Christmas, New Year and Winter

Mod Tree

Happy Friyay people!

My mojo appears to have gone AWOL. I’ve tried to craft so many times this week, and have failed miserably. But look! I finally finished a card today! Hurrah!

I decided to use the colours from this week’s Color Throwdown challenge (lime green, green, aqua and eggplant) to create another Christmas card. The tree die is one of my very first Simon Says Stamp dies. I think it’s retired now, but I still love it!

I cut the tree and Savvy Stamps sentiment from eggplant cardstock although it looks quite brown on screen. It actually looks much closer in colour to the small bits of eggplant ink I added to my background panel, but they look quite different here.

Anyway, I’m also entering this into the current CAS Christmas challenge (tree).

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

Merry Christmas to you

Happy Sunday everyone!

It’s time for a new challenge over at AAA Cards and this fortnight we are challenging you to use a stencil. Our sponsor is Stamplorations.

I love stencils. The price point is great and you can do so much with them. Great for quick and simple cards and I often use part of a stencil to ‘ground’ an image in my CAS cards. My stencil collection has grown a lot over the last couple of years!

For my take on the theme, I decided to use a stencil by John Next Door as a main focal point for some quick CAS Christmas cards.

A few weeks ago, I bought some Ranger detail blending tools – they are tiny and perfect for detail stencilling! They made it very easy to use different distress oxide inks on parts of this stencilled tree! After inking the image, with the stencil still in place, I coated the tree with Cosmic Shimmer sparkle texture paste.

It was quite interesting to see how the paste changed the colour of the underlying distress oxide. For example, I used Dusty Concord for my second tree, but I think it looks like Seedless Preserves, don’t you? Once the glitter had dried, I stamped the small Simon Says Stamp sentiment to create a tree trunk!

My teammates have shared some gorgeous CAS cards on the AAA Cards blog and we are also joined by our wonderful sponsor, Sherry, plus the super talented Hannelie from Desert Diva and Steph from Morticraft as our Guest Designers. They have some fabulous creations on their sites!

I’m also entering my green tree card into the current CAS Christmas challenge as the theme is ‘tree’.

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

LucieG.

Stop! It’s Tinsel Time!

Happy Saturday, people!

It’s a typical British summer’s day (overcast, cool) and I should be in the garden as some shrubs need serious attention…. but I’m in the craft room instead playing with my fabulous new Avery Elle Quirky Trees stamp set!

Last month, I told myself I would be more restrained with Christmas supplies this year – I have so much already! And what do I do as soon as the first release hits the stores… But at least I only got the one set I suppose!

Anyway, I couldn’t wait to ink up those quirky trees and decided to use the lovely colour scheme that the Color Throwdown has this week (grey, teal and pink). I cut out a middle section of the card as I love the see-through effect and was please that the card turned out to be quite stable!

To finish off the card, I added some Stickles and my favourite sentiment from the set. Am I the only one thinking of the ‘Stop! Hammer Time!’ lyric from the MC Hammer song (U can’t touch this)?? Yes? I know, it’s not just these trees that are quirky!

Anyway, I’m also entering this into the current CAS Christmas challenge where the theme is ‘tree’.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

 

Glittery holly berries

 

Hi everyone!

I’ve been playing with more Christmas supplies that I bought in the January sales. I’ve really enjoyed Christmas in July and plan to continue it into August!

For this card I used a holly die from Penny Black and a Tim Holtz stencil. The sentiment is by Clearly Besotted.

I coloured the leaves and berries using regular distress ink and used distress oxide to create the stencilled panel. To finish off the card, I added some Nuvo red gliiter drops. I really love how these dry in a beautiful dome! I’ve finally found a way of creating dots and easily adding them to my project when dry – I use waxy paper! I had previously used acetate and a clear block but it was so difficult to remove the dried dots! They comeoff the waxy paper very easily indeed!

I’m entering this into the current Color Throwdown challenge (red, green and grey), Freshly Made Sketches challenge and the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge (Christmas in July).

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

 

 

Poinsettia in a pot

Greetings!

Another day and another Christmas in July card! For today’s card, I worked with a lovely stamp from Magenta Art Stamps which I got five years ago! It’s another large image and I have struggled to use it in many cards… but I love colouring it in!

I heat embossed the image and then used two shades of red from my Twinkling H2O collection to colour the flowers but you can’t really see the two shades in my pictures unfortunately.

After colouring the image, I added lots of gold splatters using some diluted Cosmic Shimmer powder. On reflection, I feel this may make the card a little busy for a CAS card…. or maybe I feel that because I added a blue card frame rather than my ‘safe choice’ of white card…

To finish off my card, I added a sentiment from Penny Black.

I’m entering this into the CAS Christmas challenge – poinsettia.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG

Botanical tree

Hi everyone!

I’m fully embracing Christmas in July this year and today I’m playing along with the CAS Christmas challenge which has the theme of ‘poinsettia’.

I decided to use the wonderful Botanical Tree stamp set from Power Poppy. I first saw this stamp on Instagram almost three years ago and bought it after Christmas. Sadly, like most of my Christmas supplies, I don’t use it enough!

The tree is quite large – and I always find it challenging to use a large stamp on a CAS card. So I stamped the image on the left of my card and trimmed off a small part of it. Believe me, I didn’t want to cut anything off that beautiful image, but I think it actually helped to ground the image on the card.

As I wanted to focus attention on the poinsettias within the stamp, I kept the colour scheme very simple and coloured just the poinsettias and leaves at first. However, I felt the image was still unfinished, so I coloured the roses and added some sparkle to the rest of the image using my Nuvo Aqua Shimmer pen. Although this is bit different from my original plan, I still think the poinsettias are very prominent!

The sentiment is also from the same Power Poppy set.

I’m also entering this into the current Simon Says Stamp Monday challenge – Christmas in July.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.