A Fairy with a Difference!

Now there's a fairy I'd definitely want on my side! She's full of character and seems to me to have a 'don't mess with me' attitude! Her name is Sparkles and she's from Stitchy Bear Stamps and she's really interesting to colour. I went to town with those flower petal/wings, mixing four colours - salmon pink, carmine, honeycomb and burnt orange - to get a gradation I liked. I've framed her with a nestibility frame cut from some Coredinations Whitewash card. I embossed it with one of the Spellbinders Impressabilities and then sanded it to reveal the stronger green. The background pink is also Coredinations, but the standard variety this time, embossed with the same pattern and, again, sanded. I cut the shape with a Craft Tonic punch and border system. The papers are from a My Mind's Eye pad that I love. I've finished it off with a tissue paper flower. I cut layers with my peony nestibility die and coloured them with the shades from the wings, then assembled them with a brad and scrunched. It does give a nicely mulit-tonal flower.

I gave serious thought as to whether or not to embellish further but decided that I love that sanded Coredinations so much, I really didn't want to hide any more of it!

A Real Challenge

So, the challenge at Crafty Cardmakers this time around is to do something that challenges you. To use something you've bought and then consigned to a drawer or cupboard where it hasn't seen the light of day. Well, there are a few of those - I'm thinking specifically of some collage stamps I have, but in truth I have used those - just now the way I expected to. So, what haven't I used at all?

Well, in Hobbycraft a while ago, they had reduced a thing called a 'wire designer' and I really liked the idea of making wire patterns to add to cards, so I splashed out and bought it, along with a selection of beautiful, jewel-toned wires. There were some patterns supplied with the designer, but every time I tried one it was a complete failure. It's about that time that I consigned it to my bedroom - where things I don't use so often tend to be put.

Anyway, after considering this challenge for a while, I managed to find the various bits I'd need and tried the supplied patterns again. I wasn't any more successful than before, so I had a play on my own and came up with a basic flower shape that seemed to work. Four more and some freehand writing later, I came up with this:



I've also used my trusty Wizard to cut my layers and a tag, and all have been textured using a Spellbinders Impressability. I love the way you can emboss the die shape at the same time as you get the texture with these - it looks so much more 'finished' as a result. I attached the flowers and word to the card using a few single stitches and anchored the thread on the back with standard sticky tape.

I've also come away from my comfort zone as far as colours are concerned. I looked at the colour wheel and decided that since my flowers fell into the red/red violet/violet area of the wheel, I should go for a contrast and went for a green for the background then matted that onto some very dark purple, green again, and then found some paper I've had forever which is a rose pattern with dark green and dark purple. It's not a colourscheme I've tried before - not that I've got a problem with green and purple - it's just that I'd normally stick to pastel shades and not go so dark. I was really quite pleased with the result, and can definitely see me using something similar again - especially the greeting. It looks better (to me) than hand-written, but you can basically do whatever you want to which is quite liberating!

The Stamp Man Award

The idea of this award is to to go through the things you've made this year and decide on a favourite - one which is special in some way. I chose this one because (as various people who know me know) I've had problems with stamping in the past. Now, thanks to encouragement from various people, I'm not completely scared of it. And this card is one I did to prove to myself that I could actually achieve a result I was happy with. The details are in the previous post.

For full details of the award, follow the link in the sidebar.

Sketch Saturday 72 and Colour Create 29

Two challenges, one card.



The first is a sketch challenge from Sketch Saturday and the second is a colourscheme from Colour Create which called for red, yellow, black and white.

I'm one of those who find it difficult to incorporate black in cards, but I remembered that I'd made a paper with those colours from a Dover Books sample ages ago. Of course, I couldn't find it, so I had to start from scratch. The original is an outline of fans against a background, and I took one repeat of the background, coloured it, and made it into an A4 sheet. The two parallel backing sheets were made by inking up my new Spellbinders Impressiblity (it's called 'Floral Stone') and embossing pieces of white and yellow card with red and black. A bit of matting finished both of those. The image is one of the Sarah Kay stamps I bought recently. I added some ribbon, flowers and a sentiment and that's it. The sentiment is kind of an experiment. I like the look of the new stamps from Spellbinders that are sized to fit nestibilities. It's a great idea, but when I looked, the only set I thought I'd use in terms of the sentiments was just too big to be practical for cardmaking. So, I decided to do my own! I played in Photoshop Elements, sized a circle and placed each letter and symbol separately. (Unfortunately, there's no option to have anything other than a horizontal line as a baseline for text in that software, so I had to twist each letter separately and place it.) Next time, I'll probably make things a little smaller, but the theory works and of course, I can have any wording I like - and any image (within reason) in the middle, so it looks like I might have saved myself some money ...