Cup of tea & crafting - what could be better... Blog giveaway

What could be better when crafting away, brain cells working overtime, than a nice cup of tea?

My lovely friend, Anna, has a give-away over on her blog, Mrs Brimbles and I'd love for you all to pop over, join in and share the blog post on your own blogs to help spread the word.

Good luck everyone

#3up Paperartsy Challenge piece

Excited or what ???????????

A few weeks back, I was picked at random to create a project over on the Paperartsy Blog 

as part of their #3UP challenges. I was duly sent the stamp set and set my creativity alight and come up with my project for the evening.

To see it in all its glory, and to see what the rest of the 3ups have come up with, pop over to the

paperartsy blog now as the posts all went live at 7pm. 

Hope you like it x

Sunday Stamper - week 305 - wheels of steel challenge

Hi everyone and welcome to my blog.
Been having a nice relaxing weekend and joining a few challenge blogs.

Today's card is my entry for the Ink On My Fingers - Sunday Stamp #305 - Wheels of Steel challenge 

I have gone for a muted vintage look for this DL card  and used my 'wheelie happy birthday' stamp set from Clarity Stamps.

I stamped the flower border along the bottom using Versafine Sepia inkpad, then added the 2 bikes and the sentiment with the same ink pad.

I took my derwent pencils and used muted tones to colour the flowers and the bike. If I had a lavender pencil in my collection, I would have used that as the bike would then match my own bike :-)

To finish, I edged the card with a bit of Distress Ink - Old paper. However, there was a touch of black soot left on my foam pad and the card has picked that up too - BUT, I really like the aged effect it added.

Matted the topper onto matt gold mirri card and attached to the card blank.

Hope you like it and thank you for dropping by my blog today x

Dragons Dream Tag it On Challenge #165 Letter B & Flower

Been having a play day today and chose to join in with the latest challenge over on

DragonsDream Tag It On challenge blog.

The theme for this week is 'letter B and Flower'.

I started with a plain tag and used a brayer and 4 colours of radiant rain acrylic paints from CleverCut.

I then used a hexagon stencil that I cut on my silhouette cameo and dusted through with Pan Pastels.

The butterfly, bug and sentiments are from Nature's Wonder by Sam Poole at Creative expressions.

The poppy die is from Spellbinders and I added some red radiant rain acrylic paint over the flower heads.

I'd like to enter this into this weeks challenge on Dragons Dream Tag it On challenge #165

Hope you like it and thank you for dropping by my blog today x

Addicted to CAS #37 - Grunge

Today sees the start of a new challenge over on Addicted to CAS blogspot and the keyword for this challenge is simply 'grunge'.

For my card, I used a stencil cut on the silhouette cameo on kraft card and inked through with Distress Ink - the only appropriate colour of course being Tea Dye 

I then used the pen option on the silhouette cameo to write the sentiment and mat & layered that onto the topper which in turn was mat & layered onto black card to make it stand out.

I would like to submit this to the Grunge challenge #37 

Hope you like it and thank you for dropping by my blog today 

My 'Far Away' ATCAS challenge card

I had a wonderful day at the Ally Pally show yesterday and among the things I bought, were the above stencil from Clarity Stamps along with the stencil brushes.

So this evening, I attached the stencil to a piece of card stock and used a few different ink pads to create the scene above. Somewhere I have a little stamp from Clarity of little birds flying far away but do you think I could find it? Could I heck. So I drew them on myself with a micron pen.

I did a Mel Heaton double squiggly line boarder before matting onto black cardstock.

et voilà - one CAS card for any occasion.

I would like to enter this into ATCAS #36 'far away' 

Hope you like it and thank you for stopping by my blog today x

Have a wheelie happy birthday

I bought the ClarityStamp bike & posy set of stamps from Create & Craft recently and wanted to do an 'ET' type of card.

I simply dusted 4 colours of Distress over a piece of reversed centura pearl card with an inkylicious ink duster and ripped a piece of paper to create the mountains at the bottom.

The image itself was stamped with black archival ink over the moon.

The sentiment was stamped into the corner.

I matted the topper onto black card.

In all honesty, I hadn't intended to add the side panel - but a dirty inked finger print sort of forced my hand with that decision. So not as 'clean & simple' as I had intended 

I'd like to enter this into the Addicted to CAS challenge #35 wheels

Hope you like it and thank you for stopping by my blog today x 

Sympathy card - not the nicest of subjects

At the end of last week, a clients husband passed away from Motor Neurone Disease. Personally, I had known the man since I was 18, used to drink in his pub. It's been a horrible few years watching this awful disease take hold of him and my thoughts are now with his wife and his family.

I have made this card for his wife. I have kept it simple. 

The lattice background is available from John Bloodworth's blog   

John has designed the files himself for the Brother scan n cut and they are for personal use only.

The corner die & the dragonfly die have been cut from matt gold mirri card using a 

Create & Craft Die-Lectables die set.

 The sentiment has been cut from a cameo 

Both extreme's of life today

This morning, I arrived at my first client and discovered that her husband, who had been suffering from Motor Neurone Disease for many years, lost his fight for life last night. I had known him since I was 18, so a good few years. It's been difficult to watch him go downhill over the years. His home was full of people coming and going this morning so, after making tea for the five thousand, or so it seemed, I took myself off to the bedroom and did the ironing like I normally do on a Friday morning.

Then this afternoon, whilst passing the news onto my mum, she told me about her hairdresser who gave birth to a baby boy yesterday. 

So its been an odd day really.

Mum asked me to whip up a card for her hairdresser so I came up with this

The image is from Buzzcraft and I used promarker pens to colour it. 

I then cut it out with a Marianne die on the edge and clipped the corners with a corner rounder.

Using the 'waste' from the die, I inked over the cardstock to create a subtle background.

I dusted the edge of the topper with distress ink before simply gluing onto the cardstock.

Hope you like it and thank you for stopping by today x