Tuesday 26 April 2011

Mermaids and faeries

Hi there! Over the Easter break I tried out two new rubber stamps I brought recently. The first is a cute mermaid designed by Sherri Baldy, the image is entitled 'Remembering you' and is available here.
I coloured the image with Promarkers and enhanced it a little with some Glamor Dust glitter. Using a brass stencil from Avec I pierced the matting card and made an embroidered frame in aqua metallic thread. This was then layered with ribbons and linen textured card onto some subtle pearlised card before being attached to a basic A5 sized card blank.
This angled shot helps you to see the textured matting card by Inspire Me Papers and the stitching too, which, if I'm honest, was the most fiddly and time consuming part of this card :-)

I brought the stamp for the faery card from the NEC back in March and it is Kraftin Kimmie and is available here. Her name is the 'Forget me not fairy' and I just fell in love with her wild curly hair!
Again the image is coloured with Promarkers and die cut with a Spellbinders oval frame. I chose to use the real colours of a forget-me-not flower and used card stock to match in linen texture and pearlised card. A brass stencil from Marianne's 'Franciens Faeries' range was used to create the embossed corners, with a little paper embroidery in green metallic thread. The flowers and butterfly were both die cut using Joy! crafts dies and the lace was an ebay purchase. All this was mounted onto a white A5 card blank.
Another angled shot to show the embossing better. 

Hope you have all had a lovely Easter break, I'm back to work in the morning, but it's a very short week again, so no complaints there!
Sarah x



Sunday 17 April 2011

Two CD ROM cards

I've turned out two cards this weekend, one for a wedding and the other for a birthday, both using CD ROMs. Here's the first:
From above
inside
The images on this easel card were printed from the 'Enchanted dreams' CD by Joanna Sheen. It features the fantasy art of Josephine Wall, I've been a fan of hers for years and was delighted when they brought out this CD. There's dozens of lovely images, it's hard to choose which ones to use, I highly recommend it to crafters who love fantasy images. I used an extra large (just a bit smaller than A4) sized base card, topped it with pearlised white card and used some pastel blue card as an accent colour. I do enjoy a bit of paper embroidery occasionally and because I was fairly sure this card would be kept as a keep sake I decided to do a little in the corners in silver thread. The 'stop' was punched out using a Martha Stewart lace border punch and the butterflies were die cut from a set of dies by Joy! crafting. 
The image for the second card I made (also an easel, seems to be a current favourite of mine) was printed from the 'Lesley Anne Ivory' CD by Joanna Sheen. Again this CD is another winner in my opinion, as the artwork of Lesley Anne is beautiful, and there are images to cover a multitude of occasions. This card is for my Dad, who is 70 very soon. He's a cat lover and also loves the garden, so I thought this image should appeal to him (fingers crossed!). As well as being fond of paper embroidery, I also love a touch of dry embossing on pearlised card, so I brought out my brass stencils and chose a pretty daisy flower to decorate the sides of the easel. Again a Martha Stewart border punch was used to create a 'stop' for the card. 

Thank you for looking!
Sarah x




Saturday 26 March 2011

Some Lili of the Valley cards

Hello folks! Hope you've all been keeping well? I came back  from the Hobbycraft Show at Birmingham NEC on Thursday with a nice stash of Promarkers and a few rubber stamps :-) I brought 4 more Lili of the Valley cute stamps to add to my growing collection, I think they are such good value at £4 each! Because I just had to get started with my new stamps and pens I made three cards yesterday, two for Mother's day and one for my parents wedding anniversary.

The anniversary card stamp is called 'Love Grows' and you do get that as a little sentiment with it, but I wanted to use the round anniversary stamp from Lili of the Valley instead. The image is stamped in walnut Distress Ink onto smooth white card and is coloured using Promarkers. The background papers are from Bo Bunny, I've had them in my stash for ages.
The flower is from Prima crafts in plain cream paper which I coloured to match using Promarkers and the butterflies are cut using a die from Joy! crafts, the lace is from an ebay seller.

