Brusho Butterfly

The CAS Watercolour challenge is to create a colourful butterfly.

 

To make this card I used a Sweet Poppy stencil with some Pearlescent White embossing paste. Once I had lifted the stencil, I tapped a few grains of Brusho colours over this in Turquoise, White, Ultra Marine and Cobalt Blue. After waiting for a few moment for the colours to mix the with paste, I then spritzed with water. Over this a sprinkled a little Gold Glamour Dust and left it to dry.

The sentiment is from an old Magenta stamp simply embossed in Gold and cut with a tiny stitched rectangle die. I had to extend this by just a couple of stitches in order to fit around the image completely.

I'm really fond of butterflies for cards so I may be trying another card very soon!

Paper Towel Background

Loll Thompson never ceases to amaze me with her boundless ideas for fabulous techniques. This time at the CAS Mix Up Challenge she has invited us to make backgrounds using paper towels which have been used to mop up ink or watercolour during the process of making other projects. Often I have thrown them into the bin and thought how lovely the colours were. I vividly remember Darnell blotting up some Brusho colour from a stencil at a retreat and the paper towels looked amazing! 

Now Loll has come up with ways of using them for more cards.

I began by using a similar technique to Darnell... using 3 shades of green Brushos through a stencil with added spritzes of water. (Those cards will appear at some time in the future,) but for now here is the first attempt at using my blottings.

I put my inky towel over my watercolour paper and added another spritz of water before pressing it down onto the card. The colours here are really subtle and made me think of Spring so I went with a snowdrop die from Alexandra Renke. I cut out three layers and  just added the infils to the bottom layer.

The sentiment is an old stamp from Clearly Besotted. I thought that the coloured card base made a pleasing frame for the image.

CAS Mix Up - Paper Towel

Thanks again for your inspiration Loll!

Just one third

Recently I added to my die collection with a few sets of flowers and foliage from Sizzix. This is from one of the sets. I cut several die cuts and layered them before heat embossing with several layers of embossing powder. I used  a mix of gold and silver (which I had labelled PLATINUM on the pot, but actually it was just the mixed up leftovers from some multi coloured embossing and I didn't want to throw it away!) It's quite an interesting mix. The background panel was dry embossed with a Cuttlebug folder and the sentiment is from an old wooden stamp from Hero Arts, cut with a  tiny stitched rectangle die which just happened to fit exactly. I don't know the make of this die, it was bought cheaply as part of a set on Amazon!

This is my Designer card for Happy Little Stampers CAS Challenge, which is to use one third of the card for your design. Lots of lovely white space!

If you are afraid of leaving white space, this will be a great challenge for you to have a go... If you can only use a third of your card for the design... you're bound to have oodles of white space!

Job Done!

Yet another flower die

I really enjoyed making the  last card I posted and so as I had some more of the woodgrain background I thought I would make a similar card using a different flower die and sentiment. This flower from a Pink Fresh set just arrived  and so I was eager to try it out. I layered it several times and added the infils to just the bottom layer. I like the way the deep grey card base makes the flower a little more impactful! To make the panel I had to use a die much shorter than I needed, so I had to cut it part way from both ends, turning the card around and moving the die in between cuts. As it was quite a stretch there was one little bit which wasn't a perfect cut over the join, so that is hidden behind the large leaf! Here's a quick video of how I do it!

It's for the challenge at Seize the Birthday where the topping is Flowers!