May all your wishes come true

  

I love that this card is all pastel coloured and distressed. It gives such a soft, pleasing look to a card I always think!

I just love these butterflies from Hero Arts. They are just adorable! And they work up really quickly and easily using Distress Inks and an AquaMarker water colour blender pen from Letraset. I had such fun colouring these little beauties. They match perfectly with October Afternoon’s Fly a Kite collection papers. I really can’t get enough of these papers at the moment – just gorgeous!

The sentiment is a stamp from Stampin' Up! which I got through my good friend Monica Gale. There are four sentiments in this set, all in this gorgeous style. I’m going to be using them. A lot. =)

Anyway as usual, the video is below. Please don’t forget to rate my videos and subscribe to me over at my YT Channel. Also, if you ‘follow’ my Facebook and Twitter pages, then you’ll always know when my next video/blog post is up.

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Mother's day cards

I made two of these cards because now I have two mother's; a mom (my mom) and a mum (my husbands' mum). I wanted to use butterflies in the design because they are bang on trend at the moment, but I didn't have a butterfly stamp.....so I made one! 

I also spotted this post for a competition for some blog candy (72 FREE copic markers) so I'm going to use this post as my entry ;-) as I stamped and watercoloured the image (in the absence of copic marker pens!).

I made the butterfly stamp using ImagePac, which is a wonderful way we crafters can make our own stamps at home, simply using this weird gel sachets and a 60W bulb! You pretty much simply choose a design (or draw yourself), print out on transparency, then clamp it between some magnetic plates (supplied with kit) stick it under a desk lamp for a time...then viola! a new stamp has been born! And they really are as good as your standard acrylic stamp, except they're slightly off white (but who cares?).

These Mother's day cards we the simplest cards I could think of in the half hour I had to make them (on the morning before work on the day I posted them). I almost resorted to a shop-bought card (shock!! horror!!) cos I was so strapped for time. But you can't get shop bought for the most important ladies in your life, can you? So they weren't quite as 'finished' as I'd have liked, but then I'm always super-critical about my designs, however thought-out they are (or not). No video, cos my batteries had ran out on my web cam, and I was mega rushed!

Flower Birthday card (watercolour)

It's been so long since I made a card I had to restrain myself with this one...so I plugged for a watercolour, which I haven't done in ages. I really love the effect, which I created using Tesco's cheapo 'Go Create' felt tip pens (for kids!), due to the absence of more grown-up pens :-) I scribbled on an acrylic block with each colour, and then painted using a paintbrush as if I was using watercolour paints. For extra definition and shading effects I used the felt tip pen directly on the damp paper.

The paper was just crappy copy paper covered in a couple of coats of gesso, an idea I was first introduced to by Mel at this blog post. It looks like seriously expensive embossed paper (see first photo in close up), and is really nice to work with for very little effort, just a little patience whilst it dries, but if you do a whole stack of this paper at once, you'll always have some to hand. I love how the watercolour 'bleeds' slightly down the grain of the gesso paint. You really don't have to be an artist to do this, in fact keeping between the lines doesn't look as good, hehe.