white flower

This is the first time for ages that I have managed to take part in the Make My Monday challenge - this month the theme is florals, and this week they wanted lily of the valley or white flowers.
I don't have any lily of the valley stamps, but I do have this lovely lace flower from the new Chocolate Baroque lace fragments stamp set that I was itching to try out!
I also wanted to try the faux patina technique from Splitcoast Stampers, so got inky fingers and put them both together.
The flower was stamped in versamark and embossed in detail white onto SU crumb cake card, roughly torn out round the image and the edges inked with vintage photo DI - and I carefully added a very little ink onto the centre of the flower using a cotton bud.
The faux patina background starts out with an embossing folder - I tried several, and the ones that worked best were the cuttlebug harlequin pattern I used here and the SU vintage wallpaper, which both have smallish overall patterns that are fairly deeply embossed. The folder was inked with SU crumbcake ink before embossing, so you have an embossed white image on a pale background - I embossed twice to get a large enough piece of card. The card was then inked all over with distress inks, starting with tumbled glass and peeled paint, ending with vintage photo. After a few hours drying on a storage heater, I dabbed a versamark pad over the card, and embossed with detail gold EP - the random effect does mean that the background got a bit inked too, but it looked ok.
I used a white 5"x7" card blank, with a mat of SU chocolate chip card under the embossed panel.

catching up

Am trying to catch up on craft time, without a great deal of success! June has been a very busy time with markets and WI and I have not even been able to keep up with my favourite challenges - hopefully after next week things will be back to normal! Just to prove I am still here, these are some cards I made while back using the flowers I am currently addicted to making - I even made a pile during  quiet times when at the Easton College open day with Country Markets.

The cards all use sentiments from the loving sentiments plate from Chocolate Baroque, and a cuttlebug folder as background. As I am too heavy-handed with an ink pad to get a good finish if I ink an embossed card afterwards, I used the cheat way of inking the embossing folder using a brayer and a big'n'juicy pad before embossing the card. I inked the background, but you can also ink so that the embossing bit is coloured, depending on the effect you want - I found that you can get 2 images from one inking, the second will be pale and delicate.

At the WI meeting this month, we had a fascinating speaker on straw craft, with some beautiful creations to show us. We all had to make a countryman's favour - sounded simple, kept us all very quiet for a surprisingly long time, and we did all manage to produce something resembling the original! Considering that these little favours only used 4 straws, they felt surprisingly heavy after a few minutes working at arms length, and no way would I ever consider trying something as complicated as a bell!

If you are coming to the Norfolk Show next week, please visit the WI marquee and have a look at the cushions - there are some fantastic cushions (around 100!) going to be on display there. We sorted through bags of them on Monday - ranging from knitted, embroidered, ragged to patchwork, and probably some others I didn't see while I was fixing the lunch for the rest of the Home Economics committee - after lunch it still took almost 2 hours to sort out the winners from the shortlisted ones!

playdate 83

 The Playdate challenge 83 was to use black, white and a splash of green - I've got the black and white, but you have to look closely to see the green! Mind you, my poor photo doesn't help, as there was very little daylight left and just using flash indoors totally bleached it out.
The square base card is black, the embossed panel uses a cutlebug floral screen folder, which was brayered over with black ink before embossing the white card - the dye ink has come out more grey than black, and a second impression without reinking gave a lovely delicate grey (but too delicate for this, so saved for something else).

The paper flowers use the 2 smaller flowers on the Tin Holttz tattered florals die, 3 layers of each, and a daisy punch centre.(see previous post for how-to details) stuck on with pinflair glue gel.

I used 3 flowers, with the green leaves peeking out from behind cut using an EK punch