CC&S 167 Double: IndigoBlu Butterfly

I actually don't mind coming up with a card for the dreaded double challenge at CAS Colours and Sketches (we have one of these every time there are five Thursdays in a month). You are provided with a sketch and a colour palette, surely that's your card half made! Yet sometimes, something creeps in that makes you wonder what to do exactly. This week, for me, it was the colour brown! Flowers, no, they would appear to be dead; Autumn, no, wrong season!

After flowers, my next go to would be butterflies and yes there are a lot of brownish butterflies in nature but on our cards we usually inject more colours to pretty them up a bit. So I stamped the large butterfly with a brown inkpad, cut a square from part of the image and used the yellow and blue to watercolour (still my favourite technique at the moment) parts of my image. I colour-matched the sentiment on my computer and used a scrap of textured brown cardstock as a band to tie in with the sketch. I also ran a brown inkpad along the edges of my image and sentiment to avoid two slightly different whites coming together and raised them on foam pads.

Don't be scared of the double! Please set yourself a challenge and come along and join us this week. I liked my finished card better than I thought I would.

Supplies Used:
Stamp: Big Butterfly BBII (IndigoBlu)
Inkpads: Pinecone (VersaColor), Salty Ocean & Squeezed Lemonade (TH Distress)
Sentiment Font: Allegro
Snippets: Brown textured & White cardstock

Thanks for visiting!
Stef x

CC&S 166 Sketch: Watercolour Lifting

I've had lots of fun getting messy with inks again creating my DT card for CAS Colours and Sketches this week. I spotted this card on Anita's blog HERE and it reminded me that I had watched the same fab watercolour lifting video technique from Jennifer McGuire HERE and decided to try it out using this week's sketch drawn by our hostess Jane.

Next time I try this technique, and I will try it again because I loved doing it, I will use different paper. For this card I used a 230gsm watercolour paper but it seems to be a bit too porous and I don't think I managed to achieve quite such a marked effect as either Anita or Jennifer. I inked up four pieces of paper directly from inkpads, brushed them with water and dried them off with a heat gun. I then used a background stamp with Versamark and clear embossing powder on each piece. More water on top followed, mopping it up with kitchen roll which removes some of the ink leaving darker patches trapped underneath the embossing!

I then cut five equal pieces, inked the edges and placed them on a 7" x 5" card blank following Jane's sketch. The poppy die was cut from linen card and stuck on top with the sentiment hand-stamped to the side.

Supplies Used:
Watercolour paper: 230gsm (Crawford & Black)
Inkpads: Fired Brick, Broken China, Frayed Burlap, Worn Lipstick (TH Distress)
Stamps: Butterflies Block (Tanda Stamps), Sentiment Sampler (Paper Smooches)
Die: Prim Poppy (Memory Box)

The inspiration for my colour scheme was drawn from this week's challenge #334 at ColourQ so I would like to enter my card into their competition. I don't own any SU colours so have just used the closest that were suitable for this technique.

Thanks for visiting my blog today. I hope you all enjoy a lovely Easter weekend whatever you're doing.

Stef x

CC&S Challenge 165 Colours: I Am Sailing

Imagine my complete surprise when my husband suggested buying me a Brother Scan'N'Cut for my birthday! He knew that one day I would like a digital die-cutting machine with wi-fi connection so that I could create my own designs on my computer and cut them out electronically ... and so much more. But I never expected to get one just yet, I thought I would have to wait for several years! Anyway it has arrived and I have started to have a play with it for this week's card for CAS Colours and Sketches.

As soon as I saw Jane's colour choices with two blues I knew that I would make some kind of nautical scene though it took me a while to settle on this design. The frame and the boat have been cut on the BS&C. It will take ages to learn how to use all the different functions but I'll get there! The waves have been cut with a die using my Sizzix. The frame has been popped up on foam tape to give some dimension.

The greeting is a peel-off, coloured black to fit in with our rules at CC&S. It's such a shame that each week we have to eliminate some entries from our voting as they just don't comply with our few simple rules!

Supplies Used:
Cutting Machines: Big Shot (Sizzix), Scan'N'Cut (Brother)
Die: Breezy Waves (Memory Box)
Snippets: White linen & coloured cardstock, peel-off greeting

Thanks for visiting and please remember just to use the three challenge colours plus stated neutrals if you want to be considered as a weekly winner when entering our challenge.

Stef x

CC&S 164 Sketch: Oh What a Beautiful Morning!

Jane has given us a very simple square sketch to work with at CAS Colours and Sketches this week which opens up all sorts of possibilities.

I went to a Sincerely Yours craft show at Leigh recently where I watched Emma from Inkylicious demo a lovely technique of spritzing their ink dusters and using them on a satin card which gives a lovely subtle brushed effect to the inks.

At a similar time I took a beautiful photo in my back garden on a cold, frosty morning of the sun coming up behind the trees. I thought I would try and replicate that scene on my card. Unfortunately my small camera doesn't really do the colours justice and neither does my finished card as they were much more dramatic but hey ho! To finish the scene I tried to replicate the frost on the grass with a gelly roll pen.

Jane's sketch is square and my stamp is rectangular, though it does have the bold frame around it so I layered it onto a square of coloured card and included the greeting within that.

Supplies Used:
Card: Satin Silk 350gsm (Inkylicious)
Ink Pads: Tumbled Glass, Milled Lavender, Spun Sugar, Squeezed Lemonade, Dried Marigold, Bundled Sage, Frayed Burlap (TH Distress); Tuxedo Black (Memento), Smokey Gray (Versafine)
Stamp: Picture Perfect 1 (Inkylicious)
Stencil: Scenic Mountains (Inkylicious)
Pen: Gelly Roll 'Clear Star' (Sakura)
Snippets: Lavender cardstock, Happy Birthday sentiment stamp

We had tons of entries into our last sketch challenge. I hope you will all want to play along with this one. Please remember to follow the squareness of the sketch if you want to be considered as a weekly winner!

Thanks for your visit!
Stef x

CC&S Colours #163: Real Red Roses

I'd like to start off by welcoming my newest follower Kath Buckle! I don't have so many so it's nice to know that someone likes my cards enough to want to follow my creative journey.

Jane is our hostess at CAS Colours and Sketches this month and she has chosen a lovely set of colours to kick off the month. I decided to make an alternative Mothering Sunday card so that my Mum and my MIL both get something a little different but using the same stamp.

I have followed the sketch from The Paper Players Challenge #284, a lovely sketch by Claire. I didn't want to use newsprint, though I do love it, so have represented this element with my notebook stamp. My card need to be very CAS for our challenge so for the background I embossed a piece of white cardstock with some simple diagonal stripes and edged it with a stripe inked by my computer to match the Mint Macaron. The flowers and leaves are from different Uniko sets; the solid background rose was stamped with second generation ink giving a lighter tint than the detail rose. The sentiment is computer-generated in white again on a background to match with our colour palette.

Supplies Used:
Stamps: Flower Power 6 & Beautiful Blooms 1 (Uniko Studio), PMA 907003 (Papermania)
Texture Plate: Diagonals (Sizzix)
Inkpads: Scarlet & Celadon (VersaColor), Green Green (Whisper)
Sentiment Font: Candara
Snippets: White cardstock

Now all I have to do is decide which card to give to which Mum! Thanks for visiting my blog today. I hope you get a chance to join in with our colour challenge this week!

Stef x