Recycled Christmas Tree

The challenge for week 178 on Less is More is to use a recycled item. This did make me pause for thought - not that I don't have a lot of discarded stuff - but I seemed to be lacking inspiration! Then I found some old Christmas wrapping paper lurking in the back of the cupboard. I covered some scrap card with the wrapping paper. The embossed piece was from my "discards" box and it was already inked. The panel was cut from a card which had some marks on it. It turned out to be a quick and easy card!

Materials:-
Sentiment - Banana Frog Xmas Elegance set
Ink for sentiment - Stampin Up Cherry Cobbler

Thank you for visiting my blog - please pop over to LIM and see the other "recycled" cards.

Reindeer!

When I was blog hopping I found this Christmas card challenge blog entitled 52 {Christmas} Card Throwdown. I thought it might be fun to take part so here is my entry to this week's challenge where the theme is "reindeer".

Materials used:-
Reindeer stamp - Tim Holtz Seasons Silhouettes; snowflakes - Stampendous
Sentiment - Stampin Up Sassy Salutations
Distress inks - tumbled glass and broken china
Archival inks - black and cobalt

Thank you for visiting my blog - please pop over to 52CCT - you may inspired to make your Christmas cards early!

Spread sunshine

The code word on Addicted to CAS this week is "sun" so I searched my stock to find a suitable stamp. The one I have used was a free one from Craft Stamper magazine. The background is done using a Tim Holtz technique which you can see on his blog. I like the water coloured effect it produces. I machine stitched around the background to link this to the stitching on the circle.

Materials used:-
Tim Holtz mask - Harlequin
Distress inks - mustard seed, spiced marmalade and picked raspberry
Sun stamp - Craft Stamper
Sentiment - Hero Arts "Anytime messages"
Dies - Lawn Fawn for the circle and Die-amicus for the banner

Thank you for visiting my blog!

Three flowers

Here is another water coloured card - I stamped and embossed the images before colouring them with distress inks. The hardest part was cutting out the squares and mounting them to ensure they were equally spaced. Hope they are! I am going to enter this card in this week's challenge on Less is More which is Watercolour. There are so many great examples of this technique on the LIM blog so do pop over and have a look.

Materials used:-
Stamps - Hobby Art mixed flowers
Distress inks - broken china, picked raspberry and seedless preserves

Thank you for visiting my blog.

See the flowers smiling

I was delighted to see that this week's challenge on Less is More is Watercolour. Although I am not an artist, I do like water colouring my stamped images with distress inks or watercolour paints. For this card I used distress inks to colour the stamped images and then softened the colours with some water to produce a more muted effect.

Materials used:-
Art Impressions and Chocolate Baroque stamps
Distress Markers -various colours
Sentiment - Hero Arts Anytime Messages

Please pop over to LIM to see all the beautiful water coloured cards.

On your special day

I was delighted to see that the cue word for week 99 challenge on CASology was Anniversary as it gave me the opportunity to try out this new sentiment stamp from Stamps Away.  As I wanted to keep the sentiment the main focus of the card I refrained from adding any embellishments! The pink card has a subtle sheen which I hope shows up in the photo.

Materials used:-
Sentiment stamp - Stamps Away
Embossing folder - Tim Holtz Sizzix hearts border
Distress ink - picked raspberry
Background card - Blingalicious card from Create and Craft

Off the Edge

It's one layer card week at Less is More and the theme is off the edge.  My card is a CASE of a card by Jennifer Mullens in the October 2013 issue of Craft Stamper. Jennifer had added ink splatters to her card but I decided against this as I wanted a clean look. I was pleased with the end result.

Materials used:-
Clarity Stamps "Autumn Maple Leaves" set
Distress inks - mustard seed, scattered straw, dried marigold, worn lipstick, shabby shutters and crushed olive
Sentiment - make unknown

Thank you for visiting my blog - please pop over to LIM and see how the other participants interpreted this challenge.

Travel

I am submitting this card to challenge #40 on Addicted to CAS where the code word is transport. I used distress ink to watercolour the images. I then cut out a border to continue with the sea theme - hopefully the aperture looks like a porthole. I found the hardest part was ensuring that the eyelets were equally spaced!

Materials used:-
Stamps - Hobby Art Harbour set
Sentiment by Clear Choice
Distress inks - tumbled glass
Distress markers (for the boat) - festive berries and tea dye
Clarity clouds mask
Nestabilities circle dies

LIM colour challenge

The challenge on Less is More this week is "The colours of your bedroom".  As my bedroom is painted cream I decided to use the colours of my bedding as the inspiration for my card.  I felt the card was quite plain so I added a border around the aperture.  My apologies for the photo which makes the card look much paler than it really is!

Materials used:-

Clarity Allium stamps and sentiment stamp
Antique linen distress ink
Colorbox cats eyes chalk inks - rose coral and rouge
Distress marker - shabby shutters
WOW opaque vanilla embossing powder
Nestabilities dies for the circles


Thank you for visiting my blog - please pop over to LIM and see what the other participants have created.

Broken Strings

This is the layout I made for a recent meeting of Shetland Scrapbookers. The challenge was to follow a sketch using lots of photos.

The photos in my layout feature a very talented group of young musicians from Orkney.  They are regular performers at the Orkney Folk Festival and have also performed at Celtic Connections in Glasgow.  Their CD "Halda" is available from iTunes and you can find out more about the band on their Facebook page.

Materials used:-
Background paper - Stampin Up
Other papers and letters -  Basic Grey Recess Collection
Treble clef die - Memory Box
Violin die - Die-versions

June tag

Tim Holtz has created a lovely tag for June using distress inks and one of his layering masks.  You can see how he did this on his blog.

Here is my attempt, actually my third attempt, at trying out this technique. Using mini distress inks would have been easier but I don't have any - yet! However I am pleased with the background I created.

Materials used:-

Distress inks - peacock feathers, mowed lawn, salty ocean, squeezed lemonade and broken china

Butterfly stamps - Martha Stewart and Chocolate Baroque

Tim Holtz mask - Harlequin