WOYWW #572- The Happy Birthday To Us Edition.

Yes, our 11th Birthday! What a milestone that is, eh? All down to our lovely Julia, over at The Stamping Ground. This is my UFO for the theme, and I thought I'd make it into a Birthday card to us all. The balloons and gifts are both Card-io/Majestix stamps, the 11th is Honey Doo Crafts, and I'm afraid I have no idea where the 'Birthday' balloon came from, may have been a freebie at some time.

This was the envelope I decided to work from, I can't believe how many of these stencilled sheets I have and not used yet.
 I used an assortment of Versafine Clair inkpads for the stamping, and although it's hard to see, I did cover the balloons with a coat of Glossy Accents, and sprinkled them with a little Glamourdust.
 And I learned a little trick that some might find helpful.
 When you're trying to place clear stamps on your background, ready to pick up with the lid, they can be really annoying, as they keep sticking to your fingers, am I right? Well, the 'string' on the balloons above is a separate stamp to the balloons, and was a total nightmare to get to lie where I wanted it, as it's really thin. It was driving me nuts, and I was sort of looking round my desk for a solution. And then I spotted my anti static bag, and the little dish it sits on has a good coating of powder on it. Dipped my fingers into the powder and rubbed it over my fingertips, and Yay!!! no more stamp sticking to my fingers.

 Got the Christmas cards finished, and the Caught in Crystal sheets worked out a treat.


 Nothing much in the Enabling Dept- just a 2" Speedball brayer! Came across these a few weeks ago, but couldn't find them anywhere in the UK. Not sure if they're new, or just not widely stocked. Got mine on Amazon- via Supermart USA, which are really good, as their prices are always competitive, and they ship worldwide for free.








  realised a few days too late last week that I completely forgot to add an And Finally! So this week there's two to make up for it.

So here you are....And Finally.......

Christmas Card Club 2020- #1 Angels or Fairies

 Back in with making Christmas Cards for the Christmas Card Club Challenge, and I've used both themes for my cards, and made a total of 10 cards.


The ones on the left are 4 6" square cards, and 4 'notecard' size, which I make by cutting a sheet of A4 cardstock in half on the length, then folding to give me topfold cards, or landscape sidefold.

The Fairy and large tree are by Lavinia stamps, the treeline and small deer by Cardio/Majestix.
 As a finishing touch I added an acrylic star to the top of the tree, and some dots of Stickles for fairy lights.

These two are A4 cardstock folded, and use a very old stamp in my collection, called Angel Chorus Collage, by Rubber Stampede. It was stamped onto cardstock, then also onto vellum, and the vellum was torn around the design and added on top of the cardstock with a small amount of adhesive. I also added some colour to the back of the vellum image first. A few die cut flowers, and a couple of again very old backing papers, and they're finished.




To make the bauble shapes in the first four cards, I used a variety of stencils.The very top two are using a Clarity bauble stencil. The other two square ones use a stencil cut using a Spellbinders Ornament die, 2011 Heirloom Ornaments.
 The final 4 use a stencil cut using Spellbinders Heirloom Ornaments 2010.

 DI Broken China & Tumbled Glass were brushed over the top edge, and  I used a torn paper mask for the top hillside. I used the cheap 'Toothbrush style' make up brushes to add the ink.
 The remaining ink on the stencil was dragged around the edges to define the shape, using a dried baby wipe, which I also used to add the ink over torn paper to make the hills.

 This is the Clarity stencil, and I also cut a copy from thin paper to use as a mask when stamping in the trees. The paper is thinner than the stencil, so the stamping is easier to do without having a big gap caused by the depth of the stencil.

The Poinsettia is another Spellbinders die, and I believe the flourishes are by Cheery Lynn.

Cards using Clarity stencils & HoneyDoo Stamps

A few weeks ago now, I spent some time creating these panels.
  I used two different Clarity stencils, Framework Circles, and Framework Squares. Both are 7" square, and they come with the cut-outs too, so you can mask off areas easily. These cards are just from the circles ones.

  The cardstock is Clarity too, they make a 7" square cardstock pack, which fits the stencils perfectly.

All the backgrounds were created using a light, mid and darker ink, blended using brushes.

By adding each of the two darker colours over smaller portions of the shape, it helps to create a  more 3D look to them.







If you use a dry baby wipe to bring in the colour left on the stencil around the shape before you lift it off,  it does help to define the shape nicely. I picked up that tip from Barbara Gray.
 Most of these have now been turned into cards, and I'll share a few here, and do another post for the others, as there's quite a lot!

These first two use one of the flowers from a HoneyDoo set called Cherry Blossom. The sentiment is a Crealies die, and was cut three times and stacked up. 

These three also use a Honey Doo stamp, this time called Flower Power. In both cases the set comes with 3 sizes of flower, and a stem, or leaves to build up your image.

For all of them I restamped the image onto coloured vellum, then added those to some of the flowers with Glossy Accents, and either Stickles or Glass flatbacks to the centres.

They are all matted onto toning cardstock, then onto an 8" card blank.

In some cases, I lightly stamped a script stamp into the circles, using second generation stamping, and the darkest colour of ink used.

The final three in this post used butterflies, in exactly the same way. No idea what brand the stamp is,  I've had it years, and it's just a random one.

The Best Wishes die is from Crealies, and the Thinking of You is a Sue Wilson Mini Expressions die.

The cardstock used for matting is from a pack by Papermania- Capsule Collection Textured Cardstock.

 It comes is a variety of sizes, A4-which this is-A5 and 12x12. The A4 pack I get from The Range, and they seem to be the cheapest place to buy it, at £9.99. You get 75 sheets of cardstock, one of each colour, so you get quite a lot of shades of each colour, making matting a breeze.