It took a little time...

 Hi there, happy Wednesday to you all. There's another fun prompt on offer over at Lost Coast and Carmen's Veranda. 

I'm relived to finally complete my card for this challenge as I've been struggling with it for a few days. Thankfully, Inspiration struck in the wee small hours of this morning and I'm fairly happy with how things turned out.

I've married together two different stamps Stamp Journey Willy-Helene and Tic Toc from Kaisercraft to create the panel at the bottom of the card. I stencilled the whole card with Specked Egg, Peacock Feathers and Chipped Sapphire Distress Inks before stamping the images in Versa Fine.

I was thrilled to discover a lovely badge and a gift certificate waiting for me when I visited Lost Coast today. What a nice surprise - thanks so much.

If you're not familiar with this challenge why not head on over and take a look. The prizes are lovely, and the range of images and quirky sentiments available in the shop is wow! And (major enabling alert) did I mention the 25% sale? 

Have a happy day!

Paper piercing with an element of guilt...

It's a paper piercing challenge at LIM this week. I haven't used paper piercing on my cards for ages so thought this would be a nice opportunity to revisit this technique. I found my piercing tool but couldn't remember what I used to put under the card to pierce into. Then I had a light bulb moment, and this is where the element of guilt comes in: I turned over hubby's mouse mat and found a little row of holes! You may want keep this to yourselves girls, but mouse mats make great piercing mats.

I'm up to date with all my housework and have written three assignments this week so today I'm planning lots of card making. Because, as they say in the advert 'I'm worth it!'

Happy crafting everyone!

Take it Make it Challenge

So Craft Stamper Magazine now has an online challenge - wooohooo!

The idea is that Katy and the DT girls will challenge us to tackle a technique showcased in Craft Stamper magazine: then we Take it and Make it our own!

For challenge #1 we get to play with a 'Faux Airbrushing' technique, demonstrated by Joanne Allison in the March 2013 issue. We get nearly TWO whole months to grab a copy of the magazine and perfect the technique before the challenge closes at midnight Friday 5th April. The girls will announce the winner on the Craft Stamper site on  Monday 8th April. 

I couldn't resist having a go straight away as I was knocked-out by the DT cards. I'm currently into masking and thought the technique would suit this style of card.

I masked-off a section on my card and got busy with Distress Inks, then sponged through some sequin waste with more Distress Ink to achieve the faux airbrushing effect. I inked-up a beautiful Art Journey stamp, but masked the surrounding words to leave just the image of the girl. I finished by adding further detail with a Craft Stamper freebie stamp and sentiment by Hero Arts.
Not a quick process, but very enjoyable and hopefully good enough to enter the challenge.

Happy Crafting everyone!

Less is more... unless it's turquoise!

 

For Week #104 the LIM girls have on offer a sweet little sketch drawn by Jen.

 

The instructions are very simple:

 

Make sure that the card stays in this orientation so that the band remains in the horizontal plane, in the lower part of the card and that it takes up no more than 1/3rd of the height of the cardbase.

 

 

With this in mind I'm not quite sure how my 'band' crept a little up the card - I think it happened during the masking process! The sweet stamp is from Art Journey and is called 'Gorgeous Kids', and the sentiment is from Papertrey Ink. I needed to do plenty of masking with this one, which I do enjoy but find tricky. I added some scoring to give added definition to the panel.

 

I have a real passion for turquoise (did you guess???) and so found myself swooooooning at the colour of the newly arrived library shelves.

Here's Mark, our lovely Caretaker beginning the assembly job. I can't wait to see the finished result, and neither can the kids as they've been pressing their noses against the glass panel in the door all day!

 Happy crafting everyone!

 

 

A little late to the party.... Paula's Blog hop!

Hi everyone, I am just back from two wonderful weeks on the beautiful Greek Island of Santorini. Myself and hubby had a fabulous time and returning to 'normal' is proving to be very, very hard!

I haven't managed to get near my craftroom as yet (too much washing to do) so this gives me a chance to share some cards that I made to celebrate the arrival of sweet Lilly Bug a.k.a the newest recruit to the Laird household. Congratulations Paula!

I was all ready to join in the 'Welcome Lilly blog hop' last week but I missed my cue because I was on holiday!

Here is the lovely Lilly at 5 weeks old. I copied this beautiful picture from the lovely Helen's blog.

Helen played postie for all of us girls around the world and kindly delivered our cards to Paula and her family. She therefore had the honour of starting the hop which was organised by Deborah.

Sweet little Lilly was born on the 4th June 2010 weighing 7 pounds 13 1/2 ounces,
Lilly is Paula and Doug's second daughter and apparently Em is taking her role as big sister very seriously!

I sent this card to welcome Lilly.

This is the card that I made for Em,and this is the card for the proud parents!Congratulations, and lot's of love, to Paula and her family.

Totally out of my comfort zone!

Well, we all have to do it sometimes don't we?

One of my crafting resolutions for 2010 was to spread my wings a little and try some new techniques and styles. I've certainly achieved a complete change of style with this card!

The stamped image is a fabulous freebie from the March edition of Craft Stamper Magazine.

It was created for the magazine by the amazing 'Art Journey' who are based in the Netherlands.

I printed the Hero Arts digi-stamp 'Old Writing' onto some Basic Grey paper and then stamped the image of the girl. I distressed with black Versacolour ink. I stamped and clear embossed Hero Arts butterflies onto some matt black card, then added the Inkadinkadoo 'dream' stamp in the corner. The central panel is lifted on dimensionals.

I really like this stamp so will be experimenting with a few different ways to use it.

Happy crafting everyone!