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.

 

 

Birthday Butterflies

Hi there everyone!

My two new distress oxides inks have arrived and I had to have a very quick play with them straightaway! I did some basic ink blending with them – the Tumbled Glass is gorgeous and l love the Spun Sugar as well! I had been hoping for Dried Marigold, but I won’t have to wait too long for the final release in October and the Spun Sugar is a fabulous ‘consolation’!

I spritzed the blended piece with perfect pearls and then cut it using butterfly dies from Simon Says Stamp and Poppystamps. I decided to play along with the current Case This Sketch Challenge and arranged the butterflies around a Presscut sentiment die.

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.

Blue Christmas trees

Hello there!

The palette for this week’s Color Throwdown challenge is cobalt blue, aqua, grey and white and although the inspiration photo was of a gorgeous Mediterranean sea view, I thought of Christmas cards!

I decided to enter the current Freshly Made Sketches challenge as well and so this is my take on both challenges.

I used dies from Simon Says Stamp and Tonic Studios and blended Blueprint Sketch and Salty Ocean distress oxide inks to create the die cuts.

After I finished the card, I felt the background still needed a little something extra, so I added some stars and dots from a Lawn Fawn background die.

I’m also entering this into the Simon Says Stamp Wednesday challenge (use a die or punch), the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge (Christmas in July) and the Simon Says Stamp Flickr challenge (a favourite technique – inlaid die cutting).

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

Somewhere over the rainbow…

Happy Sunday everyone!

It’s time for a new challenge over at AAA Cards and our theme this fortnight is ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ – we want to see your rainbow cards! Our sponsor is Stamplorations.

Last year, I took the ‘Rainbow Maker’ class from Online Card Classes and practiced a lot of rainbow techniques – I love using them on my cards, so I really had fun coming up with a card for this theme!

In the end, I decided to use a Poppystamps die cut from a rainbow background that I created with distress inks. My inspiration for today’s card was this fabulous card by the talented Lisa Addesa! To finish my card, I added a sentiment from My Sentiments Exactly and a few gems.

I’m also entering this into the current Poppystamps challenge – ‘Birthday Party’.

My teammates have shared some gorgeous CAS cards on the AAA Cards blog and we are also joined by our sponsor Shery as well as the fabulous Karen from Kenny’s Cards as our Guest Designer. She has some super creations – you must pay her a visit!

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

LucieG.