Sweet and Girly

And this card certainly is! 


A friend of ours always asks me to make the 'special' birthday cards that he sends, which is a win-win situation as I always have spares and as he pays for them I can buy new stash lol!


Fab 'n Funky are wanting to see girly this week, and as I needed to make a birthday card for my daughter (from our friend - I've not done one from us yet as her birthday is a month away) and she is one of the girliest little girls I know it seemed fitting.


As you can probably tell, she LOVES pink lol!!

I also made this card to fit in with the clever little challenge over at Raise the Bar - you must use the acronym GREEN, but the letters can stand for anything you like. After having a rough idea of what I wanted to do it came quite easily:
G - girly
R - ribbon
E - embossing
E - embellishment
N - new (to me) image


The image itself is rather lovely and is a free digi from a very talented lady called Beccy; she produces lots of cute images that are FREE, check out her work on her blog Beccy's Place.


I coloured the image with watercolour pencils and cut out, sticking onto a pre-cut cream oval that I had stamped with the flower in Victorian Velvet Distress ink and edged with the same colour.


The background is pale pink pearlescent card, once again run through that lovely embossing folder with the 'Bug. I love how the pearlescent card shows up the deep embossing so beautifully.


I stamped out the flower 3 more times onto white card with VV and blended more ink onto them. I cut them out and shaped them, layering them together with a pink pearl brad that I've had forever!


I cut a little tag from cream card and handwrote the greeting with black marker. This was edged with VV and added to the card under the flower.


Finally a strip of irredescent white organza ribbon to finish it off.


Phew, 3 posts from me today!
Take care and happy crafting,
Charli x

A Winged One

I made this card using one of my gorgeous new Ching-Chou Kuik stamps, and as luck would have it it's suitable for entry into a couple of challenges.

Firstly over at Crafts and Me the theme is Time To Spread Your Wings, meaning anything with wings, which this gorge mermaid-fairy definitely has.

Also the requirement over at Fab'n'Funky Challenges is to make your own embellishment/s, which I have done with my distressed paper flowers.

The flowers were punched from ordinary white cardstock, and run through my paper ribbler/crimper/thingamajig in all directions until the layers peeled apart, then coloured with Distress Inks (Dusty Concorde and Milled Lavender). The centres were doodled on with a gel pen.

As for the rest of the card, it was a white square base card and I cut the front off then folded it in half so that the image could stand above it and it would still fit in the same envelope. I used some temporary adhesive to attach some star-shaped sequins to the bottom corner to act as masks, and inked the whole card with Milled Lavender DI and edged it in Dusty Concorde. I stamped the script background in black Staz-On.

The image was stamped in Staz-On and coloured with watercolour pencils. I trimmed her down and rounded the top corners before layering onto purple holigraphic card. It's attached to the base with foam pads and the flowers were added with mini glue-dots to allow the petals to maintain dimention. The finishing touch is the 'Do you believe' stamp that came on the same plate as the image.

Thinkin' Pink

I needed to make a card for my little cousin who turns 7 next week, and she's a real girlie-girl (like my daughter in that respect).

So I thought I'd use the Sketch and Stash sketch (using papers that are new to my stash as they were also part of my TT candy).

And again I went for the monotone challenge from Crafter's Companion, this time using their own Popcorn Bear stamp too. So this one is all pink (couldn't help the little bits of white) - the gems are also pink although they seem to look red in this pic. Popcorn has been coloured with two shades of pink watercolour pencils and his patches and blanket are paper-pieced.

This card will also be entered into the new Fab'n'Funky challenge, which is to incorporate fancy edges - not sure how easily they can be seen, but I used my scalloped edged scissors around the layers beneath the image and the sentiment and along the bottom edge of the patterned strip. I love all my fancy-edged scissors, but the scallop one is my fave at the moment (I'm sure I'll move on to a different one in a week or so lol; I'm so fickle - but then I have 10 pairs to choose from!)

And shock, horror! No Distress Inks on this one!!

