A flowery birthday

Today's card took a long time to make and I'm pretty proud of it. I poached this card design from Vicky Hayes at Crafting Clare's Paper Moments. Her card must have been a lot smaller than mine because it took me so many stamped images to fill in all the white! This is for a friend of my husband and I:

This is a 6 x 6 inch card. I'm really liking this size of card but I'll have to buy some 12 x 12 inch cardstock as I don't have much of it.

Materials:
Cardstock: Concord Crush, Rich Razzleberry, Whisper White.
Ink: Concord Crush, Rich Razzleberry, Not Quite Navy, matching markers, Green Garden marker, Versamark.
Stamps: Sweet Summer (from last year's Sale-A-Bration?), Curly Cute.
Accessories: Basic rhinestones, silver embossing powder.
Tools: Paper trimmer, heat tool, aqua painter, kraft mat, glue tape runner.

Tips and Tricks:
1. I stamped and embossed the sentiment first because I didn't want to spend heaps of time colouring the flowers and then ruin the card with a mucked up sentiment.
2. Apart from the first row, I stamped the flowers randomly in all three colours. Then I stamped the leaves.
3. I put ink on my kraft mat and coloured each set of flowers with an aqua painter. I tried to get a gradient of colours within each set of flowers. I coloured the leaves and put a pale green wash in any blank spaces.
4. I dried the watercolours with my heat tool on the front and back to help stop the card from warping.
5. I coloured the flower centres with markers of the same ink colour.
6. I added rhinestones randomly around the flowers. The camera doesn't pick it up too well.
7. Then I layered it all together with a glue tape runner.

Stuff Ups:
1. My water colouring needs work. I thought it was going to take ages so I rushed a bit in the beginning.
2. Initially I added too much ink to my aqua painter and the colour separated on one of the flower heads, oops!
3. Either I didn't wait long enough for the water colouring to dry or I didn't put enough glue on the back of the layer because it has warped slightly on the finished card (bubbled up and not sitting flat).

Pleasant Surprises:
1. The overall look of the card is nice. It was becoming dodgy for a while there.
2. I think the colour combination is pretty. I would normally stay away from navy blue on this kind of card but it seems to work.
3. I made an envelope with my scoring board that turned out ok. I practised on paper first because I forget how to do it and that meant I didn't waste any cardstock.

Happy St Patrick's Day

It's not often that I make a card that I don't intend to give away but here's one. I want to keep this one for my own collection. It's not my design - I found the design at Card Scraps. I thought it was so simple yet cute!

Here's my very slightly modified, not nearly as good version:

Happy St Patrick's to you all! Have a great day!

Materials:
Cardstock: Garden Green, Crumb Cake, Whisper White.
Ink: Garden Green.
Stamps: So Happy For You, Teeny Tiny Sentiments.
Accessories: Green organza ribbon (Kaiser Craft).
Tools: Big shot machine, Top Note die, Lattice embossing folder, scissors, bone folder, tape runner, scallop oval punch, oval punch, paper trimmer, dimensionals.

Tips and Tricks:
1. Stamp the four leaf clover on the Whisper White card then cut with the Top Note die.
2. Run the die cut through the Big Shot in the lattice embossing folder.
3. Trim the die cut along the perforation so it fits nicely on another Top Note die cut.
4. Glue it altogether. Easy!

Stuff Ups:
1. The stamped image isn't as solid as I would like. If I had time I might have coloured over them with a marker.
2. I still can't tie bows properly or straight.

Pleasant Surprises:
1. Just that I feel it's strikingly effective!
 

Playing with a new stamp set

I broke out another unused stamp set today - Simply Soft. It features pretty detailed flowers and has 2 step stamps (I didn't 2 step them today though). This design belongs to Lana Harvey from Lana's Stampin' Cottage. I loved her card so much I didn't change anything except to suit my own supplies.

I made two colour variations:

We'll call this card 1.

And this is card 2.

Materials:
Cardstock: Card 1 - Very Vanilla, Lovely Lilac (retired Stampin' Up colour). Card 2 - Whisper White, Island Indigo.
Ink: Lovely Lilac, Island Indigo, Stazon black, Old Olive marker.
Stamps: Simply Soft.
Accessories: Victoria crochet trim, Basic Pearls, Blue organza ribbon (Kaiser Craft).
Tools: Big shot machine, Vintage Wallpaper embossing folder, Top Note die, sponge, aquapainter, Beautiful Wings embosslit, mini glue dots.

Tips and Tricks:
1. I cut the top notes before stamping the images on.
2. I used an aquapainter to colour the flower heads and buds. I used an Old Olive marker for the stems and leaves.
3. The stamped top notes and Vintage Wallpaper layers are sponged with the feature colour (Lovely Lilac or Island Indigo).
4. I'm not good at tying bows so the ribbon is adhered in two parts. A length is cut and stretched across the front of the card. The ends are taped behind the card layer. Another length is used to tie a bow around the first part. Hey, it works for me!
5. Card 1 would look so much better with matching ribbon but I didn't have any.

Stuff Ups:
1. I would have used the 2 step stamps but forgot to use my stamp-a-ma-jig on the outline stamp. It was fun to aquapaint any way.
2. I would use Certainly Celery or another light green marker rather than Old Olive. I feel it is too dark for the look that I want.
3. The sponging is uneven but I can live with it.

Pleasant Surprises:
1. The overall look of the aquapainting is ok.
2. The way the organza ribbon matches the Island Indigo was a lucky surprise! It looks lighter than the cardstock in the photo but that's due to the nature of the ribbon versus the camera. In real life it matches perfectly.

Long weekend = chance for card making

It's a long weekend here in Western Australia (Labour Day) so I have some time to catch up on my card making and even try to get ahead a little bit. I have three cards to make for March birthdays so I did them today. Here's the first, I made two of these:

I was inspired to make this based on this card by Mary Fish from Stampin' Pretty.

Materials:
Cardstock: Very Vanilla, Not Quite Navy, Cajun Craze, Sixth Avenue - Broadway (American Crafts DSP).
Ink: Bashful Blue, So Saffron, Cajun Craze, Pear Pizzazz, Not Quite Navy.
Stamps: Best Dad Ever.
Tools:  Dimensionals, Eyelet border punch (Fiskars), Scoring board (Martha Stewart).

Tips and Tricks:
1. The ties were fussy cut and put up on dimensionals.
2. I did score the top third of the card like Mary's but the camera didn't pick it up.

Stuff Ups:
1. I kept messing up the score lines when trying to score the top third of the card. It took me 4 attempts to get it right - I kept slipping.
2. My cutting with the paper trimmer needed work today - it just doesn't seem to cut straight, always off on a slight angle. Maybe it's time for an upgrade.

Pleasant Surprises:
1. The colours in the paper and ties almost match perfectly.