CC&S Double Challenge 180: Eileen's butterflies

I had lots of fun again this week making my card for CAS Colours and Sketches and it was in no small way thanks to my friend Eileen Godwin!

Eileen is very generous in sharing her time and talent with fellow crafters and made a YouTube video this last week showing a really colourful way of using Distress inks and this is my version of it. The depth of colour is not as good as Eileen's but that is what makes her a superstar and anyway I'm pretty pleased with my result. I was delighted when I saw I could combine both our sketch and colours and Eileen's tutorial into just one card! I actually made one in another colourway too but it's not quite finished so will share next time.

I inked and misted an acrylic block with Distress ink pads and stamped it onto a piece of card. Stamping in the shape of an arc as in Bev's design proved quite tricky until I hit upon the idea of making a mask from a plastic punched pocket so that I could see through it and clean it easily and it worked really well! The rain drops were stamped when the ink was dry, removing some of the colour from them with a water brush and highlighting with a white gel pen. I coloured a few spare pieces of card with the three ink pads and left them to dry thoroughly before die-cutting and punching the butterflies. These have then been stamped with a swirly stamp and highlighted as before. I love this sentiment stamp but don't use it nearly often enough and thought it fitted well here. I used a black matt, a colour I don't use much on my cards but think it works well for this technique. Finally I glued the butterflies in place along the line of the arc. Job done!

Supplies Used:
Ink Pads: Cracked Pistachio, Squeezed Lemonade & Worn Lipstick (TH Distress), Onyx Black (VersaFine)
Stamps: Water Drops & Nature Speaks (Inkylicious), Klimt Swirl Block (Tanda Stamps)
Dies: Sizzlits Butterfly #12 (Sizzix), Small Butterfly XCU220 (XCut)
Punch: Small Butterfly (XCut)
Snippets: White & black cardstock, White gel pen

Remember that you must use both Bev's colour palette and sketch together on your CC&S entry if you want to be considered as one of our weekly winners. Looking forward to seeing your interpretations.

Thanks for visiting!
Stef x

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 #148: A Double Challenge

I'm not sure that my card for CAS Colours and Sketches this week is either clean or simple enough to really do the challenge justice. I was making some cards with my mum the other day and obviously had one of those indecisive days so this is what I ended up with. 

We were making some cards using Craftwork Cards products and I thought I would make a card for the challenge using patterned papers and die-cut flowers. As it does sometimes, the design started out one way and finished up another. The card has an acetate panel on the front with a patterned panel on the inside of the card. However, the finished design could just have easily had the patterned panel on the front of the card but I had a different plan when I originally sat down to make it!

I wanted to make my own flowers to match the graphic but ended up cutting and shaping flowers from the papers and using some die cuts. Also, it did prove a real challenge to find papers that only used three closely-matching colours to the ones I chose for CC&S - talk about giving myself a hard time!

Anyway, I have made it for a special friend's birthday this week and I'm sure she'll love it, especially the colours. I've got a really busy week of birthdays so I must go and make a few more cards. Then I will see about enjoying what's left of half term!

We would love to have you join us in the challenge this week. We had a bumper crop of entries last week, so thank you!

Stef x

CC&S #135: A Double Challenge!

A fifth Thursday in the month means a double challenge at CAS Colours and Sketches with both a colour palette AND a sketch to work with together. Some hate it and some love the usually tougher challenge but Jane has made it easy for us by giving us both a super colour trio and a delightful sketch to work with.

I needed to make a card for Martin's Mum whose birthday is next week so decided to kill two birds with one stone as time is precious at the moment! I have interpreted the sketch using flowers, with leaves in place of the dots. I used a Marianne Designs die to cut the spirals for my paper roses in a scrap of navy paper. The centres of the flowers are white Candi that has been coloured with an appropriate Promarker and fixed with foam pads. The leaves have been cut using the same die set in a scrap piece of green card carefully matching the colour palette. The banners have been cut with a CB tag die again using scraps of cardstock. Lastly the sentiment from Paper Smooches has been stamped using a Memento ink pad.

