Tuesday 28 July 2015

Spots 'n' stripes

I've got a lot of birthdays coming up in the next month so need to get busy. 
The Male Room are asking for Spots and Stripes this time. I decided that was something I could work with and added zig-zags for good measure. 


                                                                  http://themaleroomchallengeblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/challenge-15-theme-spots-and-stripes.html

 Here is my card:


 The spots and stripes are embossed on black card and the zig-zags stamped in black with a Casual Fridays set which I got with male cards in mind but have not often used with much success. I edged them all with silver.
The sentiment is Paper Smooches. I decided to add a bit of wire which I had seen people do to great effect. No-one tells you how tricky it is to get the wire to stay put. It springs off in all directions.
The first day I gave up and went to bed. Next morning I manged to get a bit of tape on the spiralled wire while holding it down with both hands and a foot... Then it was manageable and just a case of deciding where to place it. 
I'm pleased with this and it came together quickly so that is also a bonus. Still time to get it in the post too. 















Sunday 26 July 2015

Sketch inspiration

I wanted to get back into card making after a break so I searched for a sketch to give me inspiration. I found this Stamplorations sketch:

                                                          http://stamplorations.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/sketch-challenge-36.html 

I often read the blog posts and love the techniques and inspiration there but rarely get round to joining in. This time I have. 

 I made the stamped panels by cutting them out, holding them together with a very small amount of tacky glue then stamping the flowers. I embossed in silver, coloured with promarkers and added some gems. My plan was to emboss in bronze but I couldn't find the powder, then afterwards remembered where it was. But actually, I like the turquoise and silver look. I masked them and added the light green leaves.
I wasn't very happy with the background, I'm still not really. I made the panels too big so there was not much room for the background and the panels are a bit lost on it. Also I felt there was no room for a sentiment.
Anyway, there it is, I hope you like it. 

Spots and stripes snippets...

I really wanted to join in the Less is More challenge this week where it is Chrissie's birthday.
Happy Birthday Chrissie! Have a great day. 
The challenge is to use Snippets. This is something I try hard to do but even so seem to gather larger and larger piles all around me which, try as I might, I have real trouble organising. I have recently moved house and, though I did have a clear out, plenty of stuff came with me. 
I now have my crafting corner set up. It is a little larger than before but needs a bit more organising before I can find everything I need. I spent 20 minutes looking for a rotary cutter today which I then remembered was in another room. 
So here is my card:

I used a scrap of white to emboss the main panel and then mounted it on a snippet of dotty paper. 
The paper is double sided so I sliced it up and pieced the border. I confess I cut a piece of white paper the correct size and glued the snippets down onto that rather than trying to stick them to the card base. 
Then came the extreme using of snippets: I was looking for something to add a tiny bit more interest and cut out a couple of corners to place on the main embossed panel. They looked wrong but I liked the tiny circles which fell out of the die. I cut some different corners but kept the circles to stick onto the stripes. 

By the way - don't be thinking you can slice up a strip of paper at an angle and then just flip every other one over to make your pattern. That way you get chevrons instead of a rectangle. Project for another day maybe...
I've made this for my niece who has a birthday next month (she is not into anything pink or flowery). I have real trouble with cards for 'young people'.  I have bought this Cuttlebug embossing folder and plan to use it for all my 7 nephews and niece over this coming year. I thought I could make it up in many ways, though I am sure they are not checking if they've all got the same card and wouldn't care if they did!  I've already done one embossed on metallic card which looked pretty smart. 
So this was quite fiddly but I like the result and I hope the teenager will. 
I hope it is still CAS, perhaps a bit more busy than I meant it to be. 

I'm linking this to Less is More and also
Pixies Snippets playground. I haven't been out to play for ages, sigh, but I have had fun settling in here, after the initial move anyway, and now have my own new playground so I've spent plenty of time out there.