Sending smiles

Hi All,
It's been a couple of weeks since I've blogged. We've had a visitor and things have just been a bit busy round here.
Also, it is now winter ... there was snow on the hills on Saturday morning. It's gone for now, but I know it will be back again.


This week's Muse challenge really appealed to me. Jenni's card is really clean and simple. I love the shadows created by her white on white  that contrast with her simple and colourful string of flowers and little hearts.

I kept Jenni's flower theme, the colours she's used and the white on white. I used an old Craft Stamper stamp  that has little heart shaped leaves and had fun colouring it with my copics. I left it on the table, uncut last night & had a bit more inspiration in the early hours. I decided to find my old roller-ball embossing tool and try doing straight lines using the runner on my paper trimmer.

Sometimes I have ideas in the night that turn out to be totally impractical in the cold light of day so I was fully prepared to start again after the failure of my experiment ... but it didn't fail ... don't know why I didn't think to try this years ago.

So, anyway, my flowers were framed by a subtle, embossed line and popped onto a white card blank with 3D tape ... then I decided to add a touch of sparkle with a teeny spot of stickles on each of the stamen. Again I was worried that I would stuff it up, but it looks nice with just a little sparkle, so I'm pleased and relieved.

I will add this to the Muse challenge this week, and the AAA blog where the challenge is to use embossing.  
Then I'm off to light the wood burner 😊

Always flowers

A huge thank you to everyone who voted for my card in last weeks Muse challenge.
It's a first for me to have a card selected in a challenge and I have been buzzing all week. I could enter more card challenges I guess - but I don't seem to get that organised.

Anyway, moving on. I loved the colours in Anita's card for this week's Muse challenge and how they contrasted so well with the white. I thought she must have embossed it, but when I read her post, it turns out she'd used a stencil ....

I have some stencils, bought in a rush of enthusiasm at seeing the results of others using them - but I've had little real success with them. I decided to give it another go.

So my inspiration from Anita's awesome card was firstly the colours, then the stencil, and also how she had  placed the stencil so the image was off-centre and not fully on the card.

This is what I finally came up with (after 2 earlier cards). I used a stencil I've had for years ... first card I've made with it 😊 - I used distress inks, and the sentiment is from a Jofy stamp set.
When I lifted the stencil I thought there was too much white & it looked wrong so I blended the inks on the white areas and into the stencilling a bit which softened the edges of the stencilling more.

I originally made a tall card but when I went to photograph it & do my blog post this morning I thought it would be better sideways.
So here's my original. Plus there's another where I stamped the sentiment on uppy-downy rather than sideways .... so I have a trio of flowery cards and heaps more practice using stencils.

This afternoon I'm off to a crafting session making a mini album with a masculine theme so hopefully I'll learn lots of new techniques and get lots of ideas for future crafty things.

Cheers, Dianne