Throwback Thursday

Good Thursday Morning Ladies, 

Ooh its a chilly one, no snow though 😪!  We were originally forecast snow today, I checked earlier and we are forecast snow on Saturday night/Sunday morning. Matt said that we will get it quick bad (or good) here because we are high up, his friend Steve lives in next village and they have had lots of snow days together!   My original thought was that it would be amazing to wake up  snow on 1st December (if it snowed Thursday).  We'll love it whenever it arrives.  As long as you all get to work and home safely.  

Now I am sorry I didn't get a new card made today, I got too carried away with my reorganising,  I managed to clear another 2 piles of boxes, which makes me happy although there is still a way to go, we need to get the Kallax built for the hall way for me to fit the rest of it in.  

Today's cards are made with Pixie powders,  Brenda's beautiful Boat card, has an incredible story, Brenda had made the background a while back and it was in the 'discard' pile but Brenda just happened to try it behind the SW Background die and it looks like it was made for it, It couldn’t be more perfect, even the part around the sun is perfectly positioned.  A brilliant happy accident !! 

My card was made using an off cut piece of Pixie Powder background,   the stamp is a Creative Expressions stamp (I think), stamped over that background,  like Brenda's card, the background works so well,  like you are looking at a colourful sunset.

Just another example of how you can bring colour to your cards.  

I hope you all stay warm and have a great day,

Love and hugs to all of you,

Sandra 

xxxxxx

Lovely colourful leaves

 

Good Morning Ladies, 

We had a lovely bright day yesterday,  it was very chilly though, I had the back patio door open for Milo & Bella but it was too chilly to stay out there with them, Milo gets fussy if you don't stay out with him, he keeps coming in to check I'm still here bless him.  Paul was on the office yesterday,  we will usually tag team each other going out on the patio,  when he isn't here I'm too worried about slipping on the green stuff on the deck, so I tend not to even if it's not too cold.  

Today I am sharing a card I made with my new Tim Holtz leaf dies, Oh my goodness I love the quirkiness of them 😍🤣

I used the Tissue paper backgrounds that I made last Friday for the leaves, the rough irregular texture of the backgrounds works really well, like rustling leaves in Autumn.  I added the detail stems in mat gold mirror card, as there are touches of gold in the background colours.  I used an old SU embossing folder for the background.  I had bought a new one BUT I couldn't find the bloody thing anywhere,  I even had my craft room bins out and went up to the recycle bags at the gate to check there, but nothing, so I had to improvise!! 

So I can totally sympathise with you Lilian, did you find your tape?? 

I hope that you all have a wonderful Wednesday , 

Love and warm hugs

Sandra                                                                    xxxxxx 

A Christmas Tissue technique card

 

Good Morning Ladies, 

I had a bit of a slow day yesterday as I was feeling the effects of the weekend,  I was in and out of the wheelchair around the museum as the old cottages aren't accessible in wheelchair,  luckily Paul took my phone and photographed the upstairs of the houses as there was no way I was getting up there!  Frustratingly my phone died at about 2pm so I didn't get to photograph the 'village', it had such a lovely atmosphere as they were Carol singing and roasting chestnuts in the village centre.  

We woke to a lovely clear morning yesterday but by the time I was showered and got dressed I couldn't see the hills, the were behind a veil of fog and remained that way all day.  We had lights on in the craft room/office from about 10.30am. 

For todays card I used a piece of one of the Tissue paper backgrounds that I made on Friday,  I layered it onto a 3 × 3 inch piece of white card,  I added that to 4 1/4 inch X 5 1/2 inch card base, I added a die cut snowflake border die cut in silver mirror card and popped a diamante in the centre of each snowflake. The sentiment was a freebie from last month's Card Making & Papercraft magazine,  I die cut it in white and silver and infilled the letters with the silver  mirror card. 

I hope that you all have a brighter Tuesday, 

Love and hugs to all of you,

Sandra                                                                    xxxxxx

Maria's Beautiful Crystal Art Cards

 

Good Monday Morning Ladies,

Well its wet and cold here, I hope you have a brighter start to the week where you are. 

We had a truly lovely weekend, very relaxed and leisurely, it was lovely to have nothing to do but enjoy each others company!  

The Black Country Living Museum was worth every single penny, we both thoroughly enjoyed it  despite the weather (  it was that really fine misty drizzle), it didn't dampen our spirits though,  we certainly didn't get to see all of it, mind you it's set on 26 acres!  All of the houses were decorated for Christmas in whatever era they were set in, they started in the 1920's, all of the tree decorations were crocheted, little white bells and angels, green holly leaves, newspaper angels made with wooden dolly clothes pegs, it was charming.  We then went to the 40's tin houses, we met the milkman here, tue chap playing the milkman had been a milkman and the true life character he was portraying was his own father!  He had some lovely stories, I asked him if he had a magic wallet and he was only to happy to show us.  Our next stop was a 1961 Mothering Class, we went and sat in the class and the Midwife took us through breathing classes, talked about looking after yourself and your new baby, they had a table showing different nappy folds, they had the old prams too, talked about putting a layette together.  We saw the dispensary where the had National Dried Milk, which is what Mum said I started on,  they had Rosehip Syrup too which you don't see now, cod liver oil too.  

