things that fly.....

Challenge 8 at Bah Humbug is things that fly - I decided to save my angels for later challenges (surely there will be an angel one?)- and use this Rudolph stamp from Elusive Images a couple of years ago.
I did try creating a sky background with a brayer, but couldn't get the colours right with my big'n'juicy pads, and mucked it up even more trying to brayer DI ink over the top! So I used a piece of blue card, stamped Rudolph in versamark and  detail silver EP. I then darkened the sky with black soot DI, stamped a roofline using more Elusive Images stamps - I think mostly village life plate, but possibly townhouses too - fairly randomly along the bottom and colouring them in with black marker pen.  Rudolph looked a little lost, so he got the sakura stardust pen treatment, and I added dots along the stardust trailing from his hooves as well. I matted him onto matt silver card, then on to a black card cut down from a folded A4 sheet.

use a cd

This challenge from Bah Humbug took me back years - I was the sad person who always accepted free cds from internet access reps, so that I could use them on cards ; now they come free with everything and get thrown out, and I had to dig one out of the bin! In those days, I embossed them and then stamped into the hot ep - I still have some of the many colours of ep I used in the drawer.
This cd got coloured with alcohol inks, also dug out of a drawer. the medallion poinsettia stamp also came to light in the search for the inks, so I stamped it several times on green and red card and decoupaged it. The red was coated with a gloss finish after painting some gold in the centre, then stuck on the cd. Corner stamp was by Elusive Images.
The most trouble I had with this was taking the photo - it wouldn't scan well, and the weather has been so dull and grey that it wasn't bright enough to get a decent photo until this morning.

spring challenge

This is my card for the Less is More challenge this week, with a spring theme. The hellebore image stamp  is from Elusive Images, stamped in grey versafine and colopured with watercolour pencils, matted onto green card. I tried following the tutorial on creating greetings, and eventually managed to do this one, in what I hoped would be a matching green - my version of Word7 didn't quite follow the instructions; it was ok until it got to the point of moving the boxes as a unit, which is when it didn't.
After around an hour of cursing everything microsoft, I decided to stick with this version, which I was reasonably happy with - also before I ruined it by trying to tweak it!

earth spirit and pudding

The challenge at Less is more this week is for a one-layer card featuring either trees or flowers - I have had the set of stamps by Elusive Images from carvings by Carrie Dennison for some time, and not got around too using them, and they definitely need  a simple treatment.   I may be pushing the boundaries a bit, but my favourite  earth spirit carving is definitely a tree spirit..... It was stamped in versafine and clear embossed, then sponged with distress inks in bundled sage and tumbled glass

Bah humbug 's challenge is to use doilies - I had just bought a pack of these when I read the challenge, couldn't believe my luck! Admittedly, they don't seem to punch the holes out as well as they used to these days, but a doily is a doily even so, and these ones just fitted onto a gold 5x5 card.  The stamp is from Elusive Images, and seemed to fit nicely in the centre. I added a little colour with promarkers, and used dimensional glue to add some texture to the cream topping.

more challenges

I definitely felt challenged this week! The first card was for the Bah humbug challenge 5, bows and buttons - I very rarely use ribbon, and never as a bow, and as for buttons...........After much cursing I finally found a couple of buttons left over from the days when I did a lot of knitting, pale blue ones, so that sorted the colours out...........the organza ribbon was coloured with promarker, and the white added over the top, complete with required bow. The image is from Joanna Sheen some years ago, stamped with stormy sky distress ink and painted with a bit more of the same, cut out with nesties and mounted onto a larger blue shape. the scanner was not too happy with the bow, but eventually gave in........... 

The second card is for a new challenge blog called Less is more, where there was a colour scheme of pink, black and white. Inspired by the  cards done by Lesley, Judith, Elaine and Jo of the Craft stamping quartet I thought this would be a relative doddle ......the only pink distress ink I had  was far too pale, but fortunately   I had not thrown out an ancient  set of Colorbox chalk inks, and the pinkish one still had a little life left in it, so I inked up a homemade shadow stamp. That was ok, but I got too many sprinkles of black ep over the next version (looked like it had measles!) which definitely reminded me to heat dry the chalk ink before adding the image from Elusive Images!. Then I couldn't find a text stamp that would fit - it was going to be a thank you card - then found this one, which eventually I managed to stamp on straight.............     Then the scanner decided that it was a black and white image , so had to rescan it with some red card behind to convince the scanner that it was actually coloured.........grrrrrrrrrr        The splotches across the front  were on the scanner screen, and that was after I cleaned it (honest) and that was where i gave up!