brown, grey and silver

 The Playdate cafe challenge this week has been for cards in brown, grey and silver - not having done any challenges for some time, I was determined to do one, and the early snow here has helped as traffic was backed up past here most of yesterday due to accidents on the main road, so going out meant walking, which I am not a great fan of in snow!

This card is actually the second effort, and uses a stamp from  the Elusive Images 'New England winter' plate, which I had had for a few weeks and not got around to using.............Just stamped using vintage photo distress ink, ink brushed out with a waterbrush; image cut out and mounted onto a bit of cuttlebugged and glimmered card (it is much greyer really, the scan is very much bluer than in real life) torn and edged with silver EP - the silver EP was also dotted onto the tree by the house. The bp is from my Graphicus Guild pack, and the white card remaining was coloured with DIs in old paper and black soot  .     The second card was the first attempt, stamp was borrowed from a friend, and I think was from Personal Impressions - anyhow, stamped in vintage photo, clear embossed, torn out, mounted on a piece of torn brown paper, then glued at an angle across a grey gatefold card. The inner fold of the uneven gatefold was covered with a piece of the cuttelbugged card, and a silver strip of punched snowflakes (Martha Stewart) added to the larger side.

mica stencils

 At our last craft get-together Moira passed on a technique she saw demoed by Dot from the Stamp Hut at the recent Suffolk Papercraft show in Bury St Edmunds - basically stamping with versamark through a stencil, embossing with stamp'n'bond powder, then dusting with mica pigments (through the stencil? -I didn't see this, as there was almost always a huge crowd round Dot, and she had moved on to other things when we eventually got to see late afternoon)

 Being Moira, she thought it would be simpler to emboss the stencil first, which is what we tried. Being me and born awkward, I had to choose a large stencil - I thought I had something at home that would just go in the centre - well, if I did, I haven't found it yet! Still, I was quite pleased with the result - it probably doesn't show too well on the scan, but the base card is a dark green, with mica in autumn colours over the leafy swirls. I did several versions before the stencil got too filthy, and one has actually made it to a card!!! The base of this one was blue, and the mica was basically the leftovers from the others, mostly a mix of gold and silver. Having had a pre-Christmas present of a

big shot, I treated myself to the Tim Holtz tattered

 florals die. I cut it out several times in various gold cards, layered it up with a green cutout  and added it to the centre of the frame, and it just fitted.

The samll gift tag was more the sort of stencil everyone else was using, and I was quite pleased with the snowy effect using white and green mica, with a gold for the moon.

Maybe now Pauline and Moira will stop complaining about how bad a blogger I have been lately! (sorry ladies, couldn't resist that).