blue postcards

My postcards for the September Chocolate Baroque postcard potpourri swap - had to go with the colour this month, wasn't any too sure exactly what an aster or a forget-me-not looked like, though there must have been a CB stamp featuring them at some point!
I used a brusho background for both of them (why are you not surprised?) - the silver came from a can of webbing spray that I discovered in a drawer. I was a bit heavy handed with it, and think it would look better if the can was further away from the card, but can se it coming in useful for Christmas cards.
The poppy stamp was stamped onto the base with versafine, and again onto another piece of brusho card. I cut the poppies and the butterfly out, and glued them over the first image after colouring the stems and leaves with promarkers.
The Mackintosh beauty stamp was done the same way, apart from the second stamping onto white card, and more promarkers. I was very pleased to pick this set up in a sale bin at the recent Thetford show, so another one crossed off the wanted list!

Hobby Art with Moira

Sunday was the second of  Moira's Hobby Art workshops, this time at a new venue at Costessey  - lovely light hall, plenty of parking, and best of all a caretaker to put tables and chairs out, and away!
We did 3 cards, all using Christmas stamps,
The first one used the bauble stamps - baubles were stamped in black on white card, coloured in (glittered if wished), cut out and mounted behind the circle aperture with its acetate centre.
I cheated and brushed wild honey distress ink all over my stamped baubles, which drastically reduced the colouring, and chose to mount mine onto black, adding the strings with a gold metallic market, which I also added to the bauble tops. The edges of the aperture were stamped with the holly sprig first, using memento london fog ink, and coloured with iced sprice distress ink for the leaves and marker open for the berries.
Not a quick card, but a very effective one.
Our second card used a snow globe die, and a pre-embossed snowflake background. I chose to use the mice for my image - just love that choirmouse- stamped twice with the central one stamped onto extra card, cut out and glued in the middle of the first two after colouring with promarkers.
Background,  the base card and the edges of the globe were all sponged with broken china distress ink.

The last card took rather longer to do, involving stamping the word in black ink, colouring in with promarkers, with a bit of liquid pearls on the berries. I used iced spruce distress ink to stamp and roughly colour the pine sprigs on the background card, and also brushed some round the wedges. Two narrow mats of red card, and a couple of holly sprigs finished it off

This one I did mostly last night - had the idea yesterday and started it then. Snowflake stamps randomly stamped across the black card using white pigment ink, which dried rather paler than I had hoped - one day i will find a really good white inkpad,  there must be one somewhere!-
with lots of glitter highlights using clear glitter and a quickie glue pen.
father Christmas was stamped in black onto white card, coloured with promarkers and cut out. Once he was glued onto the starry card, I added white fluffy stuff onto all the fur and heated it to give a bit of dimension, and some glitter onto the lantern.

Sunday at Gissing

 another Sunday afternoon at Gissing with Moira, Janet, Jill and Barbara in a toasty warm hall despite the dull weather outside.
Moira had a Christmas version of this owl card, which involved using practically every Christmassy Hobby Art stamp set she could lay her hands on, and a heck of a lot of cutting out. I thought I had a bright idea using different stamps, then found I didn't have them with me...............but I did have the set of leaf stamps.
I stamped the leaf onto green and orange card, added more colouring using sponges and distress inks and cut them out.
Moira had kindly provided the embossed square and its backing card, so I just added the owls in the hole and scattered the leaves down the left hand side. The white base card was randomly stamped with the leaf stamp in greens and sponged over with vintage photo distress inks.
 Janet's sample card was very simple, with the Claritystamp tree stamped in black and decorated with dots of  Paper Artsy fresco paint added with an embossing tool. Background layer was  from an old paper pad.
I had a quick play with the new stamp of the month from Hobby Art before packing up - a very quick card, took longer to finish up at home than to do! Masked off the central stripe with paper, brushed blue and green distress inks across it, then stamped the seed heads twice down the left and coloured the leaves in with marker pen.
Sentiment added later from some magazine freebie stamps, and base black card.
The random grey splodges are from the scanner, which obviously needs a good clean again!

crazy birds

Just  a quick play with my new bird stamps from Tim Holtz - I had a load of small 4" square cards left over , and these birds are just the right size for notelets.
Background stamps from Chocolate Baroque and Ryn, and the birds were stamped onto left over bits of brushoed paper, cut out and decoupaged over the orginal image stamped onto the card. Could sit and cut birds out while watching the Vuelta on tv, less hassle than masking and also used more bits up!
A couple of the images look a bit pale, I originally stamped using black versafine, but it seemed to go grey over brusho, so the rest I used black archival ink, which stayed black.
As I used bits up, linking these to Pixie's snippets after a long absence