Happy New Year!!

What a manic few months it has been here! I've been DIYing....and that meant all my cardmaking stuff was packed up and put on hold (nightmare for me!) and I spent my days fitting new bathrooms and painting rooms. But this now means that instead of having a tiny part of the dining room to craft in, I now have half of the guest room to spread my stuff about in! It is bliss, all that space! I have no shelving or storage as yet, so it's all totally disorganised, but it's a start and it's so exciting!!!

Then Christmas came along...I had both families here for our first Christmas as a married couple and it was busy but lovely to have all my family around at such a special time.

Then during all this kerfuffle, I managed to apply for, and land myself a new job! Which was just the icing on the cake, as my old job had been getting me down for some time. So, I start that on Wednesday. A little nervous about going to pastures new, but I really can't wait to get cracking with a new challenge, and it's a perfect time, what with it being a spanking new year as well. Hurrah!

So, my New Year's resolutions....well, apart from the usual boring ones, like more exercise, eat less, blah blah blah, my main resolution is to start making more videos like I promised a couple of months back! I've had no end of problems with getting the web cam up and running, and unfortunately, it's my laptop that is the problem (not enough power in my onboard graphics) so I obviously can't resolve this issue very cheaply. But my camera DOES work on my husbands PC, so even though this is a huge faff (his PC not being in my craft room where everything is on hand) I will still be able to do some sort of videoing - yay! So watch this space - I promise there will be videos at last soon!

Anyway, I've made no cards so far this year (shocking!), but I've got loads of ideas and new goodies from Santa, so I'm off to get crafty.... xx

Flower print card - freestyle stamping

This card is nothing like I've done before, I just felt like having a play and being artistic...well, trying to be artistic...and I love it! Must try to branch out more often! There are two cards here, one is a Happy Birthday card and the other is a Get Well Soon card, but they're both pretty much the same.

I used my new Basic Grey Ornamental Flower stamp set for this card. I treated myself for making my Thank You cards for my wedding (which I've still yet to post...I promise I will soon!). I white embossed some and just white stamped others to create 'depth' and added the flower heads as decoupage cut outs. I coloured the flower heads in dark blue, and then used my white souffle pen to draw the swirl on them - but the dark blue ink hadn't quite dried so it slightly discoloured my souffle pen. But I really liked the effect and it matched the light blue paper perfectly so it looked deliberate ;-) I love it when accidental mistakes just WORK!

I felt like a change....

I never use orange. I don't often do minimalist. So I did both for this card! And I have been influenced by all the orange and black flooding the blogs from all the Hallow'een cards. I don't 'get' Hallow'een myself so I never bother with cards etc for this celebration. It's definitely more of an American thing than a UK thing! But I love some of the effects I've seen using these colours, so I thought I'd have a go myself.

Most of my design ideas come to me when I am just about to fall asleep for the night. Which is great, but quite irritating, because I will want to get up and scribble the idea down before I forget it, but can never manage it, because I am practically asleep at this point....so I just imagine making the card in my mind and usually the next morning, I have at least a vague recollection of what I designed.

This idea came from one of these designs, but the only thing I could remember was using the scribble stamp as a background directly onto the base card, and having a bright ribbon on the top and the bottom (in the end, I only used the bottom as it looked too fussy with one at the top as well).

The stamps are all stamped using black ink, then quickly embossed with holographic powder for a bit of bling. This unfortunately doesn't show up very well in the photos (the lighting is awful, I'm sorry) but in real life, it definitely adds to the overall effect. I'm not sure about the scalloped edges...I'm still considering chopping them off completely...but I may not bother.

Not my best/most favourite card, but I like it enough to put it on here for you all to have a look at....what do you think?

Get Well Soon - again!

I made this card in a rush (hope it doesn't show!) for my Father-in-Law who wanted a card for a friend. I happily sat and made a gorgeous girly get well soon card...then he informed me it was for a bloke and the card I'd already made was totally inappropriate.

Man cards are notoriously difficult to design at the best of times, but I was in a super rush, so I just went right back to basics, grabbed some co-ordinating paper and my white souffle pen and whipped this one up in about half an hour. Then I decided I hated it, because originally I'd used the yellow as a background to all of the squares, so I pulled most of it apart again and replaced the yellow with the green. A vast improvement! And I sent it off with no guilty feelings - I'm my own harshest critic.

Get Well Soon

For this card, I wanted something bright and cheerful, so the recipient would feel, well, brighter and cheered by it! I had thought of doing something with a cartoon/stamp of someone with a leg in plaster, but I couldn't find anything suitable, and I decided on this design. Because I was also strapped for time, I also used this design to make a similar Happy Birthday card for a friend, but this time I used a DL size card for a long and thin version. The photo did not come out so well, so I have not included it here, but it's just a long and thing version of this card with a different sentiment!!

I created this card using a stamp I made from a Cuttlebug die cut and funky foam - an idea I saw on Mel's blog and clear embossed the stamps on pink paper. Then I used cranberry ink and sponged over the flowers to make them 'pop'. I really love this effect...it makes a very boring piece of pink copy paper look like expensive background paper - bonus!

I then printed the sentiment on blue paper and sponged the edges in a dark blue ink to give a bit more vah-vah-voom. My paper collection is quite depressing, mainly due to my budget, so I have to spice it up in any way I can...

The rest was made with creative use of my nestibilities and lots of patience, but eventually I came up with something that I was happy with as the final design. I don't usually use window cards, but decided to have a go with this one, and quite like the effect.