A Little Bird Told Me...

Tomorrow is my sisters birthday and this is the card I have made for her.The base card is 5x7 inch ivory thick card with a panel of dark green deckle edged green card mounted to leave a small border.The next layer is very pale pink card embossed with a Tim Holtz brick wall embossing folder, and torn around the edge. The main image is a Chocolate Baroque stamp from a set called Pretty Birdcage and is stamped with Memento Rich Cocoa ink and coloured with Coloursoft pencils.The branch, bird and two front flowers are lightly decopaged, (just two layers).The shading  is done with Tattered Rose DI and the ribbon coloured with the same ink.The little gold bird is cut with a Marrianne die and to finish I hung an Ideaology chain tassle onto a birdcage charm and fixed it to the die cut with a brad.

I am entering this for Allsorts Challenge - Anything Goes Stamptacular Sunday Challenge- Charm me ( use a charm)
Make it Monday # 77 - Always Anything Goes.

Alphatag Swap Cand D

I am taking part in the Chocolate Baroque Alphatag swap challenge,we are aiming to make 2 tags each month (3 some months) so that by the end of the year we have 26 tags depicting all the alphabet letters to bind together with a book ring.  We have to use Chocolate Baroque products or ones sold by them, so it is good that I have quite a lot of their lovely stamps already and some of their backing papers too. I think that there are almost 30 people taking part in the swap, and there was some amazing artwork in the first month.I chose to do A for arch and B for Butterfly, but as I didn't get round to putting them on here I will just show a photo of them at the bottom of this post without any other discription.

This month I have done C for Colour. The tag was first sponged with Distress Inks in Antique Linen, Scattered Straw, Wild Honey, Spiced Marmalade and Fired Brick with a little Aged Mahogany to darken and define the edge. I then stamped the flourish from the Nature Swirls set with Brilliance Snow Cap white ink and over stamped with another flowery flourish from the Butterfly Flourish Swirls set with Aged Mahogany. The quote is from the Artistic Affirmations set, and I stamped the words with Versamark and embossed with white EP onto three different coloured pieces of card, and mounted them on foam pads. I  punched holes down the left hand side of the tag and added coloured eyelets and then tied brightly coloured ribbons in each hole. To finish off I added some tiny gems in colours to match the word cards.

For my second Tag I did D for Daffodil.
Again the tag was first coloured with Distress Ink this time with Antique Linen, Bundled Sage and Forest Moss, and then over stamped in Bundled Sage with stamps from the Nature Fragments set.The Daffodil on script was stamped with Versafine Olympian Green ink onto the tag and three more times onto white card.I coloured the images with  ColourSoft pencils and used Sansodor to blend.I cut out one whole flower, one flower head with the front leaf attached and one trumpet, and layered them on top of the tag image with silicon glue. I tied to keep the layers from being too dimensional as the idea is to make the tags into a book. ( The flower I used last month was probably too chunky but as it will be for the first page I hoped to get away with it.) I added three yellow pearls to the lower right hand side, and the card D was coloured with yellow ink and embossed with clear EP.




Here are last months tags  A and B. I recieved two lovely swaps for these from Joyce and Jackie who both chose the same themes as me but interpreted them in quite a different way. I will try and get them posted in the right month in future. I was right off blogging last month as being not very clever with the computer I was more than a little frustrated at not being able to make my pictures go or stay where I wanted them. I have just changed to a different browser for blogging in the hope that I will be able to manage it better.
In the meantime big thanks to every one who has been to look on here and for your lovely comments.

Wedding Card

Just over a week ago my niece got married and this is the card that I made for her. She is somewhat unconventional in her ideas and chose white, black and red for her wedding colour scheme, so I decided to use those colours for my card. I began with a top folded landscape style white base card and stamped round the edges with the flower flourish from the Chocolate Baroque butterfly flourish swirl set, with Versamark  and embossed with WOW white pearl powder.I cut the leafy frond with a Marianne die from a piece of very dark green card and covered it with Versamark and embossed with Heat It Up  Enchanted Gold powder. I love this because you get all kinds of metallic effects depending on the colour of the card and ink you use. Next I bound some tiny red roses together with some gold thread and glued them to the card with the embossed leaves. I used an acrylic tag that was etched with On Your Wedding Day and darkened the wording with a black ink pad, and tied the ribbons through the slots in each end. The little heart was a silver one that I coloured red with a permanent marker pen, and attached with a jump ring. I then stamped the words With Love in black ink and finished it off with some self adhesive pearls in the centre.This
is a close up to show some of the background embossing.

I am entering this in The Stamp Man fortnightly challenge, Embellish It,
and Make It Monday,  Anything Goes.