‘Tis the season to be blingy

Put your shades on, people….

Now in essence this is a quick card. In practice, far from it. We went through more reinventions and incarnations than Madonna. I think the problem was that I started with the premise that I HAD to use a gilded reindeer but could not find my large antlered beast anywhere, so used a much smaller die instead. I tried stamps for the sentiment because they were to scale, but the embossing powders could not compete with the blingy reindeer. I only have a few Christmas greeting dies and they are too big for this so just overwhelmed the poor little chap. Eventually I decided to cut one down, just to the word ‘Christmas’ which was fine. Then all the positioning went out of whack. Should there be snow up at the top, or snow down at the bottom? Ditto for the greeting. Everything I did fought against something else!

Eventually I decided on putting all the action into the middle of the black layer to give a border of peace and tranquility top and bottom. I think with such a full-on bling thing it was possibly a wise move! This means my brave little Blitzen is now dodging a gold meteor shower, just to bring some Christmas cheer. I hope we are all suitably grateful for his efforts….

To make this card I cut a card blank in gold, then a smaller layer in black. I used the Avery Elle Falling Snow die to create my stardust/meteor shower in the black card and a cut a gold Tattered Lace Happy Christmas, minus the Happy. The recipient will have to take it as given. The reindeer is a Marianne die I have had for years. He doesn’t seem to have a name, just a serial number LR0179. Seems kind of unfriendly, hence the renaming to Blitzen.

Blitzen was a lot easier to gild than the tree decoration from last week. I dug out some double sided sticky paper that is meant to be used with detail dies to save you trying to get adhesive neatly on the back, but of course if you use it in reverse the front of your die cut becomes sticky instead, ready for gilding. So no gluey mitts this time.

I have to confess that the reindeer is raised on 1mm 3D foam, but otherwise the card is again totally flat and will easily meet the lowest postage charge criteria. Lets hope he makes it through the storm!

 

 

Tickled? Well a bit of pink, anyway…

Whilst I have something out to make a card, I often figure I may as well make more than one. Give the product a bit of a workout. But without the lycra and the star jumps. So, three simple cards with one die set: MFT Die-namics Feathers & Arrows. I have been seeing a lot of pink and copper products and colour schemes and this tickled my fancy first. I used Brilliance Cosmic Copper ink and a really old embossing powder by Personal Impresssions called Copper Kettle. I dithered over straight or fuzzy line finish for the dipped feather and settled for fuzzy. If you deliberately choose imperfect then you are bound to get it right! The dotty feather is done with a stencil – the edges of the spots are a bit ragged but hey ho. I really like how this die creases down the centre, so you can easily get some dimension but they will still fold down flat for postage.

Card number two appeals to my sense of humour. The patterned papers are from theTrimcraft Paradise Crush pad, and they feature feathers. So I have feathers cut from papers with feathers on them. Just me then? Ok, fair enough. I know it looks a bit like a dream catcher, which is totally unintentional because dream catchers are something I find quite ugly! But, this is just a bunch of feather-feathers, right? I drop-shadowed the sentiment a bit to help it stand out more from the background paper.

The third one is super-quick. I sprayed the die cut feather with two shades of some ancient Cosmic Shimmer misters I had, then dipped the top in gold leaf paint. I had earlier tried embossing the top section of the feather in gold, but it looked a bit too muddy for my liking. Hence the dunking.

Three cards. That increases my output this week to, hmmn, three….peachy…

 

 

 

 

No Surrender Day

Today I was determined to master my big stripy background stamp. In an earlier post I bored everyone with my struggles (sorry, but that is what the internet is for!). I tried all the tips I was given, and a few of my own devising, but still got a patchy result. Today, it was going to be No Surrender Day. Battle is commenced and I plan to win big.

Using the Versamark ink pad to stamp and emboss had worked, but I didn’t want to have to use embossing powder every time, and also if I want to get a good dark colour I prefer to use coloured pigment ink as well as coloured embossing powder. Or, use a clear powder over the dark ink but then I was back to the problems of inking it up again. Dye pads work best because they are firm, but the ink transfer was not so good. By the time you ink it all up the first part is drying. I inked round a lot of times, but it still didn’t come out great. Pigment ink transfer was better, but because they are squishier (technical term) pads it is really hard not to get ink in the wrong places – particularly with the dotty stamp which has large open areas. It didn’t help that I was using a small black Brilliance dewdrop shaped ink pad though, but the stickiness (another technical term) of this ink had come closest to what I wanted. Basically I need to buy the ink pad in the larger size.

But in the meantime, as I said, today is No Surrender Day. I will not fall victim to my backgrounds!! Then, a thought. Hurrah. About time too. What if I ink it first with the Versamark, then use a dye pad over the top without cleaning it, so mix the stickiness of Versamark with the wetness of a dye pad? I don’t suppose it will do my dye ink pad much good, but I’d rather sacrifice one for the sake of battle, in order to win the war.

And guess what? It worked pretty darn good!

Now though I was running out of time, so this is basically also a ‘same card but different’ day, made with what I had to hand and in a layout I know works OK. But I don’t care. I have solved a problem, I get to use my lovely, lovely stamp and everything can be covered with stripes.

Or spots. Because it was also a day I wanted to make two cards if possible. Smug from the earlier sucess I decided to just do something quick and simple. Now that I had made my point I could be magnanimous in victory. Plus I really wanted some lovely shiny gold spots! So I use an ancient but still totally fine Encore gold ink pad and some gold embossing powder, plus one of the first dies I ever bought. To be honest by this stage I was thinking ‘just stick something on it and quit’. So I did! Clearly I would have made a lousy General.