Happy Hexagons

I haven't done much card making since the new school term started, but this weekend I decided to make a real effort to spend some time crafting. The challenge over at Simply Less is More this week is "Mostly Words" which gave me the inspiration to make this for my nephew's 25th birthday card:

The hexagon stamps & dies are by Clearly Besotted but I found that lining up the stamps onto the die cut hexagons drove me mad - I couldn't get the stamps lined up at all so I threw away dozens of failures! The letters are Kirsty Wiseman stamps, and the hexagon stickers had been in my stash for several years so it was good to finally use some of those.

I'm also entering this into the challenges over at Sweet Stampin' Challenge and We Do Doobadoo which both have a masculine theme.

Wings and Things

This one layer card was inspired by a stunning project by Jennifer Mullens in this month's Craft Stamper magazine, and although I've not managed to achieve the 3D effect that she has I'm still happy with the result. I'm entering this into the Things with Wings challenge over at Stamping Sensations.

The butterflies (Hero Arts) were stamped in Memento Tuxedo Black first, then masked. I then stamped the leaves (Imagination Crafts) and used masking fluid to cover them. I masked off the entire top half of the card then stamped the woodgrain effect (Kaisercraft) in Distress Black Soot, but using the third generation of ink to mute the effect. I then very lightly sponged more Black Soot at the top of the "wood panel". The greeting (Papertrey Ink) was stamped in Memento.

I had intended to make this card monochrome but the masking fluid had discoloured the card, presumably because it isn't watercolour card but card by Limetree Crafts intended for alcohol ink markers. So I ended up watercolouring the leaves & butterflies but tried to keep the colours muted, in keeping with the occasion.

Smarty Pants!

Our son took a couple of GCSEs a year early & passed with flying colours (A* in Maths & A in English Lit). His congratulations card is a CASE of a card I saw a while back somewhere on the internet. As I have no idea where I saw it, I'm unable to credit the originator so my apologies if that's you!

It's an excellent way of using up patterned paper scraps to fill the shape I drew freehand. The Congratulations greeting is a Clearly Besotted stamp, and "smarty pants!" was computer generated. I'm going to enter this for Virginia's View challenge number 7.