Have the courage to imagine

Hello everyone!

It’s time for a new challenge over at AAA Cards and this fortnight we have a word to inspire your CAS creations – ‘imagine’. Winnie & Walter is our sponsor.

I decided to use a quote as the starting point for my male encouragement card. I knew I wanted to create a simple one layer card so I started with a background stamp to ‘ground’ my quote and image. Before stamping the background, I used a paper towel to remove some ink so that the pattern would be subtle.

I spent a little while choosing the image… I toyed with spaceships and hot air balloons but in the end I chose a vintage plane. All stamps are by Tim Holtz/Stampers Anonymous and I used regular distress ink and distress oxide.

My teammates have shared some gorgeous CAS cards on the AAA Cards blog and we are also joined by the super talented Izzy from Izzy Scrap as our Guest Designer. She has some beautiful creations – you must pay her a visit!

Thanks for stopping by – I do hope you play along with us!

LucieG.

 

Shimmer and snow

Hi everyone!

It’s been a long busy week with no time for crafting. Hoping to carve out some time to get crafty today… but first I want to share my next DT card for Crafts-U-Love!

I was delighted to receive a couple of die sets from the John Next Door Christmas collection this month. Aren’t they pretty? I couldn’t wait to use them.

Apologies in advance for the quality of some of my process photos in this post. I was having a few lighting problems…

I decided I’d make a shaker card and showcase the dies against a blended distress ink background… of course once I sat down at my craft table, the card evolved a bit differently…

When I sat down, I spotted a couple of bottles of Nuvo Shimmer Powder that I bought a few weeks ago and still hadn’t tried, so I decided to use them to make a background rather than my distress inks.

Step 1 – prepare the surface 

As I knew I’d be adding a TON of water and heat drying the background, I decided to use watercolour paper and taped it to a wooden chopping board I use when I create inky backgrounds before ‘painting’ a coat of water.

I’ve since tried the powders on regular cardstock and they work just as well, although the card did get more warped during the wetting/drying process.

 

 

Step 2 – sprinkle the powder(s)

I then gently sprinkled the powders randomly across the paper. A little goes a long way!

Step 3 – spritz with water/blot as desired!

The pigment from the powders didn’t flow as much as I wanted as my paper had started to dry so I spritzed water onto the paper to spread the pigment a little more across my background. I added a few more sprinkles of powder where I had a lot of white and then started to dry the background with my heat tool.

I also blotted some of the ink to lighten the background a little. I ended up with a very shimmery paper towel and was worried that I’d removed the shimmer from the background. I needn’t have worried! The background was still super shimmery!

Once I finished the background, I started to assemble the card. At this stage, I was still planning to make a shaker card so I cut a square frame and adhered the die-cut snowdrifts to the top and bottom of the frame. As I was holding the frame against the background, I realised that the shimmer wouldn’t be as obvious in a shaker so I decided to simply frame the background instead!

I cut down the background and adhered the frame using foam. One of the snowdrift dies from John Next Door also includes a single whole snowflake so I cut that MANY times and stuck them across the card. Then I added the fabulous sentiment.

I was originally going to use the sentiment cut from mirror card, but when I tried this against the background, I thought a white die cut would stand out a little more. So I cut the sentiment from white cardstock a few times and adhered them together before adding it to the card.

I wanted to add EVEN MORE sparkle so I applied some Nuvo aqua shimmer to the snowflakes and sentiment and some gems across the card. After all, you can never have too much sparkle and shimmer can you?!

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG

Supply List

Here are the links to the products I used on my card. Products marked with an asterisk (*) were kindly sent to me to use.

John Next Door – Snowflake Edges die set*

John Next Door – Festive Greetings die set*

Nuvo Shimmer powder  

Nuvo Aqua Flow pens – glitter gloss

Papermania adhesive stones*

If you decide to buy any of the products I’ve used after reading this post, please let Crafts-U-Love know by using the drop down menu on the checkout page and selecting ‘Design Team’. Please note this is simply to help Crafts-U-Love and I do not receive any compensation if you choose this menu option. I do not use affiliate links.

