Under Her Wings

It's Variations Week again at Sweet Pea Stamps... always a favourite of mine because I love seeing all the very different projects everyone creates from the same starting point. This time around the DT are all playing with this adorable image "Under Her Wings" by Concetta Kilmer:

I decided to do something a bit different from my usual square cards and make a stepper card:

And can I just say at this point how much I love my Cameo? :) Whereas usually for more complicated folded cards I would be fiffing and faffing with a ruler and pencil and craft knife, measuring and cutting and scoring, for this card I simply opened up a pre-bought template in my Silhouette Studio and sent it to the Cameo to cut - et voila! :D The template even included shapes to cut the paper panels too.

I coloured the image in soft pastel colours using my Promarkers and chose pretty papers to match.

And then finished things off with a punched border and some pretty pearls.

And that was my pretty pastel stepper card. :) You can find this image in either red rubber or digi format in the Sweet Pea Stamps store.

My first ever stepper card!

I started this blog when, after moving house and finally getting my very own craft room where I could spread out and have space to play properly, I got massively reimmersed and remotivated in my crafting. I have been scrapbooking for around 6 years and, over those 6 years, have progressively gotten more and more into cardmaking too.

However, it's only since the move and having my own craft space that I have really started to grow and experiment as a crafter, trying out new techniques and ideas and getting more ambitious and creative. I've gotten into stamping and inking, making ATCs, cosmic shimmers, all things Tim Holtz, embossing folders etc etc etc! And in particular, I have started experimenting more with my cardmaking.

For the most part, the cards I have made thus far have essentially been an exercise in decorating card blanks - card blanks have the advantage of coming with a ready-made, matching envelope and I've made some lovely cards using card blanks. But lately I've been hankering to get more creative and to emulate some of the incredible work I see out there in blogland (and on e.g. Create and Craft) where people are making all sorts of intricate, original, truly hand-made cards, where the basic card itself is made from scratch.

I've already had a go at making a tri-fold shutter card and the next one I wanted to try was the side-stepper card. So last night I finally got chance to get in my craft room and have a play, and this was the result (lighting was not great for taking photos, especially as I used a shimmer card which tends to reflect the light of a camera flash!):

I combined my urge to try out a stepper card with my need to use this gorgeous card topper that I printed out from the Joanna Sheen CD I recently bought. I'd printed it as an experiment, to see if my printer's colour issues were resolved, and it just came out *so* gorgeous that I had to use it for something!

I followed this great tutorial to measure out the cuts and folds to make the base card and I printed out matching papers, embellishments and a sentiment from the CD and used them to decorate the base card.

I'm really pleased with how this came out - the side stepper card was remarkably easy to make and to decorate and I'm loving the overall look that comes from using the coordinating elements from this CD. I think I'll be getting a lot of use out of this CD.. and I'll definitely be making more stepper cards!!