Cheers!

This is a card I made a while ago but I still haven't had time for crafting what with work and gardening.  I'm hoping to get some crafting time in this weekend...

I stamped the doilies before running the cardstock through my embossing machine.  The giant glass shape was cut out on the silhouette, and the image stamped on afterwards.  There's a slight blurring on the top where I double stamped a bit by accident, but I think it adds to the alcohol effect of the card. :)

I added glossy accents to the little and big martini glasses to give them a bit of dimension after colouring the image with markers.

Sorry for the lack of posts...

I've been working extra the past few weeks and haven't had much (read 'any') time for card crafting or blog posting.  I'll try to get something interesting here soon. :)

It's 5:00 Somewhere...

I made this card for Kenny K's challenge of Flowers, flowers, flowers.  Colouring these images takes a while so I haven't done many recently.  In fact, this card took over 2 hours to make...  But I'm very happy with how it turned out.

The digital image was printed off and then cut out on my Silhouette (I printed and cut out a bunch of images a while back, so this isn't counted in that 2+ hours).  I coloured her in with pencil crayons, trying a few new shading ideas on the hair that I think worked out well.  The gold jewelry and dots on the dress were done with a gold gel pen.  I coloured the alcohol in the glass with a glitter pen and then covered the glass with glossy accents.

The circular die cut is by Marianne Createables, the large flowers and tag are Spellbinders.  For the small flowers I punched tissue paper and threaded either a gold brad or a piece of wire through the layers, turning the layers so they look full.  For the wire flowers, I topped them with rhinestones.  For the bigger flowers I curled down the petals for the die cut and added the punched and gathered flower to the centre, curling the petals first in, then out a bit.

For the card base, I stamped Impression Obsession's gradation in aqua.  I glued the two main die cuts on, curling the tag's edges.  The sentiment was also stamped in aqua, from a There She Goes set.  I used foam tape to apply the woman and carefully glued on the flowers, fluffing them up again once they'd set.

Shimmery Butterfly

I'm submitting this card to two challenges, Simon Says Stamp's Things With Wings and A Blog Named Hero's All That Glitters.

I started the paper a while back and only figured out what I wanted to do with it today.  I put a few drops of reinker ink (blue and peacock green) on a stamp block, misted it, swirled the ink around a bit and then put my piece of watercolour paper down.

Today, I looked at the paper and while I liked the colours, thought I could do better.  As one of the challenges is all about shininess, I used some complementary metallic gelatos over the ink, misted it, and smeared the colour in.  This time I used my heat tool to dry the paper, as I wanted to work with it right away.

For the butterfly, I heat embossed red glitter embossing powder on vellum.  I'm impressed that the velum didn't curl or anything when I applied the heat gun.  For a bit more colour I wet a brush and applied some gold and metallic red gelato to the wings (starting with the back and then doing the front when the colour didn't show through enough).  I think markers would have given more colour but I didn't want to colour over the gelatos in case it ruined them (the way colouring over crayons or pencil crayons will).

I fussy cut the butterfly out and then stamped my flower in a true blue ink on the panel.  I used a green glitter pen for the stem.

The watercolour paper curled a bit so I attached it to my cardstock using heavy double sided tape and some glue (as a few bits curled up despite the tape).  I glued on the metallic red ribbon and then the butterfly.

 And, so you can see some of that shimmer, a detail shot.

CAS: Shimmery Joy

I made this card for CAS-ual Friday's 100th challenge, which is a tic tac toe board.  The line I picked was "kraft - bling - emboss".

I started with a piece of kraft cardstock.  Kraft isn't my favourite colour to work with but I took inspiration from these cards by Jennifer McGuire.

I started out by stamping a flower from Close to my Heart's Delight set, in white pigment in on the kraft.  Originally I was going to do the black and white square on the challenge board, but realized it wasn't in my line, so instead of doing a raised layer on the flower embossed in white and popped up, I decided to emboss over the white with red glitter embossing powder.  This gave the card a nice Christmas feel (maybe I don't need to buy a mistletoe stamp after all).

I masked a part of the flower so the black ink I used for the stem wouldn't get on it, then stamped and embossed "JOY" (from a cheap stamp set I got at Michael's).  To finish off I added a bit of the bling the challenge required.

I love the shimmer of the red embossing powder.

Purr-fect Kitty

I'm submitting this card to 2 challenges, Some Odd Girl's April Sketch Challenge and Simon Say's Stamp's Anything Goes Challenge.

This is the sketch I had to follow:

And here's my card:

I started out with the idea of a cat playing with yarn, and having the yarn be the 'flags' at the bottom of the sketch.  Which meant finding yarn, or something close enough.  The only thing I had was pink floss, so that set my colour scheme.  I decided that since I needed two frames the pink would go best with a monochrome look, and so settled on black, grey and white.

I cut out my frames and used a tape gun to attach them to the black card base.  I then played with the floss to make my loops and cat toy.  I glued the floss under where the black ribbon was set to go.  Using a lighter, I fixed the ends of the floss and ribbon so they won't unravel.

I carefully glued the ribbon over the floss and then started on my images.  The ball of yarn was stamped in black on pink fluorescent cardstock, and the cat on grey cardstock.  I then coloured the cat with pencil crayons and fussy cut them out.

To give the card a bit of dimension I used a pop dot in the centre of the yarn and cat's face, gluing the rest of the images down.  This way they pop up a bit.  I left the cat's tail unglued.

For the sentiment, I used the 'Purr-fect' stamp from Some Odd Girl's Clever Kitties set (which is where the yarn and cat are from).  'Have a' was carefully inked from a JustRite stamp and 'birthday' is from a There she Goes stamp.  I'd intended to do the entire sentiment in black and at the last moment noticed my pink Hero Arts fluorescent ink, and so used that to give it a bit of umph.

Papertrey Ink Blog Hop: Tilted

I originally planned to do a biplane card for this challenge/hop, but I saw someone else do that, so I decided to come up with another idea.  Here it is:

I started out with a light blue card and a second piece of cardstock in a darker blue.  I scored the darker panel how I wanted to cut it (so I wouldn't need to add pencil lines, and I kind of like the bits of scored edge you can see on the panel pieces).  I cut the panels and then using the off piece in the centre, drew pencil lines where my stamping would have to go (I did the same thing for the sentiment).

The stamps are all from Papertrey Ink's Daydreamer's set.  I used black and grey ink for the dandelion heads, and a green Crayola marker for the stems and leaves.  The flying dandelion seeds were done with a fine tipped black marker.

I attached the panels with pop dots and voila.