That's all for today.
Take care and happy crafting,

Charli xx

Charmed, Enchanted, Bewitched

After going for a couple of drinks at our local for a friend's birthday, I came home to find that a handful of their uniquely shaped beermats had ended up in my pocket! A very odd occurance but hey, now they're here I may as well alter them.

So here is my project for the Darkness Inspiration challenge- Bewitched.

First I spent the better part of an hour trying to get the top layer off of the darned beermat (the others I have peel off easily; not so with this one - in fact there is still a little bit left under where the image is!)

I coloured the background Forest Moss DI (see! a new colour at last!) and then edged it in Faded Jeans. Then I took another torn out book page, coloured it with Weathered Wood (my other new DI) and stuck it down, trimming around the beermat and edging again with Faded Jeans.

Next I stamped out the Tim Holtz ticket block stamp, this time leaving it in tact rather than cutting them apart, to use as another background - tinting it with Weathered Wood (my new fave!) and then using a cottonbud to add Forest Moss around the edges of the tickets; again sticking it down then trimming it down.

The image is one of the gorgeous ching-chou kuik images, made by Sweet Pea stamps and bought from Crafts and Me. I coloured her with watercolour pencils then painstakingly cut out a mask from sticky notes and coloured the background with Weathered Wood, Faded Jeans and Forest Moss.

I used my brass stencils to do the wording with my brown Indian ink marker, using the same ink colours; added an eyelet and a strip of lace(ish) ribbon, some silver gems and finally a bit of silver glitter.

This piece is also being entered into the following challenges:
Crafts and Me - sparkle (the gems and glitter)
Crafty Pad - ribbon (the strip bowed at the top)
Fab'n'Funky - no designer paper
Crafty Creations - make your own backing paper (I did mine with a stamp, book page and planty of Distress Ink!)
and finally, Lexi's Creations - animals (her two adorable kittens)

Take care and happy crafting

Charli xx

Quickie to Finish

This was just a quickie Spring card I made using paper from a pad of paper that came with a craft mag, probably a year or so ago; and its been sat amongst my stash untouched.

But this week's theme over at Fab 'n' Funky is "Get it all out!" -meaning you need to dig out some old/forgotten/unused stash (be it stamps, papers, embellishments, pretty much anything) - inspired by their success last week with the neglected stamp challenge (the stamp I dug out last week is still being used now - check the card in the last post!)

One of the patterns from this stack was weird looking, just blobs of colour on a white background, and I didn't like it at all; so I took my flower punches and got one flower from each splodge, and I really like the result!

Will try to get more projects underway soon - just a bit hard getting back into routine after those two weeks off!

Take care and happy crafting,
Charli xx

A Pair of Challenge Cards

The challenge over at Fab n Funky is to use a neglected stamp. So I dug out my gorgeous champagne and roses stamp that I bought a while (alright, a couple of years ago) for my wedding scrapbook project and has sat untouched for much too long (especially considering that the scrapbook isn't finished.... oooops!)

Anyway, that stamp is featured in both of these cards; the first of which is also eligible for the challenges at Play Date Cafe -black and white with a splash of orange (and I admit this was hard for me as I'm really not a fan of orange!)
and at Crafty Creations who have a 'limited edition' challenge (1 designer paper, 1 image/stamp and 1 embellishment -I went with the ribbon bow).

The next card uses a fab sketch from Sketch and Stash.

And also the colour scheme of pink, brown and yellow from Crafts and Me
(Although I have no idea if its a requirement to use an image bought from them or not as it doesn't specify)


Personally I like this one without the bows, but three embellishments placed around there were on the sketch.

First Attempt at a Blog Challenge

Well, after weeks of admiring lots of other people's entries to various challenges, and preparing myself by following the blogs of my favourite ones, I have finally made my first attempts. That's right, attempts - with an 's'!

Here is the first one:

(Also my first ever easel card - how behind the times am I?!)

This is my entry to the Fab'n'Funky Challenge: neopolitan icecream (brown, pink and white)

and also the C.R.A.F.T. challenge of using buttons.

I'm really happy with how this card turned out and may well have to use this colour combo again.