It's all in the detail

This beautiful image comes from A Day for Daisies, at first glance it looks like a pretty flower with a fairy perched on it...  then you see the bees, the ladybirds, and there are snails and  even a tiny worm on there too!  Mine are quite hard to pick out as I've used fairly natural colours.  I've used hot summer colours for the flower, added Stickles in lots of different colours to my image and brushed Distress Inks onto the background.  The DP is Basic Grey, sentiment from Craftwork Cards and the flowers centres are shadd with Copics to match the image.

My card is for the following challenges:
Sweet Sketch Wednesday - sketch
A Day for Daisies - mystery ingredient (glitter)
Crafty Catz - no pink or blue
Your next stamp - 3 embellies, 2 DPs, 1 image
Flutterby Wednesday - open, use fairy or butterfly
Crafts & Me - add a flower
The Colour Dare - real red, peach parfait, pear pizzazz
Little Miss Muffett - summer
Charisma Cardz - summer colours
Fussy & Fancy - summer
Fairytale Challenge - summer sun

Phindy's Friday Challenge #18 - Pretty in Pink

Good Morning!  It's Friday the 13th but no need to worry about that, just enjoy the fact that it's nearly the weekend and it's also time for a new Phindy's Place Challenge.  This week the challenge is to be Pretty in Pink.  So it's time to make an unashamedly girly card!  Don't forget to use one of Phindy's gorgeous digis and enjoy being pretty in pink:). 

I've used one of those adorable Summer Cuties, this is Bye-bye Butterfly.  There is a beautiful, to scale butterfly included in Phindy's digi, of course.  However my card is so busy that I chose to add a little punched butterfly instead.  I wanted to add lots of flowers and swirls so I made an easel card, basing it on the sketch at Spoonful of Sugar Challenge this week.  Image is coloured with Copics, cut out and popped up onto silicon glue on top of an embossed circle.  The DP is a freebie from My Mind's Eye that came with a magazine.  The left hand flower is a Prima, with a metal spacer from Quixotic Paperie added.  There are metal butterfly charms added to the computer generated sentiment.  All the leaves, swirls, butterflies and flowers are punched and there are Liquid Pearls centres to the flowers.

I am entering my card for the following challenges:

Spoonful of Sugar - sketch

DareU2Digigstamp - blooms and charms

Flutterby Wednesday - open theme with butterfly

Paper Sundaes - metal

Charisma Cardz - easel

Digital Tuesday - butterflies or lace

Sweet Stampin' - pretty in pink

One Stop Craft Challenge - summer fun
The Pink Elephant - summer fun

Crafty Cardmakers - spotlight on punches

Everyone loves cupcakes!

I've made a card using an image from my crafting friend's visit the other week, this is of course a Whiff of Joy image, Melinda with muffin basket. I've iced the tops of my muffins, with pink Copic and Glossy Accents and turned them into cupcakes.

Whiff of Joy has a lovely sketch by Bev for its challenge this week which I've followed and Charisma Cards has the theme of Birthday cards - with a candle on. You may need to click on the photo to enlarge it, but the cake in Melinda's hand has a lit candle on it. One Stop Craft Challenge's theme is Optimistically Pink and I'm entering my primarily pink card for this challenge too. Meilnda's a fairy with wings so I've also entered her for Flutterby Wednesday's open challenge.

Image is coloured with Copics, Stickles and Glossy Accents, the edge of the oval is edged with Torn Paper Distress Ink. Papers are My Mind's Eye, sentiment is Hero Arts, flowers are Prima with Stickles added and Card Candy is from Craftwork Cards.

Purple flutter-by

Danni has been running the Flutterby Wednesday Challenge for ages now; I don't get to play along as often as I'd like. This week, for a change, I have a card to submit for the challenge. I visited the shop Made by You last Friday and had a play with some of Pat's workshop bits and pieces and came up with a couple of cards, including this one that I finished up at home. The butterfly is a Little Claire clear stamp, very large and ideal to use with shrink plastic. I've stamped it twice, silver embossed it and painted it with Distress Inks straight from the bottle, something I've not used before. The two background panels are stamped with a Papermania scrolly-leaf stamp in Distress Inks and the first panel also has some inks applied with a sponge. The vine shapes were cut from a long Cuttlebug border, I stuck both these and the butterfly layers down with silicon glue to give them dimension.

