flower power

 I hope everyone had an enoyable Christmas, with lots of crafty goodies coming your way! It was nice to be able to sit and watch Lesley from Chocolate Baroque on tv on Saturday, even though I should have been sorting stuff out.....

 Here are the last of my samples for last month's shows using  the single flower stamps from the fuchsia, lily and hyacinth plates.
I made small 4"x4" notelets using kraft card, with white embossed images, coloured using some ancient pots of H2Os.
I made a folder to hold them, just a sheet of card folded into three. The background was stamped using vintage photo distress ink, then sponged round the edges with hickory smoke distress ink .The  fuchsia was stamped and embossed in white onto an oval die cut in brown card.








My final card used the lovely big lily stamp, stamped in black versafine and clear embossed. It was coloured with brusho powders, trying to keep most of the powders in appropriate places -not always successfully.
After spritzing with water I used a paintbrush to spread the colour into the petals. Once dry, the sentiment was stamped and the image trimmed to fit onto a 5"x7" white card blank with a red mat layer.

babushka 2

 Another play with the Babaushka dolls - I had some dark  blue card blanks left over from a workshop that needed using, and this is the final result.
The colours are more accurate in the rather dark scan of the whole card flat at the bottom of the post, the ones I took outside in the sun this morning are rather light, and my photo-editing skills are not up to the task of correcting the colour.


The images of the buildings were stamped onto the base card and again onto a piece of blue cut to match the centre panel in versamrk ink and embossed with copper EP. They were coloured using ann old set of H2O paints, as I have seen photos of Russian buildings with gold domes.
The centre panel had a copper mat before being glued in place.

 

The three dolls were stamped onto white card, coloured with marker pens and cut out before glueing individually onto the front of the card. the smallest one is glued flat, and for the other two the glue is added only to the card front - if you glue the dolls, then you can easily end up with the card stuck together!
This card uses a whole sheet of A4 card, and folds down to DL, so easy to post.

playday

Had a good afternoon playing at Gissing with Moira, Barbara, Liz and Jill last Sunday- it was a shame Janet was ill and couldn't join us; we only actually did one card, the rest of the time we were playing with brusho ink powders...........
The card on the left is my version of Moira's original, inspired by You-tube originally, then Eileen Godwin.
Moira had unfortunately left the precut circles behind, so we ended up using squares instead - being naturally awkward, I stuck mine on diagonally instead of square like everyone else, but I did stamp and cut out the flowers, even adding the gems in the centre!
Rather a poor scan, but far better than the photo I took, believe me!




For the remainder of the time we played with brushos - only Moira and I had used them before, it was very interesting watching everyone's faces as the inks spread! On some of them we also used liquid  perfect pearls, which gave a lovely shimmery effect.
I ended up with a nice pile of background papers , and have used one of them here with the angel from the new  Chocolate Baroque set A child is born. She was stamped in black versafine and clear embossed before painting with H2Os - I haven't used these for ages, and really must get some more of them.
I discovered that the sheets with a lot of  the pearls resist being stamped onto, and that the H2Os won't cover the splodges of pearl either, which was why there is a golden angel on a yellow background instead of a snowy blue/grey sky one!

52cct -angel

52cct have an angel theme this week - and this is mine. I felt that I ought to use a different angel this time, and this lovely old one is from Stampendous.
When craft club met last Sunday, Moira showed us a background technique she had seen Sheena Douglas demonstrate on C&C, which basically involved splodging random colours of H2)s across paper , and we made a poppy card usiing it. I felt that it would make a good base for the angel, and duly splodged a sheet of A4 with various blues, greens and golds. The angel was stamped with versafine black on one half, and clear embossed, and the other half was put through a snowflake design embossing folder.The two pieces were then simply trimmed and  layered with silver mirri card onto a white card base.
The second card is the poppy one from Sunday, with a much darker background, with several splatters of paint - poppy stamp from Stamp in the Hand was embossed with a copper EP and layered with gold mirri and brown card.
am also linking this to Judith's Forgotten Friday challenge, as the angel hasn't seen the light of day for about a year!
Having just played around a bit with the settings, I found that I had some new followers - welcome, and thank you for taking the trouble to sign up, and I hope you continue to find it interesting

MMM romance

Make my Monday challenge theme is romance for this month, and this week we are asked for hearts and flowers, plus diecuts as an extra. I couldn't find a suitable heart stamp, so the hearts are on the background paper, which was a freebie from Glenda Waterworth. The various pink cards were chosen to go with the colour of this paper. The stamp is the harlequin rose from Chocolate Baroque, rose and scroll painted with H2Os, leaves and the script background with watercolour pencils. Flowers are from a Mariane die, centres are from an idea by Judith (large jump ring filled with seed beads and diamond glaze), and leaves from Tim Holtz die. The crochet trim is new from Stampin up.

holly

I came across this holly stamp from Elusive Images (available from Chocolate Baroque) whilst looking for something else, and it was ideal for the colour challenge 2 to use red,green and gold from 52cct.
the base card is A5, and the red is fairly accurate on the scan - but the next layer is actually a pale dull gold, not the orange it has scanned as! This layer was slightly smaller than A5 to start with, and I cut both short edges using the Tim Holtz on the edge snowflake die.
 The stamped image in black versafine was coloured with H2Os, and a very pale green wash added to the background to tone down the harsh white of the card. The matting layers for the stamped image are a brighter shinier gold and green, with the corners rounded on all the layers.
One for Judith's Forgotten Friday as well, as the holly stamp hasn't been used for over a year.

Christmas roses

A simple card this week, this lovely image from Chocolate Baroque doesn't need anything else IMHO - and lack of time has nothing to do with it!  The image was stamped in black versafine and clear embossed before colouring  - the foliage with pencils, and the flowers with H2Os . I cut the image out and mounted it  with foam pads onto a piece of white card that had gone through a cuttlebug folder, and rounded the edges. The two smaller mats were a bit of paper from a bagful of bits I was given, torn and embossed round the edges with a mix of EPs ( black twinkle and golden ocean) , the second was a bit of core-denations  card that went through the same cuttlebug folder before being sanded back and the edges distressed. The main backing sheet was most of my last sheet of a greeny gold paper bought from a show ages ago - am hoping I can find some more this year!

This card is for 3 challenges - am not usually that lucky.....

52cct - theme 1 - flowers

make my Monday 33- flowers and leaves

moving along with the times 133 - blooming marvellous