Crafty As L

How is your Christmas card making coming along? I’m really enjoying making a few cards each month resulting in a variety of styles, depending what I’m into each month.   It’s taking the pressure off the usual panic crafting at the end of November anyway. This week’s theme is white heat embossing on blue card.   My featured stamp is Gaggle of Geese by Lavinia stamps and I’m using some lovely pearlescent card I found languishing at the back of the cupboard.   It’s from  First For Paper called Stardream and the colour’s called Vista. To begin, I stamped the geese in Versamark and heat embossed in white.   The sentiment is from Taylored Expressions Modern Holiday Greetings.  To give the geese a bit of dimension, I coloured the beaks with a yellow Posca pen.  I also added a dot for the eye using a Micron Archival black pen.   Then for the messy bit – creating snow by splattering with a white Posca pen!   It goes everywhere!!   It’s a...

  This week’s card is one I made after watching the fabulous Jennifer McGuire on YouTube.  Her card looked so elegant so I wanted to have a go.  On reflection, I think I could have done with a larger stencil that covered more of the card. To begin, I cut a bunch of strips of various widths from 4 colours of card.  This is a great way to use up some of those off-cuts! Next, I glued the strips onto some scrap paper and trimmed the panel to the height of the card blank.  With Distress Oxide Weathered Wood, I used a blending brush to stencil the Frame pattern (Sweet Poppy Stencils) centrally onto the panel and card blank. The birthday and shadow dies are by Honey Bee Stamps and were cut from the same-coloured card as the strips and mounted onto a stitched circle die cut. I finished the sentiment panel with some stamping. Due to the stencil not being quite big enough, I thought the card needed a bit more interest so added rhinesto...

  Do you remember my post last January when I said I was going to try to make a few Christmas cards each month so that it wasn’t all a frantic panic in December?  Well, that lasted all of one month and I made a grand total of 2! Doh!! So, a new year and a new attempt – fingers crossed this one will go better?  I’ve been feeling a bit fed up lately due to not being well so thought I’d treat myself to this stencil set.  It’s by Taylored Expressions, a new company for me, and it’s designed to make mass-producing cards easier as you create 4 backgrounds with the stencil.  It's designed for the US sized version of A4, which is slightly shorter and fatter than the UK version but it works just fine. For the leaves, I blended SU! Old Olive ink through stencil 1 and SU! Garden Green through stencil 2 onto SU! Crumb Cake card.  You can use the same green for each stencil though – that’s what I did for my envelopes as I like to use a waterproof ink on them....

As you know, I’m a great lover of cats so, this stencil on Sweet Poppy Stencils’ website immediately called to me.  It’s called Faith and I think it has a very calm, serene feel to it.  I planned on using my Mooch silhouette with it but hadn’t envisaged it looking like a patronus from Harry Potter! I thought I’d make two cards but in different colours to see which looked best.  First, I used my blending brushes and Rococo Rose and Pretty Peacock inks, plus a touch of Smoky Slate, through the stencil.   Next, I stamped Mooch and then grounded him by using my hillside mask and blending some grey ink.  I added another hillside slightly paler and then some mountains, paler still, to give the illusion of depth. Trees were stamped either side and I used the tops of the trees for bushes in the foreground.  I used the Star Cluster and heart Fairy Charm as the focal point for Mooch’s gaze.  These were stamped in Versafine Claire Glamorous and Sea ...