Happy Birthday Husband!

Well for my husband's first birthday as a married man, I wanted to do something a little special and branch out using some patterned paper...and some leather!

The strip of leather was literally something I re-used off a clothing tag - it was double thickness so I pealed it in half and then had a nice thinner piece, that was pre-sticky ready for sticking to the card.

I wasn't sure about the flower, but I couldn't think of anything else to finish it off. He loved it anyway!

Brilliant Red celebration card!

I was putting the card together when I got to this point and stopped, cos I really liked it just like this! But I wanted to finish the card with the complete design I had in mind, so I just took a few more photos of the part finished card so I had a record....

I braved free-hand writing again. I did almost miss-spell it, but hey, it's handwriting, not a computer print out...mistakes happen. Just don't look too closely, haha!

This is the original card I had in mind. I love the three stars, it's such a bright, vibrant card!

The stars were done with clear embossing on red card, then I sponged blue ink over the top. This makes the clear embossing pop. I layered them on blue card for a bit of an outline and doodled with white around the edges. I used a darker piece of red card and a background scribble stamp in white embossing for the background strip. I doodled a border around the edge of this too. I was going to use a piece of white for this, but I didn't want this to look like a 4th July card - it's only January (and in any case I don't celebrate this cos I'm not American).

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.

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!