Beach Holidays

 

My Roar No More card made me a Princess at Freshly Made Sketches this week :)  And in true Princess style, I have done nothing since!  So I thought I’d post another of my Dirty Dozen cards.

The theme for this month was the song Summertime. 

Summertime in Australia of course means long school holidays, the beach and Christmas.

 

Most Christmas stamps are very "snowy" so I decided to try to make a Christmas beach card instead.

I brayered my circle with pool party and turquoise at the top and river rock at the bottom. I also added some dots of white pen at the waters edge for the foam. I used copics to colour the thongs and also added a little shadow on the sand.

I didn’t exactly use traditional xmas colours either, but I was trying for a tropical Christmas look.

 

Ingredients :

Stamps : Sunny Fun, Four the holidays

Card : espresso, white, pool party, calypso coral, everyday enchantment dsp

Ink : pool party, turquoise, river rock, memento black

Other : white pen, brayer, square scallop, big shot, , square punch, copics

 

Kathy

Roar No More

 

I have wanted to make this card ever since I got my Two by Two and Dinoroar sets with the new catalogue last year.

I have been thinking about it again recently because both of these sets are on the retiring list :(  I have used them a lot but I still hadn’t attempted this card idea of mine.

The Paper Players have a clean and simple masculine challenge this week and when I saw the sketch at Freshly Made Sketches I thought it was the perfect time to give it a try.

 

 

Ingredients :

Stamps : Dinoroar, Two by two, Distressed dots

Card : pool party, white, lucky limeade

Ink : memento black, white, pool party

Other : copics, big shot, chevron ef, mds (sentiment)

 

It is not my own original idea, but my “take” on a funny Hallmark card I had seen a long time ago. I wanted to see if I could take inspiration from it but create my own Stampin Up version.

The original -

Kathy

Purple Love

 

I wanted to use my new Swallowtail stamp again and I found a great sketch at Freshly Made Sketches to inspire me.  I did change it a little and made mine a square card instead so that I could fit the whole butterfly on.

I stamped and embossed the Swallowtail with Elegant Eggplant onto crumb cake card and painted over it with white ink.  Then I used wisteria, eggplant and calypso coral markers and a blender pen to colour it.

Ingredients :

Stamps : Swallowtail, Curly Cute

Card : wisteria, white, crumb cake, grey

Ink : stazon, white, versamark, eggplant, markers (eggplant, wisteria, coral)

Other : big shot, elegant bouquet ef, white pen, blender pen

 

When my 11 year old daughter saw this card she begged me to give it to her for her birthday this year.  She is a “purple girl”! :)  Her birthday isn’t till August but she just fell in love with this pretty purple butterfly. I’ll save it and give it to her, hopefully she’ll forget about it and be surprised and in love with it all over again!

 

Kathy

Happy Diamonds

 

This is the last of my cards for the Diamond and Pearl theme at the Dirty Dozen.

 

 

I punched squares from two different papers from the neutrals dsp stack  and arranged them in a diamond pattern for the background. I coloured the "diamonds" with a permanent marker to make them black and made a flower from red satin ribbon.

Ingredients :

Stamps : Curly Cute

Card : black, red, white, neutral dsp stack

Ink : stazon

Other : red satin ribbon, rhinestones, antique brad, square punch

 

Kathy

Butterfly Blues

At SU Only Challenges this week the focus is on butterflies. If you love butterflies you should check out all their wonderful creations.

I have only just bought this Swallowtail image and couldn’t wait to try colouring it.





I stamped the image on crumbcake using Island Indigo and clear embossed it.  Then I painted the “lighter” areas with white ink using my aqua painter and let it dry.  I then used a blender pen and island indigo, baja and razzleberry markers to colour the butterfly, blending it into the white.  I added some white highlights too with the white pen and then cut it out.  I actually stamped it twice so that I could cut the body part out and have it slightly above the wings.  This was the first time I’ve tried this colouring technique and I was really happy with the result.

I also tried the Chalkboard Technique for the first time on this card too.  Simple, but effective!


Ingredients :
Stamps : Swallowtail, Vintage Verses
Card : baja, white, crumbcake, black
Ink : versamark, white, island indigo, markers (razzleberry, baja, indigo)
Other : blender pen, white ep, button (SAB), bakers twine, white pencil


I REALLY didn’t need another butterfly in my collection to be honest but it is so beautiful I couldn’t resist any longer!  Now that I’ve coloured it, I am so glad I bought it, it was so much fun!


Kathy

White Chocolate

 

I needed to make a wedding card for my niece and I decided to use Karen’s great sketch at the Sweet Sunday Sketch Challenge.

I flipped the sketch and changed a couple of things but it was great!  It gave me lots of inspiration, when I had no idea what to do and I was really happy with how it turned out.

 

 

I’ve actually used lots of retired or soon to be retired stuff on this card.  I still love these hearts from Always and I noticed that one of the Tiny Tags stamps has little dots around the edge which match the dots on the hearts, Yeah!  (But I’m sad the Tiny Tags are retiring).  And the beautiful flowers, I haven’t used them much but they look so pretty, I might save them for any wedding cards I need to make in the future :)

I embossed the Always hearts with white onto vanilla and cut them out minus the dot part.  Then I stamped again and embossed with crumb cake onto shimmery white card, cut them out and put them together.

Ingredients :

Stamps : Always, Tiny Tags

Card : crumb cake, shimmery white, vanilla

Ink : espresso, versamark, crumb cake

Other : clear ep., white ep,, big shot, finial press ef, vanilla seam binding, flower trim, adorning accents edgelit, essentials paper piercing pack, tag punch, linen thread

 

 

 

My youngest daughter thought it was a very “yummy-looking card”!  She thought the flowers looked like white chocolate :)

 

Kathy

Wedding Invitations

 

All the invitations have now been delivered!  Yay!  So I thought I would post a picture of one here on my blog to show you what I’ve been working on.

 

My son and his fiance chose river rock, white and black for their colour combo and they did look very stylish.

The white part is embossed with the stripe embossing folder, it’s a bit hard to see that in the photo but it looked very effective.  And that whole piece is a band to keep the card closed and you slip it off the card to open it. 

I was going to emboss the initials with black embossing powder but I had a lot of trouble with “stray” flecks of black.  It would have taken an eternity to get them all perfect.  So instead I stamped with stazon and clear embossed that. You can see it shining a little in the photo.  It was probably not quite as eye-catching as black embossing, but still looked nice. It was a compromise that saved my sanity :)

They were both very happy with the invites and have said that they’ve received lots of lovely “WOW” comments about them.  :)

 

Ingredients :

Stamps : Lovely Letters

Card : river rock, black, white

Ink : stazon, river rock

Other : big shot, vintage wallpaper ef, stripe ef, labels collection framelits, rhinestones, clear embossing powder

 

Kathy