 

Simply the best

Happy Sunday everyone!

Life has been busy with no time for cardmaking, sadly, but I managed to find a couple of hours today to play along with some of my favourite challenges – the Color Throwdown and Freshly Made Sketches.

There’s a great seasonal colour palette over at the Color Throwdown challenge this week – red, orange and blue. I used distress oxide ink and one of my new Hero Arts glimmer paints to create blue and red background which I then cut with a Penny Black background die. I also used the die to cut a piece of orange glitter card – got to have a bit of sparkle somewhere.

The background die is rectangular but the sketch calls for a square background, so I simply cut an extra section and stuck it to the end of the blue die cut as I knew I could use my sentiment strip to hide the join. I then inlaid the die cut leaves from the orange and red background pieces.

Once I completed the inlaid die cutting, I stamped a Penny Black sentiment and adhered it to the card.

This week, Penny Black announced a holiday challenge (covering autumn, Thanksgiving etc as well as Christmas) – I often play along with other Penny Black challenges but I was so pleased to see one from Penny Black themselves, so I’m entering my autumn card in that challenge as well.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

 

Best wishes to you

Hello everyone

There a fabulous bold colour palette over at the Color Throwdown challenge this week – purple, green, yellow and red.

It did take me a little while to decide how I was going to use the colours but in the end I chose the fabulous Penny Black potted plant die which I painted with my Altenew watercolours.

I stuck the image to a background I created with by smooshing some mustard seed distress ink onto a base card. (I painted the brown with some distress oxide ink once I worked out where I was going to adhere the coloured die cut).

To finish off the card, I added sentiment from Penny Black and some Nuvo drops to the centre of the flowers – but they are quite difficult to see in my photos.

I’m also entering this into the Penny Black Saturday Challenge (anything goes).

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

Sweetest Fluffles

Hello everyone!

Who remembers the wonderful Fluffles the Cat by Stampendous? Such a cute fun kitty! I still have all the wood-mounted Fluffles stamps I bought probably a decade ago and today I had fun reminiscing about the happy hours I used to spend at a couple of ‘local’ craft stores back in the day. I love how the internet has connected us all and we have so much more online choice nowadays. But I really miss those days in the craft stores.

Anyway, when I saw that the Simon Says Stamp Wednesday challenge had a theme of ‘anything goes’ with Stampendous products, I immediately thought of my Fluffles stamps and decided to use one of them with the sketch from the current Freshly Made Sketches challenge.

I was originally going to fussy cut Fluffles and put him on an action wobbler but in the end I decided on an ‘out of the box’ die cut instead.

I went through my backgrounds box and pulled out the remnants of a Hero Arts background that I created with Satin Pearl embossing powder and distress oxide inks last year and adhered it to my base card before adhering the Fluffles image. To finish off the card, I added a sentiment from My Favorite Things.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

 

Birthday leaves

 

Happy Sunday everyone!

It’s time for a new challenge over at AAA Cards and this fortnight we have a sketch for you. Our sponsor is Happy Little Stampers.

I love this CAS sketch – lots of ‘white space’ with a great focal point! As we’re now into September (how did that happen?), I decided to use a stamp from Happy Little Stampers’ Doodled Flowers set and create an autumn-themed card. I had such fun using my Altenew watercolour paints again. Love how vibrant they are!

I then cut a circle from a square piece of white card to create a frame to go on top of the leafy background. I knew I wanted to raise the frame a little, but didn’t want to use funky foam. Instead, I created another frame from card and adhered one on top of the other to give my card some very subtle dimension. Finally, I added a Happy Little Stampers sentiment.

My teammates have shared some gorgeous CAS cards on the AAA Cards blog and we are also joined by Alex as our Guest Designer. She has some fabulous creations – you must pay her a visit!

Thanks for stopping by – I do hope you play along with us!

LucieG.