Yee Haw! Leather Effect Kitty Card

Hi everyone, Taheerah here wishing you a happy Thursday!

I'm always on the lookout for new-to-me techniques! They're a great way to build up your 'techniques toolbox' and get out of a creative rut. So when I recently learned a technique to create a leather-like look on a card, I couldn't wait to try it!

I'd been waiting for an excuse to play with the Newton's Nook Newton Rides West stamp set. This set seemed perfect for masculine cards. Paired with the new technique I learned, I came up with this:

Fun, right?! I love that leather effect, it really is a very convincing look!

I achieved the effect by spraying my cardstock heavily with a mixture of water and glycerine, scrunching up the cardstock, and repeating. I dried the cardstock with my heat tool because I'm impatient! Once dry, I blended some ink over the panel so that the cracks and creases were more pronounced. Love this look!

The cardstock can still be stamped on like normal but you might need a bit more effort to stamp evenly over the creases, so my Newton was stamped using a stamp positioner for accuracy. I was happy to leave the image uncoloured, apart from a little shading with a coloured pencil for some authenticity!

I repeated the leather effect technique with a second piece of cardstock and die cut the letters for my sentiment from it. The WPlus9 Folk Art Alphabet die actually works perfectly for a 'Wanted' poster-style look! Some dimensional glue to add the letters and the wood veneer stars and I was all done!

I'd love to hear what you think of this card. Is there someone you know who'd love to receive it? Thanks for stopping by!

Floral hugs card

Hi everyone, it's Esther here and I've got some sad news... I'm stepping down from regular slots with the Seven Hills DT due to work commitments. I'll still be hanging around and guest designing occasionally, though!

Today I've got a simple floral hugs card using Altenew Extra Special, a stitched square panel from Lawn Fawn Large Stitched Square Stackables and Zig Clean Color Real Brush Pens.

Thanks for all your lovely comments while I've been here, and I hope to see you again soon.

    

Happy Balloons

I have a birthday card to share today, featuring the fabulous C&9th Happy Balloons stamp set and dies.

I started by die cutting a rounded rectangle frame. On the rectangle, I added die cut stitching details and then blended on some pinks inks for an ombré look. I adhered the frame and rectangle on a card base.

I stamped some balloons in different colours, adding details with embossing. I used the matching dies to cut them out, then layered them on the card with foam tape.

I tied some gold thread to each balloon and adhered the ends to the card base.

I die cut a banner and stamped a sentiment from the stamp set, then folded it along the score lines and adhered the ends to the card base. The middle part isn't adhered so it adds some nice dimension.

Finally I added some sequins from my craft stash to finish the card.

Have a lovely day,
Gemma

C&9th Happy Balloons

C&9th Happy Balloons

MFT Stitched Strip Dienamics

MFT Rounded Rectangle Frames

Big Birthday Balloons

Hello Hello, Jennie here on an actual sunny Bank Holiday Monday!!!

My card today is for one of those BIG birthdays, I thought I'd just spell it out

 with rainbow coloured balloons...

These Avery Elle Dies are fun and a great size for personalising cards. I cut all the numbers and letters out of white card and sponged Distress inks over them which meant I could add darker shades around the edges for a 3D effect. The sky has been made by sponging blue ink over the edge of the Lawn Fawn cloud border dies.... I cut myself some re-usable stencils in acetate.... and then MFT bought out a couple of cloud stencils!!! This card is for overseas so I drew the strings on and adhered the balloons flat to the card.

For the inside of the card I couldn't resist this cheeky little sentiment from the Irreverent Birthday stamp set by Hero Arts.... I thought it went well with the balloons as well as the big birthday number!

  

Thanks for stopping by, hope you have a great day :)

Jenny x

Christmas Baubles and Wreaths

Firstly - apologies for anyone who tried to access the store in the last 24 hours.  The server which hosts our data crashed in the early hours of Saturday morning and sadly the tech team were unable to restart it so they had to undertake a complex process of moving the data to a new server and ensuring that we restored it in the exact state before it crashed (to ensure that no orders were lost and that inventory levels were accurate).  For some reason the reboot has triggered lots of confirmation emails from May - we are not sure why and can't stop them - if you get a confirmation email today - check that it is for an old order and just ignore it.   We will be updating the orders that shipped yesterday later today so you may get a "real one" too but the dates should be obvious enough to tell the difference.   The system is now up and running again.   We did however not have access ourselves all day yesterday so have lost a days worth of "inputting time"   We will get items loaded as soon as we can - watch our facebook page for notifications.

On the plus side - I did manage to have a quick play with the new Lawn Fawn goodies whilst I was stuck waiting for updates on the store - so I have 3 fun Christmas cards to share.

I started with the stitched ornaments dies as I'm a sucker for baubles (my husband has to steer me away from Christmas decorations departments - we have enough to fill about 10 trees already!)



I love the stitched and die cut details you can add to make lots of different styles of baubles so I went for a simple card design first - an easy one to mass produce which is always handy for Christmas cards.  Simply die cut from green and red card with gold toppers and black strings which I folded over the die cut layer to add to all the stitched details.

For the second one I wanted to feature my favourite image from the stamps in this release - I do love a penguin so this little group of 3 singing ones seemed like the perfect image to pop into a bauble so this time I used the outside stitched detail on the largest die to create a bauble aperture on my card front and stamped the penguins on the base card behind (coloured with pencils so they don't show on the inside).  I added the topper and string again and stamped a co-ordinating sentiment from the Here We Go A-Waddling set.

