A warm welcome to all my visitors,

Thank you for taking the time to come and look at my blog, I really do appreciate it. I would love you to leave me a comment, even if it’s just to say Hi. It means I can come visit you!

All my designs are original, so copyrighted to me. If I have been inspired by someone elses work, I have named them in the post, and where able, I have provided a link.

Please feel free to use my designs for inspiration, I just ask you to credit me, and provide a link back to my blog.

Thanks, Shaz XX

Sunday, 28 May 2017

Christmas Card Club Challenge 11- Mistletoe & Wine

This fortnights challenge has been set by Rita, and is called 'Mistletoe & Wine'.
Well, the card I ended up making is nothing like I originally had in my head, mainly because when I finally found the word stamp I knew had the phrase on it, the words were nowhere near as large as I'd remembered, so wasn't going to work for what I had in mind.
You can see, they are just tiny words in one corner, even though the stamp, from The Stamp Bug Artifacts range, is actually called Mistletoe & Wine!



So, I needed a Plan B. Which is when my eye was caught by a stamp set I'd seen at Happy Stampers, but had sold out so I ordered it online when we got back. It was lay on my desk. waiting for me to get round to putting it away.
It's from a company called Stamps by Me, and is called 'Cheers'. 
 You get the two wine glasses, and in the top left corner, the splodgey shapes are wine to go in them. The guy at HS said that if you ink the stamp, then spritz with water,  it looks totally realistic.
 Anyway, I now had a new plan, so hunted out some heat resistant acetate, some  pigment inks and embossing powders, and set to work.












I stamped the wine glasses twice, once in gold pigment ink, once in silver, both by Encore. Heat embossed them in gold & silver detail powder- even though the acetate is heat resistant, you really do need to watch it carefully, and keep the heat gun moving. I had it in one spot on the silver for a second or two too long, and it buckled a little. It did flatten a little after it cooled, so I may still be able to use it. But went with the Gold ones for this card.

 For the 'red wine', I used Brilliance
Pearlescent ink in Crimson, and for the 'white wine', Encore Champagne metallic. Both heat embossed with clear powder. One thing I did notice was that the 'wine' doesn't fit the glasses perfectly, I had to fill in at the bottom, using a cotton bud dabbed on the inkpad. It probably works fine if you mist with water, but that wasn't going to work with pigment ink & acetate. I cut out both pairs of wine glasses.



 Now for the 'Mistletoe' part! I have a Sweet Poppy stencil of a Mistletoe wreath, and decided to use this, onto white cardstock. I mixed a custom colour for the mistletoe, using Cosmic Shimmer Clear stencil paste, and adding some Adirondack Meadow re-inker, as well as a dollop of darkish green Mica powder.











Spread over the stencil, no idea whether I'll get a shimmery paste or not, just an experiment!
It seemed to work ok, got a little shimmer, and a fairly realistic colour for the mistletoe.







I used an 8"x8" square base card, as the 'wine' showed up better against a white background. The patterned paper down the left side  just broke up the plainness a little. I matted the wreath onto dark green, then red cardstock, and fixed it off centre, so I could add the wine glasses. I stuck them down with a few blobs of Glossy Accents behind the embossing & wine.
 Some half pearls were added as mistletoe berries, and finally a small peel off greeting in gold.





An End of an era

An end of an era

I write this with a broken heart, that only time can heal My beautiful, wonderful wifelet Shaz (Silverwolf) passed away peacefully in the ea...