I'm not here

All being well that is true. I will be on Holy Island with my lovely friend Rachel.
But I wanted to make sure that my DCM post went up so I have scheduled this.
We have a dare sponsored by the fabulous Ruby Rockit this week, which is to make a card for a baby which has some sort of swinging/rocking motion to it.
I did both.... but kind of cheated.

I made a round, rocking card. BUT if you look carefully I did just snip a tiny bit off the bottom so it would stand straight and not rock for the photo. And the two swinging charms? You can just see the foam pads under the "joy" which gives away the fact it will not swing back. Hopefully the card still fits the challenge!

Those two charms might be 10 years old! 
I folded a card base over and cut it with a circle die, making sure to leave a gap for the fold.
I chose two toning papers, one from the Lily Bee Sweet Shoppe pad and the other is Fancy Pants (I think) Everything else comes from the Ruby Rockit Fundemental line.

I gave everything the black Sharpie treatment and when it was all stuck together smooshed some Stickles onto the train. I've strayed from the Stickles since discovering Wink of Stella but this shiny surface needed something with a little more dimension.

Ruby Rockit have offered a prize for this dare (Winner will be drawn randomly just after next weeks dare is revealed). For more details and to find out more about this great company, head for the Daring Cardmakers blog right now!

Oooh blogging on a Friday

its a rare thing these days....
Maybe its because I made my card for this Friday last Friday? 
This Friday the theme is Bokeh style cards. Mine is a blatant case of Laura Bassen's amazing card.
I pinned it (also rare for me) and it is one of my lonely little pins which has been repinned. Laura's card isn't quite bokeh but I thought just a few more circles would do the trick.

 A photo doesn't do justice to this card. It is so pretty and sparkly and dimensional in real life. It is one of my top faves ever/ The circles were punched out of Bazzill cardstock and I painted them with Zig Kuretake paints, adding Wink of Stella over the top for extra shine

 I die cut the thank you several times, the top layer being glitter cardstock and stuck them all together. I mounted the panel on black card and a white card base.

I have been remiss in blogging my scrap pages. I have a new one up of the Quirky Kit blog which you can see here, but I have also being doing some just for fun. I don't think I will have finished layouts about last years holiday before going on this one but I am not going to cry about that!

This page was about being unimpressed by Hill Top

 It mostly uses scraps from the last Basic Grey Christmas papers and also some Crate Paper washi tape and ancient scroll stamps

I did one about our recent trip to Teignmouth using a Fancy Pants collection I have everything of and have hardly used - Trendsetter

There is a big mistake on this layout - we went in 2015. Doesn't time fly! I also used a blue pen to write with and really don't like it. Ah well

And finally

 Again this uses up lots of bits and bobs. I unified all the patterns by adding black lines to them all. It is time consuming but worth it.

The story is about the youth group we have started running and I hadn't had permissions to use their photos at the time of making it, so it is our ugly mugs again :)

I followed the crowd and ended up at Tescos

On of my favourite lines from Max Boyce that.
I share it because this week a few of the Daring Cardmakers shared some cards. So I produced mine for the dare - only at the last minute to discover those cards were for NEXT week. Ah, we all know what assume makes don't we?

Its been a bit of a week though. Phil is on his trip motorbiking round Britain and the house feels strange without him. Also my computer died :( A new one is coming next week and I suppose the upside of Pip being away  is that I get to use his computer.... But nothing is quite the same so everything takes forever (Moan moan)

I'm actually behind as well on last weeks dare (the computer failed last Friday) so will cover that as well in a minute.
This weeks dare was a challenge to use Neon colours - Glowing Neons
I'm not a big fan of neon. Funnily enough as I slaved over my card I thought "the last time I was into neon was when I had that orange t-shirt with "relax" written on it and my lovely friend Cathrinehas just posted a photo of me on Facebook wearing said neon shirt (and fairly bold trousers). I reckon it must be around 1984. I've cropped it so it is just me and her legs :)

It would have taken ages to get my hair that foofy!