Supplies Used:

Spiral & Leaf Dies: LR0162 Roses (Marianne Design)

Candi: Icing Sugar (Craftwork Cards)

Promarker: Buttercup (Letraset)

Banner Dies: Tag Along (Clearly Besotted)

Sentiment Stamp: Sentiment Sampler (Paper Smooches)

Ink Pad: Nautical Navy (Memento)

Snippets: Navy, Green and Textured Yellow cardstock

As all the cardstock I have used is from my snippets box I would also like to enter my card into this week's recipe challenge #234 at Less Is More and at the same time wish Chrissie a very happy birthday. I have followed her blog and her challenge for some time now.  All her cards are fabulous and she is a great source of inspiration to me and, I know, many other crafters! Edit: I forgot to link up my card to the LIM challenge - silly me!

I think I had roses on my mind because I have been making some paper roses for the wedding from a pattern found on the internet by Lia Griffith. Katie is making her bouquet from paper roses using pages from an old copy of her favourite book 'The Time Traveller's Wife'. So I am making some extras to partially decorate the cake and maybe for the tables, etc. I'm very pleased with the way they are turning out and more importantly Katie likes them too so I thought I would share photos of them with you.

That's it for now. Hope you enjoy the double challenge. 

See you next week!

Stef x

CC&S #122: The dreaded double?

Do you dread it or do you love it? As April has five Thursdays we have both a sketch and a colour palette chosen by Louise for you at CAS Colours and Sketches this week.

I've been wanting to join in the challenges over at Uniko Studio for a while and thought I would try and kill two birds with one stone. It's been a real challenge! I pondered over Louise's sketch and decided to use one of Bev's trailing vine stamps, but then couldn't find an ink pad to match 'Calypso Coral' from amongst my stash anywhere! It got really complicated as I only have a small collection of Uniko Studio stamps at the moment and definitely don't have anything that remotely resembles 'Things With Wings'...hmmm!

So after some thought, I set about creating butterflies from one of the 'Flower Power' sets using the half flower, experimenting with stamping two of the three petals and then trying to create a mirror image. I think they turned out OK and have got a few spares to use another time. I cut them out and mounted on foam pads adding some adhesive pearls and stamping a few tiny flowers and dots from the vine set in the challenge colours along with a sentiment also from the 'Flower Power' set.

I hope that Louise thinks I have been true enough to her sketch and that Bev approves of my butterfly creations.

Supplies Used:

Stamp sets: Background Builders - Vines & Flower Power #2 (Uniko Studio)

Ink pads: Pacific, Smoke Blue (Versa Color) & Orange (Whispers)

Snippets: White adhesive pearls

Next month it will be my turn to host the CC&S challenges. I can't wait to share my colours and sketches with you and hope you'll continue to play along!

Stef x  

CAS Colours and Sketches Challenge #109

I must admit that I found this week's challenge at CAS Colours and Sketches quite tricky. I studied the sketch graphic for ages before deciding how to interpret it but then it's good to be really challenged sometimes and do something outside of your comfort zone. As it's a fifth week of the month it's a double take and is therefore also a colour challenge.

I have kept my card very simple and made it for a male work colleague whose birthday falls this week. I have turned the sketch 90 degrees and played with my new chevron stamps from Uniko Studio to make the background and then matted and layered this onto a piece of green cardstock. The two small squares in the centre of the sketch have been transformed into the first two letters of 'Happy Birthday' using some ancient See D alphabet stamps lurking in the bottom of one of my drawers. The rest of the sentiment is computer-generated in the same font and has just been raised at one end with foam pads to counteract the layering.

As I don't have any SU products the inks I have used are Whispers Chestnut, Whispers Sage and Adirondack Lettuce, these being the closest I could find to match the SU colours in the challenge.

Not really sure I like the finished card but I've no time to make another one this week. Still I can't wait to see what you make of it!
Stef x