The two Mother's day cards were stamped onto watercolour paper, I feel it gives a much more intense colour from the pens but I have a suspicion that it leeched a lot of ink from the markers, I think I'll be more inclined to use the smooth paper in future.
Again the butterflies on both these cards were using dies from Joy! crafts, the flower on the aqua and lemon card is from Prima crafts and coloured using Promarkers, the jewel brad in the center is from Dovecraft, the white cotton lace is from Wild Orchid Crafts The paper on the lilac card is from K&Co 'Dollhouse' range. 

I enjoyed using the Promarkers so much and it's made me think of the potential in lots of the other stamps in my stash too, hopefully I'll be back with more stuff soon.
Sarah x




Tuesday 1 March 2011

An award!!

I am very pleased to say that the very kind Dianne awarded me with a 'Liebster Blog' award, which I have accepted :-)

In accepting the award I've agreed to the following conditions:

1) You have been tagged, do you want to accept? YES! then create a post on your blog and post the love blog photo.

Link back to the person who gave you the award and say if you accept.

Choose 3-5 of your favourite blogs to tag, link these in your post too and tell the lucky people they have been tagged.

The aim of this award is to bring unknown good blogs to light, so we're asked not to tag somebody "with 3000 followers".


       The first one is Chrissy


       The second is Jo


      The third is Rachael


Hope you will go and visit these lovely blogs.


Sarah xx

Sunday 20 February 2011

I haven't left the planet, honest

Hello...is there anybody out there?! I'm terrible, it's been an age again since I blogged but as usual I have been crafting away in the background. My card making seems to have gone in two different directions lately...one way I have been stamping and colouring with brush tip pens to make cute cards and in the other I have been creating some simple to construct designs from pre-brought kits. I find both have their good points: some days I just want to put things together quickly and feel like I'm being productive, so the kits help with that. Then other days I want to take my time and try to make something more detailed and that's where the stamping and brush tip pens come in. I think today I'll show you some of the more detailed cards I have recently made:
The above two cards were made for twin girls on their 4th birthday. The stamps are from Lili of the Valley, I have completely fallen in love with their entire range of pretty, cute stamps! I stamped them onto 160gsm watercolour paper and coloured them with 'Whisper' brush tip pens. I am thinking of investing in either some Promarkers or Copics if I continue with this style of card (probably Promarkers as they are cheaper!). The lilac card was decorated with some random handmade papers that I'd had lurking in my stash for ages, but the paper on the yellow card was made using a cuttlebug embossing folder, several different inks pads and some finger tip blending sponges...it was fun to blend the colours together.
I couldn't resist these sweet Forever Friends Easter themed stamps when I saw them recently and decided to use them for the small batch I'll make for this year. There are other images in the set, which I'm going to use next, but this bear with his hot cross buns is my favourite, so I used him first :-) Again the image is stamped onto 160gsm watercolour paper and coloured with 'Whisper' brush tip pens. The flower is made from a die by Marianne Creatables and is one of their 'ribbon flower' designs as there is a slot punched into the top petals that you can thread a narrow ribbon through. I finished them off with a Dovecrafts jewel brad in the centre. The background papers are from the same range as the stamps and all are made by Papermania.
Another card made using a stamp from Lili of the Valley, I think these two little girls having tea together are adorable! The card is 8"x8" and layered with card from Papermania and papers from the Laura Ashley range, the flower is a Prima craft one. The wide crocheted lace border is something I've had for a very long time, my Great Auntie gave it to me many years ago and it was still bundled up with a price tag of shillings and pence on it, so you know that it is at least 40 years old...practicaly an antique, a bit like myself ;-) I punched the bottom of the cream card layer with a Martha Stewart lace border punch to add interest, and gave it a couple of small square buttons to finish. I really enjoyed making this card and I think that my colouring is improving...I hope so anyway! This one is for sale at my Dreamaid shop here.
I'll leave it here for now, and hopefully I'll be back sooner next time. Thank you so much for looking!
Sarah x










Saturday 29 January 2011

I'm still alive!

I know it's been an age since I last made an entry to this blog, I have several excuses but I won't bore you with them.

I have been crafting, but mostly on a quick and simple level. Here are the results:

I have been practicing colouring with my brush tip markers onto stamped images, something I've not really tried before, hopefully when I've practiced some more I'll be confident enough of the results to post some here soon.

Sarah x