International Art and Soul Challenge 118

 The challenge for this fortnight was set by my team mate Debbie, and she wants to see projects featuring Furry Friends, so I'm looking forward to seeing your animal-based creations.

I don't have a lot of animal stamps really, but I do have a gorgeous CDRom featuring the beautiful Ivory Cats. I will admit that I've often used it for backgrounds for unrelated projects as some of them are gorgeous, but this time I used an image.

I combined the image mat and background paper in Photoshop Elements. Looking at the flowers on the ground, they looked a little like forget-me-not, so I found my Susan's Garden Notes Forget-me-not die set and created a sprig to go alongside the image. I added a little white pen on the flowers and pale green pan pastel on the leaves, but otherwise, these are very simple flowers.

I do hope you can join us this time.

International Art and Soul Challenge 92

The challenge for this fortnight is to follow this board:

Your project has to contain three elements from the board - any line, horizontal, vertical or diagonal.

I chose to go with the middle horizontal line and made this:

I started with white card and made the frame using a die from Elizabeth Craft. Another piece of white card, and I stencilled that using stencils from Crafter's Companion and Imagination Crafts using Distress Ink and gilding wax.

The dies used to create the floral arrangement are (almost) all from Susan Tierney Cockburn's various collections. The exception is a die I bought in The Works which makes a useful piece of background with added perfect pearl dots.

I completed the frame by adding some die cuts cut using a Spellbinders die.

I do hope you can join us this time.

Crafty Cardmakers Challenge 260

The challenge for this fortnight is to create your own background.

I started with a couple of Crafter's Companion rotating background stamps and came up with a couple of different effects.

This card uses Memento ink in four shades to create the background.  I cut a window in the card using a Sizzix die which actually double cuts, so I had a separate 'frame' die cut. I used foam mounts to attach the background, then added the frame tight to the gold coloured background. The flowers were created with a die set from Elizabeth Craft/Susan's Garden Notes.

The process here is the same, but instead of four different ink pads, I used a single, Kaleidoscope pad. Again, I cut an aperture in the floral background, and again, the flowers were made using dies from the Susan's Garden Notes collection.

I have to say I'm a little disappointed with the rotating dies. Having watched Sara demonstrate them, they seemed fairly foolproof, and I assumed they'd work well with my Tim Holtz stamping platform. To be honest, they didn't. It simply wasn't possible to arrange things well enough to get the desired result - even placing the stamp as close to the centre of the card didn't seem too work. Of course, using that platform, I left the stamp in place and rotated the card (which I'd placed at the corner to be sure of repeatability.)

Anyway, I managed to find the Crafter's Companion stamp platform and magnetic base at a good price (ie, not much more than the platform alone) and decided to get it, at least partly because having a non-hinged platform seemed to have some advantages. Unfortunately, the result wasn't any better, initially. Because with this system, you leave the card alone and turn the stamp, it's important to place the stamp in the dead centre of the platform. And there lies the problem. Even getting it as close to the centre as eyeballing it will allow, there's still a bit of a mis-match between rotations. That may be because, unlike the Tim Holtz platform, there's quite a lot of wriggle with the Crafter's Companion  platform. It's definitely possible, even with the platform feet in the recesses in the magnetic sheet, to get up to a couple of millimetre's wiggle when you stamp. The result (providing you line up the grid lines on the platform and base as well as you can) is ok  and I'll definitely use the stamps, but I don't think I'll be using this platform as much as the Tim Holtz.

I do hope you can join us this time.

Crafty Cardmakers Challenge 246

The challenge for this fortnight is to do away with patterned paper. Leave your stash of pretty papers alone, and other than that, any project is allowed!

I made a card and matching box for a friend who retired last month.

I started with some white card which I coloured with Distress Oxide ink in several of my favourite shades.

Then, I embossed two roughly 8in by 8in pieces using an Embossalicious folder. I then added a little more distress ink on some of the embossed areas and finished with a little gilding wax.

I made some flowers using dies from Sizzix's Susan's Garden range, Elizabeth Craft's Susan's Garden Notes range and finally a die from Printable Heaven along with some greenery cut using a Sue Wilson die. To complete both the box and card, I put together a label in Photoshop Elements which I die cut using Spellbinders dies. After photographing, I removed my friend's name from photos of both the card and box because I don't think it's fair to include that sort of detail in public without permission.

And that's it!

I do hope you can join us this time.