Anyway enough nostalgia for the days of neon. Here is the card

 I was initially rather panicked but then decided to borrow some highlighters from my student daughter. (Ulp, I have just realised she is probably exactly the same age now as I was in this photo. I think it was taken in the summer I turned 19, which is where she is now . I can say exactly the same age with confidence as we have the same birthday...)
 I have just bought a new stamp and die set - Doodle  flowers from WPlus9 and some Clean Color (sic) brush pens (never got into copics but I adore these) I stamped the flowers and leaves in black ink. Then I scribbled some neon highlighter onto a perspex block and used a water brush to pick up the colour. It worked really well! I did add some depth and contrast with some of the Clean Color (hate spelling it that way) pens but the highlighters did most of the work. If you look closely at the card, you will see that I used green, orange and yellow as a wash on the background as well. It is more visible to the naked eye than the camera was able to pick up.

I added Wink of Stella clear shimmer over the images, used a black pen to redo the ink sections and added some dots with a white pen. Then I die cut/hand cut the elements out , adding some with foam pads for dimension. The sentiment is from the same set. It was finished off with some sequins and I also raised the panel with foam pads (the thick black line at the top and right hand side is a shadow as it was really sunny when I photographed it)

The week before was an inspiration month and Leo came up with this
 (I would show the pictue here but blogger is mucking me about)
I basically decided to be inspired by the whole thing and had a go painting a face

"Brave effort" I reckon :) I also watercoloured a yellow/grey panel and added paint, stripes and dots to my background patterned paper as well. I raised the Clearly Besotted sentiment onto foam pads and added some sequins. For a change.

I'll quickly share my first outings with those Clean Color pens. They are such fun to use. Here are two cards using Clearly Besotted stamps

and four using the same Woodware stamp, just playing around with colours

If only you could see the Wink of Stella sheen, it is so pretty :)

I'll be back next week - hopefully with my hard drive full of photos of other things I have made.... (back things up? ME who has had two hard drive failures?)



 

Poor old blog

I have rather slowed up on the old blogging - I am never in when the Daring Cardmaker challenge is posted and then rather forget as time goes by. And May was my bloggerversary and everything (9 years blogging now!)

Ah well. I can only do what I can do. (V. philosophical)
So lets have a crafty catch up again shall we?

Two weeks ago the Daring theme was Science Fiction. Svenja wanted us to portray an sci-fi hero of our choice. I didn't read that properly and just went for a sci fi sort of vibe. I'm not sure what I would have done if I had read it properly but the rest of the team filled the brief with some AWESOME cards.

 I dug out my old Purple Onion space people/rocket stamps. They are a bit Futurarma-y aren't they? I coloured them with watercolour paints (the awesome kuretake gansai tambi set) and while they were drying I cut out a rectangle of watercolour paper and added a dark blue wash over it. I took a Heidi Swapp stencil and some diamond glitter embossing paste to create stars. I cut out a spotty planet but looked a bit dull so spread some of the paste on that as well. I loved the shimmer so gave my aliens and rocket the same treatment.

and popped them up with foam pads. The only thing left to do was a hand written sentiment.

My middle son was 21 during that week. He was still at Uni and it is too far to nip in to say hello, plus he was still in the middle of the presentations for his finals. Instead we sent him a fruit cake through the post with a pic of a teddy bear with balloons  - one of those you can write your own greeting on and will go through a letter box. Cool eh? (Don't have a photo of that yet)
And this card

The glittery letters were given an ombre ink treatment that I rather like... I used papers from an old MME pad

This week's Daring Card also featured glitter. I do love glitter.
It was a bit of a challenge. Sharon asked us to try out the Mirror Mirror technique - mirror stamping, mirror die-cuts or patterned papers featuring a mirror image.
I went for mirror stamping - why? I am not the best stamper in the world. But I had finally got my hands on those cute Unforgettable stamps from WPlus9 so had to try. I stamped the image onto some vellum and then placed the vellum on cardstock, tracing over the inked area with a pencil. It was still quite faint but enough to go over with a black pen

I used prismacolour pencils - not totally successful to colour my little grey friends and then cut out party hats, balloons and bow ties with the matching dies to the stamp set. The paper is from the Doodlebug Sunkissed paper pad. The glitter card is from Craft Creations.

Lets see if June is a more blogably productive month!