossed it in white regal ep, then cut it out with a small nestie - having mounted it, am not now sure it was in just the right place when cut.......anyhow, it was mounted onto copper card using the next size up, then onto another sheet of Artyylicious paper - this time from the Seasons Greetings cd, that had been spritzed with glimmer mists. White peeloff greeting added to a copper mount using the smallest nestie in the set - have loads of DL blanks that need using up, so there may be quite a few DL cards being made!
This is for the latest Bahhumbug challenge 12, for Christmas trees - hopefully I won't need a Christmas tree again for a while!

CHNC 11

the CHNC challenge 11 is 'go for gold' - I took the easy way and used gold EP! Stamp by Clarity stamps, BP from Glenda's cd Season's greetings sprayed with English ivy glimmer mists to make it tone in better.
I really crawled in under the tape for this one after Mr Linky played up a bit- thanks Hazel for fixing it!