We took much longer to get around as we were stood chatting to the actors who remained in character the while time,  it was so incredibly fascinating and listening to the explanations of what they used and why made things more interesting, we both learnt so much.   I would recommend the Museum to anyone, your day ticket gets converted to a Year Pass as you leave, so you can go back aa many times as you like and we definitely will. 

Today I am sharing 2 of Maria's amazing Crystal Art Christmas cards, I love both of these designs, I am lucky enough to have one of Maria's CA Christmas cards,  I popped mine in a frame and bring it out every Christmas😍.  The recipient will ferl so special that they received a card that had so much work put into it.  Thank you so much for sharing your CA cards with us Maria XXX

I hope that you have a great start to the week, 

Love & hugs to all of you,

Sandra xxx

Your Colour challenge cards

 

Good Sunday Morning Ladies, 

Ooh isn't it chilly, we had our first hard frost yesterday at home and my goodness it was really really cold.  

We set off bright and early to Birmingham to the Motorcycle Museum for the craft show, well we could have left later and taken our time, for the first time I can honestly say it was the first time that I was annoyed at paying £7 (for us both) to get in! The list of Exhibitors was impressive,  sadly that list was not the reality!  There were 4 actual stamp companies,  Card-io, HoneyDoo,  Inkylicious and Lili of the Valley !! The other stands were either selling cheap & tacky Christmas decorations (like you'd see at Market), or had just taken lids off of big storage boxes for people to rummage through!  Inkylicious made it worth while,  I haven't seen them at a craft show for ages.  I would have been peeved had I driven 50 odd miles purely for the craft show, luckily it was only part of our weekend plans, so we headed off to our hotel, luckily we got an early arrival, so we had a leisurely lunch, read a little then walked across the road to a huge shopping centre where 3 hours just disappeared,  we then had early dinner and came back to hotel for a relaxing evening,  we picked up so naughty treats to have a bed picnic,  we are both excited for the Black Country Living Museum today 😀 

Your Colour Challenge cards

Karen

Karen's Description:

Here’s a couple of cards experimenting with watercolour paints and watercolour card Insired by the lady that now demos for Pink Frog

Flower - drips of pink mauve yellow paints “swooshed” with a wet paint brush Scribbled edge with a finer liner

Baubles - a mix of green and blue paint and stamped using a base of a jar and then blended edged with a fine liner and covered with glossy accents

Not brilliant but was fun experimenting.

Karen I love the colours that you have acheived by mixing different shades, so much depth of colour on one petal, echoed through the whole flower, beautiful.  

The Christmas baubles are amazing,  The fact that you drew them just adds to the brilliance,  again the interest given with that colour mix is amazing.  So I totally disagree with you!  Two totally amazing cards. Thank you so much for taking part in the colour challenge XXX 

Lilian 

Lilian's Description: 

Here is my card for this week: used a star stencil and water colour paints. Made the paper very wet ,then added paints and course see salt. Added white pen and stickles. The background is done with chalk pastels, big stars are pearl pan pastels, stamps are from Lavinia using blue metallic ink.

Have a lovely day Lilian

Ooh Lilian,  you must be so pleased with how this card turned out, I love the texture that adding the salt gave to the star!  The colours are gorgeous too.  Thank you so much for taking part in the colour challenge XXX 

Maria

Maria's Description:

Rick let me sit in his office while he was watching football so had a play with some things I still got out and this is made with Pixie powders and a stamp from Creative Stamping nr: 127.

I always using too much water so had to use a brush 🖌️ to drag it out 😂. Taken 2 photos as wasn't easy to take of.

I love this card Maria, the stamping composition is lovely,  those holly borders really finish the whole card off.  Just look at that gorgeous gold shimmer! 😍  Most of all I am happy that you got to do some crafting!  Thank you so much for taking part Maria,  I really do appreciate it XXX

********************

I hope that you all have a lovely Sunday,

Love and warm hugs to all of you,

Sandra

xxxxxx

Mixed Up Saturday

 

Good Morning Ladies,

As you are reading this we will be on our way Birmingham, we are going to the Excalibur craft show at the Motorcycle Museum today and then staying at a lovely hotel tonight and then going to the Black Country Living Museum tomorrow.  I am so excited 😊  It will be nice to have some quality time to ourselves.

