Any old excuse

I've been pretty unwell/blogger stopped talking to Firefox and no-one would help me for days/I've discovered crocheting and am addicted to making granny squares... all of which are part of the reason for yet more blog silence for which I am very sorry.

So here is a crafting catch-up. I'll do cards today and maybe schedhule another post with some layouts.
I've got three weeks worth of Daring Cards to catch up with and so I will share them in reverse order.
This week it is all about Tempting Treats! I'm trying (not very successfully) to lose weight and this one was tough :)

I found this lovely fabric ice-cream dish in one of my Quirky Kit leftover bags - the amount of embellishments you get is awesome and I love to dip in to my little store of goodies when I have a crafting project to complete. I had forgotten all about this so it made me smile when I found it. The papers are a combination of Studio Calico and Maggie Holmes, from 6x6 pads. The sentiment is hand written (like you can't tell :))

The week before the theme was "Thankyou for the music" (cue Abba for those of us of a certain age). And here is my card

For this card I stamped a music backgroup stamp onto watercolour paper with Versamark and heat embossed using white powder. I took some green and blue distress inks and smooshed them one at a time onto some plastic, spritzed with water and then transferred the colour onto the paper. It gives this lovely gradient effect.

To keep things light I added a little vellum label which was dry embossed. I fished out a very old Cuttlebug die and cut it from blue card and also some Little Claire iridescent sticky film which I layered over the top. The sentiment comes from two The Big, the Bold sets by Winnie and Walter. I have fallen in love with the little words that come with the sets. I think it is because, although I loathe Times New Roman as a typed font on the page, I adore trying to use it as a handwritten font. (Me? Wierd?Never) And this is quite similar I think. A few gems and that was that.

Finally... What do you do beside crafting? Miri posed the question wanting to see how we could put what we do for a living into our cards. I came up with this...

The background was made using a technique that I am loving at the moment. Using acrlyic iridescent paint and a stencil. The green was painted too and when it was dry I die cut a cross using some of the Little Claire self adhesive glitter film. The die cut words come from two different companies - the top ones are Paper Smooches and I can't remember the other.

Here are some more of the cards I have made with this technique. This is my favourite

 You can't really see the shimmer, even on the close up but it is beautiful

And a few more - using those little word stamps again