CC&S #152 Sketch: Gilded Christmas

I'm very pleased with the way my card has turned out this week for CAS Colours and Sketches. Louise has given us a delightful little sketch to work with and I have also combined my DT card with two other challenges involving the use of metal/gilding.

My card involves gilding in three different ways. Firstly, I made the background. This involved getting messy with my mica spray mists, a piece of hammered cardstock and the cling film technique which pools the mica together in glorious folds when it's dry. Then I simply cut a rectangle with a stitched die. For my second gilding technique, I sponged Flitter Glu directly onto a piece of white cardstock and applied gilding flakes to make a solid piece of gilded card. From this I die-cut two circles of different sizes. I die-cut a small white Christmas tree and stuck it to the centre of the larger gilded circle and then layered this onto a white scalloped circle. This was then cut in two down the middle and positioned on the background piece as shown in the sketch, raised on foam pads. The third piece of gilding involves the printed gold sentiment  which was stuck onto the smaller gilded circle and adhered to my card with foam pads.

I would like to enter my card into the following challenges:
CAS-ual Fridays challenge #145: Precious Metals

and Happy Little Stampers November CAS challenge: Gilding

Supplies Used:
Dies: Stitched Rectangle Layers (Memory Box), Plain & Scalloped Circles (Spellbinders), Christmas Tree (free gift on PaperCrafter 88)
Mica Sprays: Meadow Lush & Rich Gold (Cosmic Shimmer)
Gilding Flakes: Yorkshire Dales (IndigoBlu)
Greeting: Gold sentiment (Craftwork Cards)

I hope you're not too busy yet with your Christmas preparations to join us this week and don't forget that we currently have a DT call!

Edit: So sorry my card didn't post on time. I had saved it as a draft instead a published scheduled post!

Thanks for visiting!
Stef x

CC&S #151 Colours: New Home for Christmas

We took our Guide unit away last weekend so a quick post from me tonight for CAS Colours and Sketches as I still have a ton of things to catch up with! I love the colours Louise has chosen this week and decided to go with a card that could be Christmassy but I've actually made it as a new home card for my daughter Laura and her fiance Max who have moved to Bristol this week.

I stamped the image with Versamark and embossed with a silver tinsel EP (by accident!) which makes it quite sparkly but it looks just fine. I coloured parts of the image with Promarkers, added a few silver stars and some Stickles and matted and layered it into a piece of matching cardstock. The sentiment is computer generated and I added a few more stars for balance.

Supplies Used:

Stamp: Good Morning Robin (Little Claire)

Promarkers: Soft Green & Antique Pink (Letraset)

Sentiment Font: Allegro

Snippets: Aqua green cardstock, Silver stars

We had lots of lovely entries for our birthday challenge. It's great to have so many of you join in this week but it's going to be difficult to choose the winners! If you are new to our challenge I hope you can find time to play again.

In the meantime I hope that Laura's move is going well and that she is enjoying her first day in her new job!

Stef x

CC&S #150 Sketch: Happy Birthday Us!

We are marking our third anniversary and our 150th challenge at CAS Colours and Sketches this week. I feel honoured to have been part of the DT for almost a year now and delighted to be part of such a fantastic team. This week Louise has designed a very special sketch to celebrate our birthday and we have also have prizes to give away too! So what are you waiting for? Whether you've been with us all the way or have only just discovered our challenge please enter into the fun this week with your clean and simple cards!

When I saw that we needed to design a card with an aperture and a number on it, my mind went immediately to making a shaker card using a circle aperture as the number '0'. The celebrations made me think of designing a 50th birthday or golden wedding anniversary card using '5' as my number. And as Bev is not only our guest designer for this month but her company, Uniko, are sponsoring one of the prizes I thought it would be great to use the large Uniko 'congratulations' sentiment which I have only recently acquired.

And so the card came together quite easily. I have used pearlised card throughout to suit the occasion and kept the design all in one long banner to fit in with the sketch. The shaker element was created using the funky foam technique and the sentiment is stamped with Versamark and embossed with gold EP.

Supplies Used:
Stamp Set: All Occasion Sentiments #1 (Uniko)
Circle Dies: Standard Circles Large & Classic Scalloped Circles Large (Spellbinders)
Snippets: Ivory pearlised cardstock, Gold pearlised paper, a random number '5' sticker, assorted sequins and sparkles

I do hope you'll find some time to join in with our very special birthday challenge this week! I think I'll give my card to very special couple at church who are celebrating their golden wedding anniversary in a couple of weeks time.