Sweet Summer Sun - and 8 challenges!

It's been a lovely hot day today, in fact it's been hot for a few days and I've been drawn to making a hot summer sunshine card. I've begun with the very simple, very usable sketch from the CPS Challenge blog this week. I've used some lovely images from My Grafico, a set called Garden Elements and I've coloured them with Koh-i-Noor pencils in hot pinks and oranges to match Michelle's Summertime theme on the Digital Tuesday Challenge. This is also the theme at Cupcake Craft Challenges so I'm entering it for this Challenge too. Sadly Cupcake Craft is closing down as a challenge, it will be their last challenge next week. A Challenge blog is a big commitment and a lot of work, thank you to all the Cupcake gals for running their challenges for so long :). There's yet another Summer Challenge to enter at A Spoon Full of Sugar this week!

The challenge this week at One Stop Craft Challenge is to use Fruity Colours, so I'm entering my orange and raspberry card, though it has no actual fruit on it, it still fits the bill. Charisma Cards has an open challenge that you can enter up to four times, that they've called Rubbernecker Week after their sponsor, so here's entry #2 to their challenge. And last but definitely not least, my blogging friend Danni has a Flutterby Wednesday theme of creating an outdoorsy card with a butterfly of fairy. OK I make that SEVEN challenges in one card - yippee! :).

PS My Grafico has a Summer/4th July challenge which Martha has reminded me about (see my post below). So that makes it a record EIGHT!

Now, on to the card...

Digi images from My Grafico were printed twice and coloured with Koh-iNoor pencils. Flowers were cut out and added to the image with 3d sticky dots. The image was edged with Distress Ink in Worn Lipstick and matted onto pink card. The DP is an Artylicious printed paper from my Graphicus Guild membership. The Hero Arts sentiment is stamped onto orange Bazzill card and the whole of it matted onto pink. The butterfly from the set was then stuck down, some Glossy Acents and Stickles blinged it up a bit and I added two butterfly brads from a special offer pack I bought at Made by You. Enjoy the summer and I hope you enjoyed looking at the card!

Purple & Pink for Alice

Dutch Dare's challenge this week is one close to my heart, they are asking for cards to be created for Post Pals. Post Pals is something I already support, I send cards to Alice, who currently undergoing chemotherapy. Her favourite colours are pink and purple, so that's what I've used for my card.

I've used the gorgeous sketch from Sketch & Stash Challenge this week and I've used butterflies on my card, which is this week's challenge for A Spoonful of Sugar . I love Danni's butterfly challenges and this week she gave us the very straightforward challenge of using a challenge sketch and including butterflies (or fairies) so I've covered that one too :).

This is, of course, a stashbusting card as it's for Sketch & Stash :). I began with something new: the lovely butterfly stamp from last month's Graphicus Guild themeplate, which I hadn't used yet. It's stamped onto Glimmer Misted paper, the butterfly stamped again and coloured with Koh-i-Noor pencils then with Glossy Accents on top. The sentiment stamp is part of this month's Graphicus Guild themeplate, again I've not used it before.

The pink pearlescent card came from a box of paper that I filled at one of the first craft shows I ever went to, this is neglected stash, as are the two DPs, which are both from my Graphicus Guild membership papers. The pink background is obescured by the images, but it is a lovely large-scale flower print, and of course the butterflies had to go onto this card :). Butterflies diecut with a punch that I've had for a while and just begun using, ribbons and flower from stash.



Post Pals is a lovely organisation, please join in and send cards if you can :).