Tissue Paper Technique 

I thought I would give you a quick step by step guide to creating the lovely tissue paper pieces to add colour to your cards.

You will need white tissue paper, water bottle, some inks, something to mix colours with.

Smoosh some of your chosen colours onto your glass mat. 

Spritz the inks with water 

Then mix colours together a bit

Lay tissue paper into ink/water and let it absorb the colour.

Lay on a piece of kitchen towel and leave it to dry, you can use your heat tool if you can't wait.

This was the result of the Distress inks Salty Ocean,  Mowed Lawn & Evergreen Bough.

Here are some examples of different things you can use and the results:

Tissue

Card

The gold shimmer on this one was amazing, I mopped up remaining ink with a piece of card.

I think this was my favourite combination 😍 

I had some left so decided to add a bit more colour, because.... why not ?!!!

So I added these...

Tissue paper 

Card I used to mop up!  I absolutely love the shimmer, some look silver, some look gold. 

There are so many different products you could use to add colour,  I think it doesus all good to have a messy play session from time to time, this lot literally took me half an hour to create, most of that was choosing colours/mediums and drying times.  I have a lovely collection of bits to die cut from, although if you want to die cut it is better to adhere the Tissue paper to a piece of card or acetate.  I will definitely be using some for backgrounds.  

I hope you found this little demonstration helpful my lovelies, if there is anything else you would like to see then PLEASE let me know, I will happily have a go at anything,  it could be a new Saturday feature 😊 

I hope that you all have  Super Saturday,  I will be updating you all through the day on our Chat group, 

Love and hugs to all of you,

Sandra

xxxxxx

Tissue Technique card

 

Good Friday Morning Ladies, 

It's Friday once again,  Woohoo for the weekend!! 

What are you all up to?  We are thinking of travelling up to Birmingham on Saturday,  going yo the Motorcycle Museum on Saturday as there is a craft show on, Inkylicious are going to this one as well as a lot of the usuals, Lilli of the Valley too, I haven’t seen either of them at a craft show for ages.  We will drive over to Dudley after the show and go to the Black Country Museum on Sunday,  we have been talking about going for ages.  We just haven't made the final decision!  

Another new (to me) technique,  a great way to bring colour to your cards.  

You start by adding colour to your glass/craft mat, I used Wild Honey, Picked Raspberry and Carved Pumpkin Distress inks,  you can use anything that can be diluted with water, so Dye inks, Brusho, spray inks etc.  

You need to make sure that the area of your ink is the same size as the Tissue paper piece you have,  you then use something to mix your colours together with a spatula,  or paintbrush,  then simply drop the tissue paper into the ink, when it has absorbed the ink set it on a piece of kitchen roll to dry.  

When your coloured piece is dry, you can add it to a piece of white card, I used a piece of cut & dry foam to add a coat of glue to my card, then placed the tissue paper onto the card and smoothed it down.  I waited for the glue to dry and stamped a Catherine Pooler flower stamp onto my background and added gold embossing powder and heat set. I added the sentiment too. I added this to a white card base.  You can stamp onto acetate to place over the tissue background too. 

If you have any questions just let me know, I could do a step by step for you x

Lilian,  I hope that you aren't in to much pain after the dreaded dentist visit yesterday,  sending hugs xxx

I hope that you all have a lovely Friday,

Love and hugs to all of you

Sandra

xxxxxx

Colour Blocking #2

 

Good Morning Ladies, 

I had another busy day yesterday,  Paul moved my shelves around in my craft room to make room for my new bookcase, so I ended up emptying the shelves that took me a whole day to organise as I put my SU stamps in Alphabetical order, it's all part if the process though I guess, mind you, I'm not sure that there is such a thing as a perfect set up!              I was sat chuckling to myself as Paul must have sat moaning and swearing to himself for over an hour as 'people keep moving aircraft maintenance dates without knowing the bigger picture' (from what I could gather) he has every aircraft's maintenance planned up to the beginning of 2025!  Then he was looking around my desk amd in the hallway for an alarm sound, I knew it wasn't anything for me, I said it's coming from your desk, it was one of his colleagues Skype calling him, his headphones were behind his laptop so it wasn't obvious!  I think he may need a day off 🤣😂

Today's card I really liked the idea of as it looked simple, it was in fact a bit of a faff !! I wasn't really happy with the final layout but I couldn't move things any more without adding too much glue and making it look really messy.  However, you can see the idea!  I stamped my Gina K Holiday Tapestry stamp a couple times using, Versamark (frustratingly my 6 embossing ink pads were all dry) so I didn't get a great emboss, (maybe this was a sign for me to give up at that point)!                          I added gold embossing powder and heat set,  I then chopped up the background and trimmed each part so that the pattern still kind of followed but leaving a gap between the pieces.  I then coloured each section with Distress Inks (not oxides as I wanted the vibrant colours).  I stamped a sentiment in the larger gap that I had planned for and then re-arranged the coloured pieces around the sentiment.   I really like the concept of this card and I might have another go after the Amazon driver has bought my new Ink pads! 