Finally I had an idea for making quick mini wreaths that had some added realism - use tissue paper!   I bought a pack of tissue which has 2 shades of green in it from a local store for a £1 which will make me about a 1000 wreaths!  You get 5 sheets in each colour so I cut a square through all 10 and die cut them all at once with the wreath die.  Once separated and layered up (using tiny dots of glue to secure the layers) you get a full and fluffy wreath.  I used just 5 layers here so you get two wreaths from one die cut pass.  I used the tiny bow and a few dots of liquid pearls (we'll have more tonic nuvo drops that do the same back in stock soon) to decorate it and added it to a small square card with an embossed square stitched border.  Another really simple and easy to mass produce card.  I'm going to try some more ideas with the same technique so watch this space for future posts.

NEWS FROM THE STORE

• We will start to work on the Hero Arts release again now we have access to the store - it takes around 10 minutes per item to add stock to the store and there are over 100 to add.........   We also have "non store" tasks to be done this weekend so cannot unfortunately work on it solidly.  We will post on facebook as soon as it's finished and live.
• We have the new Christmas release from Flora and Fauna in transit and hope to have by the end of the week.
• We've ordered the latest release from Altenew (everything except the storage pockets as we will not be stocking those as they are no different from the Avery Elle version we already stock.) and expect to have that by early to mid-September as it takes a while from them to process and ship orders.
• We have ordered the latest release from Sugar Pea Designs and expect that to ship this week.
• There will be more new releases released to retailers this week and we will be placing orders for those including MFT, Stamping Bella, Lil' Inkers and Winnie and Walter.  Check the weekly newsletter and Facebook for future updates on when they will be in store.

Enjoy the rest of your bank holiday weekend.

See you next weekend!

Tara

Two For One

Hey stampers, Anni here!

I love dies which provide two die cuts you can use for two cards! A lot of the Cover Up dies by Lil'Inker Designs are good examples. For today's cards I used the Cover Up Die: Swirls.

I started by creating a background with ink blending! To add more interest I flicked some water on it to achieve this bleeched effects.

From this piece of watercolour paper I die cut the Swirls background. Very, very carefully I removed the die from my die cutting machine, hoping every single piece would stay in the die. This way I could add dimensional adhesive to all the small pieces and gue it in one step to my card base. Not easy but so much easier than adhering every piece individually to the card.

I die cut the swirls background again, this time out of kraft cardstock and glued it to the cardbase using the inlaid die cutting technique.

I didn't want to cover up to much of my background. So I went for my sentiment with a big word die cut that I cut from vellum. Therefore I used the Say Hello Die by Concord & 9th. I used just a tiny bit of glue so that it wouldn't show up too much.

The negative piece of the background I added to another cardbase. This was much easier because it was one big piece.

I die cut Wishing  from W Plus 9's Sending Hoping Wishing die set out of dark brown cardstock and added it to a circle of vellum die cut with My Favorite Things' Inside & Out Stitched Circles.

See? One die - two cards!

Thanks for stopping by and have a crafty weekend!
Anni

         

Be Bewitched!

Hi everybody,

Jill here, and this week I'm getting hyped for Halloween!

Using the awesome Bewitching from Avery Elle's latest release.

Let's just get past the 'HOW is it nearly October already?!', (but really, HOW?!), and on to the WOOHOO-OOOO it's nearly Halloween!  I've always loved Halloween as it's the day after my best friend's birthday so we always do something fun, and I'm loving how amped up it has become over in the UK - for sure our friends over the pond do it best, but we're definitely catching up.

I love this new Bewitching set from Avery Elle, it's packed full of all your favourite Halloween images, spooky ghouls and a wickedly wretched witch, (who's actually really rather sweet), and a ton of cool sentiments made with a spooktacular font!  Another job well done from Avery Elle!

I started my card by cutting a circle from masking paper and inking through it to create a bright moon, then uisng the positive piece from my masking paper, covering the moon and ink blending a black background around it.  I added some purples and navy blues to my background to give it some depth but it didn't show up to good in the photos.  I then added a flick of water to add some texture to my background.  Once completely dry, I added some stars from my stash and heat embossed in silver.

I then stamped out the awesome witch from the set, flying across the sky on her broomstick, and coloured using Copics.  I then cut around her leaving a thin outline which I coloured yellow to help blend into the moon and added to my card front using foam tape.

I took a piece of purple card and stamped out my sentiment right along the bottom, adding the sweet little bat which is included in the set, and heat embossed in silver. I then added the same little bat to the moon in black, for a little added interest, matted my panel over top of the purple card and mounted onto a card base.

And there you have it, a Bewitching blog post to get you hyped for Halloween :)

As always, everything I used is linked below so be sure to have a peek.

See you next week.

Jillx

Celebrate Animal Parade Birthday Card

Hi everyone, Taheerah here wishing you a happy Thursday!

Two of my favourite stamping companies celebrated their birthdays in August, so what's a crafty girl to do but create a card featuring a combination of their most recent products!

As soon as I saw the Neat & Tangled Wild Ones stamp set it was love at first sight. Same with pretty much all of the latest Concord & 9th release, but particularly the Sprinkles Turnabout stamp and the Happy Balloons stamp set. I couldn't wait to play:

I am so head over heels for this card! I love these characters so much and really enjoyed the process of stamping and colouring all of them, and some other details too!

I wanted to give these guys a tickertape parade, but with sprinkles! For those of you without a stamp positioning tool, you can still use the Turnabout stamps to stamp a pattern, and in the case of this card being an irregular shape, it actually works in your favour to use the stamp without a tool!

Lots of dimension and detail in this beauty! It took a lot of time to put together and was definitely a labour of love, but it was so worth it!

Happy Birthday, Concord & 9th and Neat & Tangled! Here's to many more!

I'd love to hear what you think of this card. Is there someone you know who'd love to receive it? Thanks for stopping by!