Three Challenges, one card

I'm combining three challenges here on one card. My starting point was with some digital download papers that I got which fitted the them on The Secret Crafter's challenge for this week perfectly: pink, turquoise and a hint of brown. I got an email about a birthday sale at Funky Fairy and saw a really sweet set called Just a Bit, which is based around pink, blue, green and brown. I've printed off a floral, an almost plain blue and a dotty pink. There is some brown in the trails on the floral but I added brown centres to my circles from some Basic Grey paper too.

Because the paper was digital, I decided to use the sketch from Digital Tuesday Challenge and found a beautiful free digi-image on Nina's blog, created in honour of her daughters. Due to lack of room I've cropped the text from the bottom of the image. Nina has a brilliant blog, do check it out if you get a chance. The image is coloured with Koh-iNoor pencils, with Stickles blinging it up a bit. The image was cut out with a Labels Nestie and mounted onto turquoise Bazzill card. The circles have small brown and turquoise circles overlapped on the smallest scalloped Nestie size.

Danni's Flutterby Challenge this week is an open one, to use butterflies or fairies. I've used a punch to cut out a butterfly that is sitting on the ribbon and a couple more on the sentiment. I had a lot of fun making this card, I just hope it's not too busy :)

Inspirational Cards Sketches #11 & Flutterby Wednesday Week 52

I got out my Elusive Images butterfly daisy and poppy collage stamps for this week's Inspirational Card Sketches Challenge. I coloured some glossy card with Distress Inks. The colours are Tea Dye and Weathered Wood. I stamped the lovely text and scrolled background onto it and cut an oval from it with Nestabilities dies. Then I stamped a large butterfly onto the glossy card and cut round it. I've chopped off its antennae as too fiddly to cut round though, and can't decide whether to try to draw some in on the background... The butterfly is attached so as to be 3D, sorry it doesn't show up well here.



The two sentiments come from Graphicus Guild stamps, they are stamped onto Glimmer Misted paper that has had cling film crumpled onto it while the ink was wet. The design paper is from the Graphicus Guild membership pack and I've stamped the smaller corner scroll from the butterfly daisy collage set onto the paper. All stamping was done with black Versafine ink.




I've changed the proportions around a bit to fit my ideas to Dawn's sketch but I'm quite pleased with the end result. I'm also submitting it for Danni's Flutterby Wednesday challenge - Danni has been challenging crafters for a year now! Congratulations Danni, hope you like my butterfly card :)

Twisted Thursday #5 & Flutterby Weds #51

This is the sketch for Twisted Thursday's #5 challenge. The twist is to add embossing. Danni's Flutterby Challenge this week was not to use design paper. I decided that the two challenges go really well together and I combined them, using the sketch for Twisted Thursday.

I began by stamping a butterfly and "Happy Birthday" onto textured pale blue paper, using blue Stazon. Both are Elusive Images stamps. The butterfly is coloured in with Inktense pencils and has a line added with an embossing pen that is heat embossed with silver powder.

The gold coloured background is glimmer-misted paper. It's dry embossed with a Cuttlebug folder with a leaf design, rubbed over with an embossing ink pad and silver embossed. The main piece of paper is treated much the same way, it's a very dark glimmer misted paper that I've rubbed over with white embossing ink to lighten it a bit and then with the silver embossing powder added.

The ribbon was a friend from my SBS25 "sister" Vanja and I've folded a Prima flower to one side. It's been fun avoiding printed papers, I've certainly used lots of embossing, dry and heat! There seems to be a lot going on in this card, hope you like it:)

Flutter By Wednesday Challenge

I've come across a great new blog with a regular challenge called Flutter by Wednesday. The challenges all have butterflies as part of their theme and this one uses a very attractive sketch.

As my new Elusive Images stamps are butterfly collage stamps, that I'm loving playing with, this challenge is just made for me :). I don't have as many butterfly stamps as tree images but it's a close thing! I've coloured the image with watercolour pencils and a little Stickles glitter, mounted it onto dark blue card. It's teamed with two papers from my Graphicus Guild papers, a couple of toning ribbons, a daisy from the same themeplate and a butterfly sentiment from Craftwork Cards, coloured with Copic pens.

I love these stamps, hope you like my flutterby card :)