Cock-a-doodle-do!

You know how hubby keeps chickens. Well, he also likes to hatch their eggs, but of course when you hatch eggs you get roughly half and half cockerels and hens. In normal practice, the cockerels would be despatched and cooked up in a sunday roast after a few months. But no, not ours. They are pampered, so this card is a tribute to our first born chick, Chirpy, who is over two years old now.

The background uses distress inks and is overstamped with grey memento. I often make A5 sized cards, so I start with an A4 sheet to make the background, then cut it in half and use half for the background and the rest for embellishments.

"Honeycomb"

This section is cut using on of Tim Holtz' new dies. I diecut some old packaging for the outside edges and stained with metallic distress stain. The inner pieces are diecut from scraps of the decorated background card.

 

"Bee"

 

"Chirpy"

I found this bee and decoupaged cockerel in my stash. I think they were printed some time ago using some free images from the Graphics Fair. Anyway, a quick dip into the meltpot gives them a lovely glossy coating of UTEE. Cock-a-doodle-do!

Tim's Tags of 2014 - June Journal Page!

Mea culpa, my bad. Once again I have used this month's tag techniques to make something other than a tag - these are a couple of journal pages from my new Dylusions journal. I've only recently started journalling and htis is the first time I've shared any journal pages, so please go easy on me :-)

"Creepy crawlies in the deep, dark forest"

The backgrounds use inks, stencils and stamps. Highlights are added with a white gel pen, words with a fine black marker.

 

"Acrylic Songthrush"

 The songthrush in the first spread is painted over the top of the stamped image using acrylics.

 

"Someone to watch over me"

This second page has less layering of stencilled images and more stamping and painting.

 

"Watercolour Songthrush"

The second songthrush is painted using distress inks as watercolours. Like Tim, I prefer to use watercolour paper to colour with distress inks since it is far more forgiving when you are working with a brush on a wet surface.

 

"Wren"

I hope Tim will forgive me, but I just couldn't resist painting this little wren into his nest! If you want to have a go at your own version of Tim's tags, there's a new one posted on his website every month.

A blingy birthday card

This is the second of the "Animal Antics" cards I told you about last week. There's plenty of time for you to join in with us at Stamping Sensations with your take on this month's theme and the chance to win a £35 gift voucher for Crafty Individuals. Now back to the card. My mil loves a bit of bling, so that's the inspiration behind this card for her birthday, even though it's not my usual style. Actually, it's really not my type of card at all if I'm honest.

"Have a blingy birthday!"

Flaming June it ain't! We have been having some terrific thunderstorms this week. Still, everything is growing well with all this rain so it's not all bad. Fingers crossed for some better weather later in the Summer and lots of blingy blooms :-)

If Friends Were Flowers...

I promised to share the other cards I made for the Stamping Sensations "Animal Antics" theme, and this is the first one. The image is coloured with promarkers, the mad birds are from a DC swap (thank you) and the flower and feather embellishments are made from UTEE.

"If friends were flowers..."

It's been a strange weather week. A couple of good days, a couple of cold days, and today has been thunderstorms and torrential rain with dry spells in between. Someone said not to worry, it's Summer so at least the rain is warmer :-)

Animal Antics - June Stamping Sensations Challenge

This month's challenge at Stamping Sensations is "Animal Antics". You can create anything you like as long as it fits with the theme and features some stamping, and as always there is a fabulous prize on offer. The June prize is a bumper package of £35 of Crafty Individuals goodies of your choice! Wow :-)

I had four goes at making a card for this theme before I was happy. As you know, I'm not the sort of crafter who like to use cute images, so the first two cards I tried turned out nice enough, but they just weren't me. The third one I made I liked, but felt that it didn't really fit the theme. So I went back to the cute images, and came up with a design that is a bit more "me" iyswim! I'll show you the other three in the days to come, but first here's my DT card for June.

"Happy Birthday"

I made an A5 landscape card blank from thick brown card, and diecut an aperture in the front to site the Spellbinders tree. The decorative diecuts on the front of the card are coloured by rubbing on some Inka Gold.

 

"I love hanging around you"

The hedgehog is stamped in Memento and coloured using Promarkers. He's an old Papermania stamp.

 

"Pan Pastel Parade"

This panel is stuck inside the card to provide a backdrop. It was my first attempt using Panpastels and was fun to do, using lots of different nature stamps with versamark ink and brushing the pastels over the stamped images to colour.

 

"No sentiment"

Just for fun, here's a photo of the card before I added my wonky lettering. Diecut letters are great for adding whatever sentiment you like to a card, but as you can see I'm a bit too clumsy with my hands to do a neat job, so what I do is make it good and wonky then it looks like you've done it on purpose lol! Please come and join in with us this month on the challenge blog; I can't wait to see what you've been up to!