Crafty As L

My card this week was for a friend’s 60 th birthday.   Handily, one of the things he learned to do when he retired was play the drums so Feel The Beat stamp set was perfect. For the background, I started with Parallax stencil and blended grey ink in the centre, fading to the edges. The drummer was stamped and clear heat-embossed in the centre to begin.   I’d just finished a red, white and blue project so I think those colours were in my head!   I stamped the scribble alternately in red and blue around the edges to make a frame.   Pulling the small stamps from a variety of Visible Image’s music themed sets, I stamped and heat-embossed, in either clear or silver powder, these around the frame and the drummer. Using the sentiment from Make Some Noise and the numbers from Birthday Balloons, I stamped them in the same colours as earlier and matted them on black card. These were added to the card using thin foam tape.   I used the same small stamps to d...

My card this week is one I made for a cat-loving friend.   The stamp set was a limited edition to celebrate Visible Image’s 20 th birthday called Purr-fect Birthday and I love the silhouettes and fun sentiments.   It’s a great set to use for quick cards and brilliant for those tricky male cards too. For background, I blended blue and red inks through the Squared stencil. Whilst that was drying, I stamped the cat in the box onto white and kraft card.   I added a little shading to the brown box and then fussy cut them both, chopping the cat off the brown box.   The brown box was then glued to the white one, with the cat peeking out of the top. Returning to the background, I replaced the stencil and used a fine black pen to draw around the squares.   The various cats were then stamped into the big squares. I stamped some paw prints onto the other squares and then added the sentiment.   Each of the cats’ eyes were finished with clear Nuvo Drops to m...

Our Design Team theme this week is Father’s Day and I’ve made a clean and simple card for my Dad.   He loves a bonsai tree, as do I.    They are so majestic despite being miniature.   When seeing them at gardening shows, I’m always amazed as to how old they are.    When I was young, I grew an orange tree from a pip and Dad suggested we grow it on as a bonsai.   It lived for many years on the kitchen windowsill in its little pot. For my bonsai card, I started by stamping the tree from  Resilient Bonsai in Versafine Clair Pinecone ink and clear heat-embossing.   I heat-embossed the pot part again, this time using Versamark and gold powder. After smooshing some Distress Inks on a block, I sprayed them with water and added some colour to the tree.   I watercoloured the pot using metallic gold paint. After fussy-cutting the tree and pot, the white edges of the trunk were visible so I used a brown marker pen to darken these up. T...