I hope that you all have a lovely Thursday, 

Love & hugs to all of you, 

Sandra xxx

Colour Blocking Technique

 

Good Morning Ladies,

I hope those of you that Knitted & Nattered enjoyed it, I felt like I had a revolving door yesterday,  Lucy turned up at Nine and headed straight for the pantry, so we sat and had breakfast together, she stayed for a couple of hours, she is staying at Flynn's house this week as his Mum is away in Kenya so they are pet sitting,  it's nice for them to get so time together,  he was having a tattoo yesterday so she had 6 hours to kill !   She left and I went to look out ingredients for Brenda's fruit cake,  about 5 minutes later I heard a car and it was Matt & Alex, they both have the week off, they popped over for a visit and to collect a Hamper that Matt had won for his faultless driving,  they have a thing in their vans that monitors your driving,  he finds it very frustrating, but he was quite happy to receive a Hamper, it was packed with goodies from Devon, including fudge, these enormous fudge cookies, plus lots of other goodies,  Paul arrived home and they left and that was my free time gone, we had lunch and I needed to finish today's card.   So maybe baking will happen today !🤔 

Today I am sharing a card I made using the 'Colour Blocking Technique'

There are different ways of acheiving the blocking, you can chop an emboss resist background up then colour and trim a tiny bit off each piece and reassemble or you can do as I did and use low tack tape to mask off areas.  You can colour block plain backgrounds too or add stripes, anything you fancy really. 

I tried to go for a symmetrical pattern  blending two Distress inks in each section, remember to wipe off excess ink from white embossing before removing tape.   I used the diamond in the centre as inspiration for decorating the card, I layered to pierced square frames together and placed a butterfly backed with vellum (so that you could see the colour through it. I finished with a simple sentiment, I may add some pearls too. 

I hope that you all have an enjoyable day,

Love and suidgy hugs,

Sandra xxxxxx 

 

Good Morning Ladies, 

I hope today finds you all well,  Janet are you still getting to go to Knit & Natter, I do hope so, there is something more satisfying about crafting with friends.  

Talking of that should we try and arrange a Watford meet up?? Let me know your availability. 

Today's I an sharing the card that I made using the Tissue paper background.  

I die cut the butterfly out of the background and also out of a piece of gold mat mirror card, I mounted the whole piece onto a piece of the same mirror card, it was a 1/4 inch larger.  I placed the gold butterfly outline into the aperture and then replaced all of the pieces of the butterfly into the gold outline.                                                                       For the sentiment I used one of my strip sentiments stamped in pink to match the background,  I mounted it onto a gold mat to make it standout from the background. 

I hope that you all have a great day, I may do some baking!

Sending my love and hugs to you all,

Sandra                                                                    xxxxxx 

Pretty butterfly card

 

Good Monday Morning Ladies, 

Did you all have a good weekend?  Ours was relatively chilled out, I was a bit miffed on Saturday evening though as for some reason 'Strictly Come Dancing ' didn't  record,  we could only get and 'Audio Description ' version on I player which was too frustrating to watch as someone was describing every move over the music etc!  I was really looking forward to Blackpool week, so was Sophie,  we record and watch back because it starts earlier than we are sat down, it's the one night we will eat in front of TV these days. I am hoping I can get the normal version on catch-up!   Paul and I popped to Ikea yesterday afternoon for another storage unit for our hallway, for over flow craft storage and books etc.  This led to a little frustration, as the M4 came to a stand still because selfish idiot drivers cannot grasp the skill of merging, when a lane closes, instead of pulling in in plenty of time they drive right up to cones closing lane and expect everyone to stop for them!!  😡 if they simply merged i  turn there would be no delay!! 

We made it, I was relieved it was open until 5pm and not 4pm, we got what we needed and got out of there,  Ikea on a rainy Sunday was manic!! 

Todays card I made to use the splatter background that I made last week,  I thought the splatters would be a fun way to add colour to a card.  I simply used a 4 1/4 X 5 1/2 card base, cut a mat 1/4 inch smaller and die cut the butterfly out of it and added some gold splatters to it so that itwasn't completely plain, I adhered a piece of the splattered background behind the panel and *Tip* I added a couple of pieces of scrap card to even out the card mat either side of the piece of splattered card, so that i didn't have to waste my pretty background.                           I used some of the leftover background to die cut my sentiment, I layered the pretty letters on top of some plain white ones for dimension. 

I hope that you all have a great start to your week,

Love and hugs to all,

Sandra xxx