Let it snow… in July!

Happy Sunday everyone!

It’s time for a new challenge over at AAA Cards! This fortnight we are celebrating Christmas in July and want to see your CAS Christmas Cards!

AS I mentioned in an earlier post, I actually decided to embrace Christmas in July after a crazy cardmaking frenzy last year! I was determined to avoid that again! I’ve already made a few cards – it’s the perfect chance to use the supplies I purchased in the sales or when they came back into stock. It’s also a chance to show some love to some overlooked supplies before I get dazzled by this year’s products!

Anyway, for my card, I used an older snowflake stamp set from Hero Arts and stamped them with various layers of distress oxide inks (picked raspberry, wilted violet and seedless preserves). Once I was happy with the colour mix of each stamped image,  I spritzed them with perfect pearls. I even used one of my very old square punches to cut out the snowflake squares as it was the perfect size for the images!

The sentiment stamp is also from Hero Arts.

My teammates have shared some gorgeous CAS cards on the AAA Cards blog and we are also joined by our sponsor Kylie from Happy Little Stampers as well as our Guest Designer – Maria from White Mood. She has some fabulous creations – you must pay her a visit!

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

LucieG.

Poinsettia Flourish

Happy Friyay people!

It’s ridiculously hot here in the UK but I’m powering on with my Christmas in July cards!

For today’s card, I used a gorgeous Memory Box die and my current favourite product – Tonic Studios Nuvo Crystal Glaze. After colouring the petals, I added some Nuvo Aqua shimmer to the petals before applying the glaze – I just can’t seem to capture the shimmer on camera, unfortunately. It’s really interesting to watch the colour lighten as the glaze dries – the petals were coloured with dark red but clearly I must remember to make my colours evendarker before applying the glaze in future! The sentiment is by CAS-ual Fridays.

I’m entering this into the current Simon Says Stamp Monday challenge, Simon Says Stamp Wednesday challenge (both red, white and/or blue), the CAS Christmas challenge (poinsettia) and the CAS-ual Fridays challenge (heat embossing).

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

Twinkling lights – inspired by Yana

Hi Everyone!

After last year’s crazy Christmas cardmaking frenzy, I promised myself that I would start earlier this year! So despite the crazy temperatures here at the moment, I am embracing Christmas in July!

It’s fun to play with the supplies I got in the sales or when they came back into stock, like this fabulous Hero Arts background stamp that I was so sure I didn’t want until I saw what the talented Yana Smakula did with it.. by then of course it was already out of stock.

Anyway, I finally got hold of it earlier this year and today I got to case one of the backgrounds that Yana created last year. So much fun!

To finish off the card, I added an embossed sentiment from Cas Fridays.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG

 

Color Throwdown Celebration

 

Good morning everyone!

This week, I have the honour of being the Guest Designer over at one of my favourite challenges – the Color Throwdown Challenge.

The palette for this challenge is navy, blush, gold and white, another fabulous combination, don’t you think?

I had a lot of fun with this combo and ended up making several cards!

I wanted to celebrate the 500th challenge – isn’t that an amazing milestone! I’ve only been playing along with the challenge for a couple of years and whenever my mojo goes AWOL I always look back for a past colour combo to get my creativity flowing again! Many congrats to the whole team, past and present!

Right, onto my cards…

For the celebration card, I used a new embossing folder that I found at Michaels during a recent trip to the US. I used dies from My Favorite Things and Crealies for the balloons and added a die cut  sentiment by Penny Black to an Avery Elle banner to finish off the card.

 

 

For the hello card, I heat embossed a Penny Black image with Altenew Peach Gold embossing powder and added some die cut butterflies by Simon Says Stamp. The frame and sentiment are by My Favorite Things and Sizzix/Karen Burniston.

There’s some amazing inspiration from the Color Throwdown DT over on the challenge blog – I do hope you can play along this week!

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

 

Thanks for sticking by me

Hi there everyone!

Can you believe it’s already 1 July?! Seriously where did the first half of the year go?

When I was looking through my Concord & 9th supplies the other day, I spotted this ‘stuck on you’ cacti set that I got last year, but hadn’t used… so I put it into my July ‘must use’ pile!

The cactus is cut froma background I created by smooshing some left over Ken Oliver colourburst ink. Can’t believe the different effect that I achieved – the different colour particles that you get when you sprinkle the colorbursts aren’t present, but I really like the shade of green. Definitely going to try more colorburst smooshing in future!

I decided to enter this week’s CAS Colours & Sketches challenge so I assemble the card with and embossed the kraft rectangle and some My Mind’s Eye paper from my patterned paper mountain.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG

Pink Birthday

Hello everyone!

Today I have my second DT post for Crafts-U-Love using the fabulous Pinkfresh Studio stamps. You can see the first card I made with these stamps here.

I really wanted to use the large ‘Happy’ stamp from the Word Series set – I love the pretty flower and leaf details and knew I had to include it as a focal point. As you can see, these sets also have a lot of smaller images and as I rarely use a lot of smaller stamps on one card, I thought it would be good to challenge myself to use them on my next card.

I remembered seeing a cute card that May Park created last year using small stamped images and used this as my inspiration. I loved the idea of colouring all those cute images, but felt that a monochromatic colour scheme would support my ‘Happy’ focal point.

I started by embossing the sentiment in gold embossing powder – the ‘birthday’ is from the Hero Arts Happy Birthday Messages set (which coincidentally is actually part of this week’s Limited Time Offers at Crafts-U-Love this week!).

I then blended a background using Worn Lipstick Distress Oxide ink before randomly stamping the images using the same colour of regular distress ink.

Once I had decided on the design, this card came together really quickly and I enjoyed using those smaller images. Think I will definitely be reaching for smaller stamps more frequently in future!

Have a lovely weekend – 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.

Pinkfresh Studio – Itty Bitty Elements stamp set*

Pinkfresh Studio – Word series stamp set – Happy*

Hero Arts – Happy Birthday Messages stamp set

Distress Oxide ink – Worn Lipstick

Distress ink – Worn Lipstick

Embossing Powder – Nuvo Classic gold