Butterflies

Some days you just really fancy a good old inky, messy play, and I had one of those days yesterday. Here's what I made and some simple steps if you are interested. Suz xx

I prayed a piece of thick card, probably about 400gsm with Oak House Studio Spode spray ink. I then mixed some of the ink with some Sweet Poppy translucent paste, not too much or it just goes flat. Then I used a swirl stencil and some chipped sapphire TH inks around the edge, and another mask with polka dots .  I inked though a butterfly stencil with Versamark, heat embossing the lower with Stampendous Frantage enamels and the other with clear embossing powder which darkened the colour beneath. I added white Signo pen to the butterflies and also used it to highlight other areas and to frame the beautiful sentiment with swirls and dots. I used a blue pencil to give depth in some areas around the butterflies too. To create the bird cage and branches I used another stencil but this time spritzed Dylusions white ink through. The sentiment stamp was from Oak House Studio, just using archival black ink onto which card which I'd also pre-coloured with the Spode. I might also enter this one into the Oak House Studio challenge as I'm still on the blue theme with this!
Happy crafting all.
Suz
xx

Anniversary Card for my Hubby

So here is a card I made for our 22nd Wedding Anniversary next month. Slight problem that hubby saw it while I was trying to take pics, but he will pretend to be surprised on 25th July!

I sprayed the main card blank with the Oak House Studio 'Spode' blue spray inks, which gave a lovely soft colour. I stamped three hearts using the Walesby Heart, also from Oak House Studio using a Versamark ink pad then heat embossed with Cosmic Shimmer Marine Sea Lustre, which I also used for the Anniversary sentiment. I added ribbon top and bottom to the main strip. I had a piece of blue card which I rounded the corners on, divided into 3 parts and added white dots to with a Uniball Signo white pen, which I also did to the card behind the sentiment. I layered it all up, was happy that it wasn't too girly (it's blue!!!) then smudged a mark on the edge of the main heart bit so I die cut more of the same coloured card and added the swirls to cover it up, but I liked it with that too! Tiny scrap of ribbon on the semtiment, just in a knot rather than a feminine bow, and voila!

I'm going enter this into the June Oak House Studio Challenge

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun - and my last DT post for Artistic Inspirations!

Hi all. This is the very last image I'll be using as a member of the Artistic Inspirations Design Team and it must be one of my favourites! I went all out and made 4 cards in one morning, great fun.  Here is the link to this image by Bugaboo  http://www.bugaboostamps.com/Red-Hat-Stella-Block--want-to-have-fun_p_1645.html.
The theme this month over on the Artistic Inspirations Challenge Blog is 'Inspired by a Song'.  So this image with the sentiment "Girls Just Want To Have Fun", that old Cindy Lauper classic, was perfect, in fact I'm listening to it as I type this post!
I added colour with Promarkers, then used the same colours to draw frames on the card blanks to match.  More details at the bottom of this post on the pic. I also discovered the perfect copy paper today for printing my digital images, typical as this is my last one!!! It's Xerox ColorPrint paper, and at 100gsm it is brill. One final tip; to give your digi's the effect of being heat embossed, just go over them with a black Sakura Glaze gel pen - works a treat! Best wishes all, especially all my fellow DT members, loved working with you all! Suz xxx

The pic below shows all 4 images on the 1 sheet of A4 paper. I do it this way to play with colour combinations, but as I liked all of them, and the colour went on so well on this paper, I used em all!