A Card-making Day

I've made a few cards this holiday, but they've been pretty much fitted in among other things - like rewatching Stargate SG1 (something I took a notion to do) and reading (The Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series by Tad Williams). Well, today, my daughter headed off shopping/cinema/pizza with a friend for her friend's birthday, my husband went to play bowls and my son was in his room (as usual) so I felt like I had the house to myself. So, I pulled out my stamps and ink and had a play.

I bought my first samples of Distress ink at Olympia a few weeks ago, but really hadn't done much with it. And even longer ago, I bought a Versacolor pad with a range of blues which I'd never even opened. Then there was the recently acquired set of flower stamps from Personal Expressions, so there were some real possibilities.

First, I tried doing a background with the blues, but it really didn't work out as I'd expected. Still, I had enough to stamp a couple of images on, and then I did some further backgrounds by stippling card with my shaving brush.

This first card was pretty simple. One of the things about a stamped image like this one is that they seem (to me) to lend themselves to comparative simplicity. I did spend some time getting the layering to look right, but other than that, all I've done is add a sentiment and some ribbon.



This second card shares the backgrounds of the last one, but because the image is smaller, it lent itself to adding a little more. There's the sentiment - this one is from a stamp set from Anna Griffin that was in the Readicut sale a while ago, and I've added some roses that I made using a similar technique to one I saw on a video recently. (Sorry, can't remember whose it was - but all I've really done is to make them significantly smaller.) And then I added some pearls which were given to me by a neighbour. She's a hairdresser and she said they were left over from a wedding she'd been involved in. Whatever they are, I think they fitted well here.



This third card shows off my distress inks. I only got three colours - that seemed a minimum to play with, and I definitely didn't want to spend more than that until I'd got an idea of whether or not I'm going to use them. So, armed with Aged Mahogany, Fired Brick and Wild Honey, I set to work.

I must admit, nothing worked out quite as I'd expected. I found it much harder to blend the ink than I'd expected, but I wasn't unhappy with the result, so I carried on, stamping another of the flowers from the Personal Impressions set. The resulting colour scheme looked very rich, and I hunted through my paper stash, finding a gingham paper (again from Readicut) which worked really well. Then I added some ribbon and a sentiment (printed on film from the Fruit Pixie) and that was that. Again, I spent a lot of time deciding on the layering of the image, but I'm happy with the result.

So, what else did I do? Well, I finished a couple of Christmas cards - my first of this year - but I won't show them here. I'll probably do a general Christmas Card post when I've got a few more done.

The other card I made is for my husband's uncle and aunt who're celebrating their sixtieth wedding anniversary next month. I didn't have any stamps that seemed to work, but a quick check through my other images came up with one from a collection of Christian Clip Art I've had for years And interestingly, the couple in the picture look a little like the couple in question!



I made the backing paper using an element from the flowers, and generated the sentiment on the computer. Not particularly complicated as cards go, but the picture made it fairly easy, and all I added was a border from Spellbinders and a couple of sticky gems..