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...

Sadly, I recently needed a sympathy card for my friend who lost his Mum.   It is difficult making cards for such occasions but I find inspiration knowing that the card I send might just help ease their pain a little.   To make this card, it was a first outing for Visible Image’s Forever In Your Heart stamps and matching die. To begin, I made a couple of inky panels using the ink smooshing technique.   I pressed Shaded Lilac, Victorian Velvet, Seedless Preserves and Dusty Concord Distress Inks onto my craft mat, spritzed on some water and dabbed my card into the puddles. Once I’d finished the brighter one that I was going to use for the feathers, I spritzed a little more water and pressed the second piece of card into the inks.   As there was less ink and more water, the colours are more muted. I stamped the feather using Versamark ink, added bronze embossing powder and heat set it before cutting out the feather with the matching die.   Even though the ba...

  My Colorado Craft Company Color My World stamp set was still out on my desk from the post a couple of weeks ago so I thought I’d have another play with it.   First, I decided to actually paint the brushes so I stamped onto hot-press watercolour paper and got busy with my watercolours.   To finish the cards, I heat-embossed the sentiment on vellum and wrapped it around the panel, affixed the panel to black card and then onto a kraft card blank. For the next cards, I was inspired by a tag that I made for a Facebook group challenge, the theme of which was “something you want to do more of in 2024” and mine was painting. Again, using hot-press watercolour paper, I stamped the brushes and the sentiment, although I found another stamp with the English spelling of ‘colour’ and used that instead. Next, rather than painting, I used ink-smooshing to add some colour to each panel.   On my craft mat, I smooshed several Distress Inks and sprayed water over.   I c...