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.

Geometric

Another week, another challenge, this time the one over at Addicted to CAS where the theme is geometric. This was an ideal opportunity to try out a recent Ebay purchase of some Clearly Besotted stamps & dies, and another watercolour technique. This time the technique is to emboss with the dies rather than cutting the card, and to let watercolour paint fill the embossed lines.

I decided to cut out one or two of the shapes to let the black background show through, and stamped some of them with a variety of the stamps from the set. The greeting is by Woodware, and the enamel dots were created with Ranger Enamel Accents.