Crafty As L

My makes this week are the card and ATC I made for my swap partner in this month’s Visible Image ATC swap.   The theme is “Summer Love” so it can be anything you love about summer.   Being solar powered as I am, I love the sun and the warmth that the British summer sometimes brings.   What I also love is the massive array of flowers so I test drove my latest purchase, Daisy Grunge . To begin I stamped the large daisy in Versafine Clair Nocturne and heat-set with clear embossing powder.   I planned to use the metallic watercolours and the embossing resists the lines, making them remain visible.   The ATC was straight forward but I hadn’t quite decided on the size of card so I just stamped the daisy on a half A4 piece of card, to be trimmed down later. For the colour of my background, I opted for some ink smooshing using Salty Ocean Distress Ink and Weathered Wood Distress Spritz and some water on my glass mat, repeatedly pressing the card into the inks un...

Today is Father’s Day in the UK and you may recall my Father’s Day inspiration for my Visible Image DT post at the end of last month.   I had my Dad in mind when I made that one.   However, I needed another card for my Father-in-Law so here’s what I created for him. My plan loosely involved beer bottles and a wall but I decided to add a cat peeking under the wall.   This is exactly what our youngest cat, Dill, would be doing.   I marked in pencil where the stencil bricks end and added a bit of sticky note to mask then stamped the cat from Curious Cats . Whilst I had that set out, it occurred to me that the whiskers would make rather good grass so I stamped that along the bottom edge. Before stencilling the brickwork, I lightly blended some brown ink so that the mortar lines wouldn’t be stark white.   Then I blended terracotta ink through Distressed Brick stencil. To give the bricks some texture and interest, I mixed a small amount (which was still way too ...

Our Design Team brief this week is Summer/Picnic and on a warm summer evening, my husband and I like to go watch the sun set over the sea with a bottle of fizz.   Our version of a picnic is that we occasionally have a bag of chips to go with it!   For my card this week, I started by stamping, clear heat-embossing and colouring the champagne bottle and cork from  Anyone For Bubbles and cut them out with the matching dies . To make the champagne flutes, I stamped and clear heat-embossed them onto vellum.   I then pressed my Versamark pad over the top of them, added clear embossing powder and heat-set.   I coloured champagne onto the back of the vellum.   The glasses were cut out with the matching dies too. To make the sea, I first sprayed a variety of blue Distress Stains onto a piece of card.   To make the waves, I die-cut the  Framed Fibres then sprayed that too.   Once it was dry, I used a Tim Holtz Embossing Dabber to add some s...