International Art and Soul Challenge 33

Our theme for this fortnight is All About Boys/Men. Other than that, your project can be anything, any style, any technique, any colours.

I chose to make a birthday card for my husband who recently had a birthday. His preference is for plain and unadorned, so I mainly stuck to that.

I know it''s a funny angle, but I wanted to show the Happy Birthday.

here it is so you get a better perspective on the image.

The image is from a Pamela West CD Rom from Joanna Sheen. While a lot of those images are very flowery/girly, there are some beautiful landscape type images too. Unfortunately, having come across a blank stepper card while clearing up, and deciding to use it, neither of the papers provided for this image seemed to work for the small areas you get on these cards. So, I took a small sample of the image in a mainly blue and mainly yellow area and tiled thse to get some papers that tone well. I combined the image with an outline and the yellow paper in Photoshop Element and added a bevel to give better definition before printing. I then die cut a greeting (not sure whose die that is), and my husband's name (using a XCut die) as well as a fairy cake (Marianne die, I think. It's pale blue.) I added a little shimmer (and colour) to the candle flame and shimmer only to the icing using Crafter's Companion glitter pens.

Now, a question. I often see this style of card being made, and I just wonder how people post them. (Obviously not an issue in this instance.) I rarely make this sort of card because I find that the varying thickness of parts of the card when folded leads to the card being warped and looking quite tatty. And that's before you compress it to any extent. So, do people make boxes for these cards? Or do they unfold them out so they're rectangular, leaving the recipient to work out how to display the card? (I know that easel cards can be a puzzle for some people, so could only imagine what they'd make of one of these unfolded. I used to make birthday cards for people at work which were passed around for signing, and with easel cards, I was often taken aside by one of the people signing it to warn me that the card needed mending. It didn't - it just wasn't obvious that the design was intended.)

Any ideas/suggestions will be welcomed. I do like this style of card, but unless I solve this issue, I doubt I'll be making many of them.

I do hope you can join us this time.

International Art and Soul Challenge 14

This fortnight's challenge at International Art and Soul is to make a box or bag. It can be for any purpose and design, colour etc is entirely up to you.

After almost 17 years working in a special school, I took the decision to leave at the end of the summer term.  During that time, I've worked with many wonderful children, but those same children often presented with very challenging behaviour, and consequently, good teamwork among the adults was essential. I decided to make a little gift for all those women I've worked closely with at the school with whom I still had contact, and the starting point was a gift box. For some of them, I used a die set from Tonic - the Kensington handbag die. I do like these, and I especially like how there are variations on a theme which stop them from looking too samey.

This is one variation of the bag. The paper is from Joanna Sheen's Pamela West CDRom. The chain was from a pack I bought via Amazon which just seemed to work better than ribbon or twine for the purpose.

A more standard version of the bag, with paper from the same CDRom.

And another ...

And another.

And again - this time with gorgeous paper from the Mehndi Peacock paper pack by our own DT Co-ordinator, Jane, here at International Art and Soul!

And the same combination with a different colour base.

And for a bit of variety, I've also made some using the Chelsea die set, again from Tonic. While I prefer how this design looks, it's an absolute pain to get it to close in a non-permanent way. I've used hook and loop fastener, but there's enough tension in the closure that means that the sticky side peels away from the card or from the plastic of the fastener. I ended up having to add some hot glue to keep the fastener attached to the card. There is a tab arrangement in the lacy over layer, but I've struggled to get that to work, and it's not there if you choose to use patterned paper. I notice that, in the Tonic demonstration video, the demonstrator uses hot glue to close the bag on a one-off basis. Anyway, enough moaning from me.

This time I used one of the gorgeous marble effect papers from the Crafty Image Emporium CD Rom from Crafty Computer Paper.

And the same paper with a contrasting card base.

And finally, another Chelsea design, this time with paper from the Pamela West CDRom.

I've cross stitched a coaster or handbag mirror for each of the recipients, each with their name and the symbol of the class we worked in together. 

So, that's that. I hope you'll have time to join us this fortnight.

International Art and Soul Challenge 12

Our theme this fortnight at International Art and Soul is Elements of Nature. You're free to interpret that as you wish! My ideas were around horses, trees and leaves!

This is a card for one of my two (twin) brothers-in-law, and I've kept it fairly simple as a result. I've used an image and paper from Joanna Sheen's Pamela West CDRom. I've found this CD to be a really useful one for the folks who I find difficult! It's got a lot of landscapes and garden images (as well as some gorgeous floral images). I added the cream background and sentiment in Photoshop Elements before printing, added some matting and a couple of leafy borders cut using a magenta-coloured die which I think might be Crafts Too but I may be very wrong on that. It's a gorgeous die, and despite being fairly detailed, always cuts well - definitely a favourite of mine.

I hope you can join us this time.

A Couple of 70th Birthday Cards

In the last week, I was asked by two different people to make 70th birthday cards for two different men. They've got fairly different interests, so they turned out rather different, although I tend to make my 'male' cards fairly plain as I know my oh and sons don't like things to look 'fussy'.

This gentleman, apparently likes to sit outside in or close to his shed, drinking a beer. So, I adapted an image from the Joanna Sheen CDrom of images by Pamela West by adding a beer glass! I designed the background paper using colours from the image, as the papers on the CD tend towards the floral!

The second gentleman is a life-long supporter or Harrow Borough Football Club. I used an image from Pollycraft, which I adapted using Photoshop Elements to give him a 70 badge, and to add the words to the scarf and to colour it red. I coloured the rest of the image with Promarkers, and put the stripy paper together in Photoshop Elements. 

And those are both examples of why I love digital images - you can add those little details that personalise  a card.

I'd like to enter the first card into the following challenges:

The Crafty Pad where they want autumn colours,

Secret Crafter where they want milestone birthdays,

My Heart Pieces where anything goes,

Bearly Mine where anything goes.

I'd like to enter the second card into the following challenges:

Quirky Crafts where they want numbers,

Just Some Lines where they want two different colouring media (Promarkers, but the scarf was coloured digitally)

Tuesday Taggers where anything goes.