Minding the gap

I was just feeling pleased with myself that I was blogging fairly regularly when life got in the way again. I have had very little play time recently which is never good. And when I sit at the computer there is often work to do (or just enough time to play Pearls Peril and/or Criminal Case on Facebook) before going out to do more work. Or I am tired after the sentence above.
There we are then.
Soooooo, catch up time.
I did make a card for last week's Daring Cardmaker challenge - Fairy Tales. It was a clever idea that had us all thinking hard and I think the team came up with some fab ideas. Mine is quite simple

can you guess the tale?
give up?
Its Goldilocks and the Three Bears!
The papers are all Websters Pages and I added gold glamour dust and a Clearly Besotted stamped sentiment in Delicata gold ink (which is LOVELY). I do feel a bit sorry for big and small butterfly so I might actually give them more gold before I send the card anywhere!

This week we were sent some lovely goodies by Docrafts - some dies and papers. Many of the team were sent Gorjuss images but I had just the papers (but two die sets so I am not complaining!) which is why I don't feature any cute girls on my card. Hopefully it still counts as Die-licious!

I was sent the fabulous butterfly - there are several different wings and a side view as well. It is fairly big - this is a 4x4" card. There are holes in the wings and I decided to fill them up with gold cardstock from Craft Creations. I used the rest of the cut out gold card as a second layer to lift the butterfly without adding too much bulk.  The dots on the body of the butterfly were made using Beads In a Bottle in gold.

The doily came from a Quirky Kit and was originally kraft but I sprayed it with Gold Lame colour shine. I added some cream cardstock which was embossed with a Maggie Holmes folder. I bruched the cardstock with Delicata gold ink. "Love" was diecut with another Docrafts set - a lovely swirly alphabet. I cut this twice - once with the purple paper and once with the gold and offset it ever so slightly for a subtle effect. "With" was spelled with some Carolees Creations alpha stickers I have had forever.

Here are some close up shots

Ah yes, I did add some Stickles blobs which went horribly wrong and dried to be totally the wrong colour so I slapped some toning pearls over the top! I wish I had done the panel in vellum not cardstock but there we are

Here is hoping there is less of a gap before I can next share my crafting.

Feeling slightly colour blind

This week at Daring Cardmakers it is time for the monthly colour challenge
It is absolutely gorgeous

Now when I have some crafting time I copy and paste various sketches and ideas onto an A4 document. I try and get as many as possible onto one page (cheap I am) and possibly I made my copy of this colour seed just a leeeeeeetle bit too small as I "read" the colours wrong. I was v. cross with myself as I absolutely love these colours together, but just didn't have any time to make another card this week.
I haven't told my sons yet but I know they will enjoy this mistake as they are both quite prfoundly colour blind and being a loving mother I have spent many happy hours laughing at them getting colours wrong.
Anyway, here is my card

Papers are from the latests Amy Tan 6x6 pad, a Kaisercraft Christmas pad and some very old Heidi Swapp.
The dies are from Dienamics; Sizzix and Clearly Besotted and the sentiment is from Imagine That. Oh and I used two circle punches and some Hobby House gems.
The finished card is quite nice but I will never love it as I will always say to myself "why did you see that colour as yellow and not lovely sage green. why? Why? Why!"

I did play with other colours for a new challenge this week. I saw some people playing along and decided to have a go.
Virginia wanted people to use watercolouring as well as this inspiration piece

and I made two cards

This one uses a free stamp I had with a magazine, embossed in white and then watercoloured using yellow, pink, orange and red distress inks and a waterbrush. The papers are Heidi Swapp, Amy Tan and MME. The sentiment is computer generated

This was another free stamp, watercoloured in a similar way. I added Amy Tan papers and some washi tape. The balloons are Clearly Besotted dies and I had drew the string. The balloons were given the Wink of Stella treatment

Expect to see loads more cards like this as I really enjoyed the process :)