Happy Birthday

I have been making homemade stencils for quite some time. Often, my dies are just the right dimensions to make a stencil background and I have used a variety of things to create the stencil. These often comprised paper, card, vellum or acetate. However, recently I came across Mylar sheets. I don't know what took me so long to find them, but together with dies or my Silhouette Portrait, one can make simply terrific re-usable stencils. For this card I used a Sizzix corner die. and once the Mylar sheet was cut, I used Distress Oxide Inks, applied through the stencil, using blending brushes.

I made the card for the challenge at CAS Mix Up

I bought a set of cheap brushes from eBay, I think they were described as make up brushes, but they work so well with the inks, to create beautifully smooth colour and blend them perfectly.

The 'Dreamy Butterfly' die is from Memory Box and the tiny sentiment from Avery Elle. The stitched frames were cut with dies from SSS, although I have to elongate the cut slightly to fit with British dimension cards. The width works beautifully but I just have to add around 1cm to the length. For these cards I use a sheet of A4 cut in half down the length and folded to make a tall tent fold card.

AAA Birthday has a birthday celebration so many congrats to them.

These days we have to make appointments to make a visit to the local dump, and we have one this morning, so I need to start loading up the car with some of the detritus from the garage and garden.

Wish me luck!

 

Merci

When I first started cardmaking, I was clueless as to styles and genres and it was only after I started my blog that I settled on my preferred style which is Clean and Simple. I bought all sorts of bits and bobs, and lots of the designer papers I bought have since been donated to a charity shop which has a craft section. I guess it took a period of experimentation to discover what really appealed to me. Now that the shops are opening up again following Lockdown, I shall probably be taking another contribution of stamps, dies and punches etc to the shop. I really need to de-clutter! I wish my room looked as clear as my cards!

For this one, I began by making a watercolour background, by splodging a little paint with some water on watercolour paper. I die cut a few delicate sprigs in plain white card and just one in gold. I wanted the sentiment to tie in with the other die cuts and so chose this one from Simply Graphic, a company in France (... hence the language). I think that the thickness of the lettering matches well with the delicacy of the stems. I don't remember the make of the foliage and I can't put my finger on the packaging either. I think that it is possibly Alexandra Renke.

Always Fun Challenges - Clean and Simple

 

From our family to yours

Here is a white on white, or should I say ivory on ivory card with just a little stamping. The house border die was a freebie from a mag and the background behind the circle was embossed with a Sheena Douglass EF.  The latter is sadly no longer available, but I feel sure that should they bring it back it would sell extremely well, if the number of enquiries I have had about it is anything to go by.

I fancied having the aperture cut with no impression of the die around it. My regular circle dies leave an embossed impression around the cut...even my Sizzix Framelits do this, although the circle itself is cut without an embossed border, the aperture part is left with the flattened edge. To get around this I used a circle aperture die which had some foliage in the centre, so I just cut it from both sides, turning the die through 180 degrees before the second pass.

The sentiment is from Memory Box, stamped and embossed in silver EP.

Merry Little Christmas - Anything Goes

Christmas Card Throwdown - Stamping

ABC Christmas - H Homes

The Holly and Ivy Challenge - Anything Goes

Gwen

A friend recently asked me to make a birthday card for a little girl called Gwen who is going to be three. The only information given me was that she liked animals. Should be easy you say, and so it should but when one starts to overthink things, that's when the trouble starts. I got an idea into my head which didn't actually work out, but I could seem to get away from the fact that I wanted to use my Silhouette Portrait machine to make it. I did all sorts of things wrong... I'm not the world's greatest tech brain sadly! Anyway after several incarnations I finally ended up with this card shaped as a three! I chose this particular font as I thought that the straight bottom of the number would be good to let it stand up  squarely when opened. I found this cute tiger image and decided to use that, then added the bunch of flying creatures. The tiger is raised onto dimensional pads, but when I went to stand the card up the weight of the tiger lifted the bottom left corner of the card from the surface of the shelf. So I added the little frog die-cut to keep it propped up! It looks like he wants to be friends with the tiger!

I am entering it into the challenge at AAA Birthday