Until next time
Stef x

CC&S #149 Colours: Double Birthday Cards

If I'm honest, I haven't really liked one or two of the cards I've made recently, probably because they've been a bit rushed. So this week I've put a bit more thought and care into the design of my DT card for CAS Colours and Sketches and with no small thanks to Louise's absolutely gorgeous colour combinations I'm pretty pleased with the end results. That's just as well as this week I needed to make two cards for the special men in my life, my husband Martin and my son Philip.

I was looking to see if there were any other challenges that I could combine my entry with when I stumbled across last week's Muse challenge and some gorgeous cards particularly from Anita (the muse) and Julie (one of the honourable mentions). And so my cards began to take shape. 

My first challenge was to cut out a circle aperture from my 5" x 7" card blank, tricky as I only have a 'Big Shot' and the card wouldn't fit sideways through the machine but after a couple of goes I worked out the best way to do it. I cut 5cm from the right edge of the card and lined the inside of the card with some dark purple polka dot paper. The leaves were all stamped onto linen cardstock in the other challenge colours (using some newsprint for one of the cards) and cut out leaving a margin. It took a while to assemble them in a group but when I was happy with the design they were stuck down, some raised with foam pads. Finally the sentiment was stamped on the left front. I made both cards similarly but not quite the same!

So unfortunately I found it too late and can't enter my card into the Muse challenge but I'm so glad to have been inspired by it anyway. Huge thanks also to Louise for bringing us such a gorgeous colour combination to work with this week.

Supplies Used:

Die: Standard Circles Large (Spellbinders)

Patterned Paper: Purple Polka Dot (free download from www.pixelscrapper.com)

Stamps: Leaf Decor CCS006 (Royal Langnickel), Happy Birthday (Clearly Besotted)

Ink Pads: Pinecone (Versa Color), Elderberry & Peanut Brittle (Memento), Imperial Purple (Versafine)

This weekend Katie and Tom are throwing a party for Phil down in London so I get to spend the weekend with all my children - can't wait!

See you soon

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 #147 Sketch: Christmas Tree Triangles

Hi everyone! When I drew this week's sketch for CAS Colours and Sketches, it just screamed Christmas trees to me and therefore it wasn't hard to come up with a design.

I used a lovely 5-piece layered Christmas tree die set which I really haven't used enough especially as the trees are so easy to assemble. I curled, shaped and inked the edges of each layer to give the trees some dimension. The trunks are cut from snippets of brown paper and each tree is finished with a silver star. They are mounted onto a die-cut stitched rectangle which has also been debossed using a swiss dots embossing folder. The sentiment is printed directly onto the card blank.

Supplies Used:
Patterned Papers: Christmas Fancy (Dovecraft)
Dies: Christmas Stacker Tree (Dee's Distinctively), Stitched Rectangle Layer (Memory Box)
Embossing Folder: Swiss Dots (Magazine Freebie!)
'Greetings' Sentiment Font: Scriptina
Snippets: Brown paper, Linen cardstock, Sequin stars, Crystal Stickles

Well, that's another Christmas card made. Thanks so much for visiting. I hope you get a chance to play along with us this week!

Stef x

CC&S 146 Colours: Autumn has arrived!

Welcome to everyone visting from CAS Colours and Sketches where it's my pleasure to host again and this week I've chosen an autumnal colour palette for you.

I have a lot of close male relatives with birthdays at this time of the year (my husband, my son and my two brothers), so it's natural for my thoughts to turn to male cards for a few weeks before getting stuck into the rest of my Christmas cards. So an autumn colour palette and design suits these just perfectly.

The background is masked and inked using the bleeding art tissue technique, learnt from the fabulous Eileen Godwin's blog. She creates some amazing mixed media art and if I didn't live at the opposite end of the country, I would love to go to one of her workshops - one day maybe! I used tissue in the three challenge colours, let them run into each other and then left the card to dry completely. I didn't want to use black for my stamped leaves and sentiment so have gone for a very dark shade of brown as my neutral colour because I think it works better with the colour palette. I hope that's alright with the rest of the CC&S DT!

As I have done everything in one layer I would also like to enter my card into this week's challenge #245 at Less Is More where the one layer card theme is 'Autumn'.

Supplies Used:
Tissue: Spectra Art Tissue (from Amazon)
Stamps: Leaf Decor Stamps (Royal Langnickel), Happy Birthday (Clearly Besotted)

Thanks for dropping by this week. Please come and join in the fun and share your designs with us at CC&S. We'd love to see them!

Oh, and happy birthday Stu!
Stef x