Making life brighter one card at a time
This was intended for two challenges this week – I missed the deadline for one but it’s still in time for the My Favorite Things sketch challenge. I just love the rainbow made from washi tapes. Unfortunately I didn’t have a suitable MFT stamp to go with it, and I had my heart set on this format, but hopefully it’s ok.
Such perfect timing – I created this card today for a challenge over on the Share Handmade Kindness Facebook group, and tonight I see the TGIF challenge this week is to ‘use your scraps’ – couldn’t be more perfect timing if I tried! It’s been a slow road recovering from Covid, but I’m finally starting to get back to doing more cardmarking again this last week – I think creating this card has helped get me back on the right path again too. It really reminds me of a stained glass window.
This card was actually for the previous Craft Roulette challenge that I entered just in the nick of time – but it’s perfect for the Time Out Challenges this week, also just in the nick of time 😉 The challenge was using the photo inspiration of a beautiful sewn zippered pouch, and I automatically went to the sewing/quilting aspects of this die set.
A couple of days late in posting, but the parameters for this card for Craft Roulette were:
Another set of trees using Gina K Designs’ Christmas Tree cover plate die. I this these are my favourite versions of the cards, I just love the more subtle colours of the papers together. I just flicked through my paper samples and found greens that I thought could work well together. Not a single paper pack in this case was a Christmas paper, so it just shows what you can find when you look outside the box a wee bit.
I’ve decided to enter these into a few challenges this week – I’ve been slack at doing challenges lately, so I guess I’m making up for lost time. I keep updating my Instagram feed, but forgetting to post here oops:
I created the die cut elements a few weeks ago and put the top layer together while I was at a craft retreat. I only just remembered to put them together into the final card versions this week! While I was posting on Instagram it was rightly pointed out that the bottom card is perfect for the current challenge over at the Double Trouble blog! The challenge is to mix plaids, stripes, checks, flowers and polka dots, with an optional twist of paper piecing … it was perfect timing 😀
I’ll be honest I created this background maybe 9 months ago, and never really liked it. The colour choices didn’t work for me, and it was too busy for my liking. That’s the great thing about experimenting, though, if we don’t try colour combinations that take us out of our comfort zone we never learn from the experience. In this case I love the stamp set (Sketched Bouquet by Simon Hurley) but I didn’t love the Nuvo shimmer powders I used.
I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out, though, even though it was unloved – and over the last few months I’ve noticed other designs just using a portion of busy backgrounds and got the idea to chop up the background for other uses. What was a very ugly (to me) background became three cards I’m pretty happy with overall … it’s a reminder to never give up on something, you just never know what its future holds.
Here’s the original background:
And here are the three cards I made out of it:
Here I used Plum Punch (and Ivory) cardstock and a happy birthday die by Gina K Designs – I ink blended the ‘happy’ die cuts with a bit of Plum Punch ink to dark it up slightly. The matte gold cardstock is from Tonic.
I’ve not very good at doing clean and simple cards, so this was a challenge – but I really loved the elegance of the finished card. I’ll add a small sentiment once I’ve decided what to use the card for. I used my Scor-pal to score lines down the sides, then once everything was stuck down I felt it was a bit plain, so I threaded a matte gold strip underneath the boxes and it just finished it off beautifully. I really like this one!
After I’d made the first card, I wished I’d thought of embossing the cardstock first – so I decided to do that with my final strip of the background, and I really like the effect. I kept the sentiment really simple this time around, and I’m pretty happy with the result of this one too. Amazing how different cards can look with just some small changes made to the design! Once again using Plum Punch and Ivory cardstocks and Plum Punch ink by Gina K Designs, and the sentiment is from the Beautiful Butterflies 2 stamp set, also by Gina K Designs. I used the Tin Tile embossing folder (retired) by Stampin’ Up!