Anything Goes Black and White Challenge

I haven't joined in with any challenges before, but I found this gorgeous ribbon in CostCo this week - its for decorating my Christmas present wrapping really, but when I saw that Anything Goes Challenge Blog were doing a black and white theme this week, I knew it would be perfect to make a really quick card.

 

I covered a strip of white card with the ribbon to make sure the black card didn't show through, then mounted it and added some black plastic pearls to areas on the design.  I matched these with some white liquid pearl dots to the right edge, and a CraftWork Cards black and white circular sentiment to finish it off.  Full card in under 5 minutes from start to finish which has to be a record for me!

Kraftin Kimmie Stamps

Kraftin Kimmie is a relatively new range of stamps from Canada - Kimmie recently celebrating her first anniversary - boy what a great range they've produced in just a year!   I love their Moonlight Whispers range - the characters are just gorgeous and colour up amazingly!  I bought a couple to try and had such fun with both of them.   I get mine in the UK from Quixotic Paperie and if you hurry on over to her store, Elaine has 10% off all rubber stamps until 13th October.

My first purchase is Suzette the Can Can girl - isn't she fab?  I stamped and coloured her with a mix of copics and pencils blended with sansoder and blending stumps.  I cut her out and mounted her onto color-core black magic card which I embossed using a "twinkle" crafts too embossing folder in my big kick, and sanded the embossed areas to reveal the color-core card to look like lights twinkling behind her on stage.  I added a co-ordinating strip of paper embossed again with a crafts too folder - this time damask which I adore.  A little card candy and copic colour-co-ordinated sentiment from craft works and a glitter strip finish off the card.

Most of the stamps come with a matching sentiment - I went for Rapunzel here because I could see lots of cards I could make with the sentiment of "let your hair down"  I coloured her with copics and pencils as before, but slightly over blended the hair so it looks a bit flat unfortunately (good excuse to have another go later!)  This time I used a Marianne D Creatables die to cut out the star border, and threaded some silver ribbon through it and mounted it onto black card.  I like the black background with these stamps - it really makes them pop, so I cut her out and half mounted her onto the black borders strip.  I stamped the sentiment in silver to match the ribbon and added another Craft Works sentiment, again, colour matched to the dress with the same copic (they colour so well with copics - the pearly card still shines through)

 

I've just ordered Cinderella from the same range - for her the sentiment is "its all about the shoes" which is very apt for me and many of my girl friends so can't wait to get her!

First Attempts at Scrapbooking

I've got a lot of scrapbooks - 6x6, 8x8, 12x12, mini, shaped - you name it, I've bought them all, but after buying they've sat, pristine in their wrappers, looking sad and lonely at the bottom of my crafting drawers, and some of them, I am ashamed to say, have sat there for nye on 5 or 6 years now.  Why?  Well up to now, I have to admit, they've somewhat scared the hell out of me.....

I can make cards, they're small, simple and for most people, a throw away item once the birthday or event is over.  But a scrapbook is bigger, and a more permanent record for you or whoever the recipient may be, the layouts are more complicated, there are photos to print, journalling to consider, embelishments, titles, double page spreads - not to mention trying to work out if your products are of 'archival' quality - its all just a big scary prospect, so I've just looked longingly at blogs and books and magazines and stroked my beautiful albums thinking "one day" I will be brave and I will take on the scrapbook challenge.

Well my friends - the whole of September was pretty much that "day"!  I did it, I bit the bullet and I did a scrapbook - and not being one to dip my toe in the water with the easy stuff, I went straight for a 12 x 12 book, to be given to someone as a gift! (and it was a boy, just to make it all a bit more complex as it was full of geology and rocks rather than flowers and glitter and manly embelishments are much harder to track down as we all know!)   Oh yes, no pressure then, just produce something beautiful, even if you've never done it before and you only have 3 weeks to do it.

This is why the blog has been pretty quiet of late - every waking non-working hour has been spent in the craft room, fidling with paper, stamps and photos and scratching my head (a lot) and going over and over the same pages trying to make it all "fit".  I have to say a big thanks to Lynne at the Craft Den for responding to my panicked questions and helping me with the last tricky layouts.  But finally I did it - I broke my srapbooking duck as it were, and, although it was very frustrating at times, and even more time consuming than I'd ever imagined, it wasn't nearly as scary as I'd feared, and I loved it, and I even think I ended up with some pretty decent pages for a beginner........

Now I can't share too many pages, as the photos aren't mine, but here's a select few:

My first page - monochrome and simple, with a border using victorian lace punch from martha stewart to add to the vintage effect.

I found gelogical papers hard to find, so printed out some pebble images and overlapped them to create a background, then found an image of rocks on the edge of a canyon, and cut them out to create a foreground - I love the finished effect.

I used a 'create a swirl' stamp to overstamp the printed poem of the glory of the garden and I think this gave a great effect, and I love the look of the "sliced" photo.

The last page was journalling stamps, and stamped tags in individual pockets for people at the retirement party to write their personal messages on.