Black and Gold

For my weekly post over at Make the Day Special today I'm playing with my favourite Avery Elle set again - these rounded diamonds are so versatile - today I've used just two stamps to make a modern flower.

Now normally I'm really not a gold girl - I tend towards silver - but gold is this season's metallic apparently so I thought I'd give it a go and I decided to try embossing the leaf like diamond in gold onto black patterned paper.  I've done a close up shot to show the paper but it doesn't show up brilliantly.  It's a black on black floral (Prima)  and I think embossing on subtle patterns like this can give a very classy look.

I also used the little line stamp from the set in two different ways - I embossed it directly onto the corners of the card base to draw your eye into my flower and I also embossed it onto vellum and fussy cut it to create my stamen layer.  All finished with a little bling in the corners and big blingy crystal (kars) in the centre - I love these they're like crushed glass and come in a couple of sizes and lots of colours.  I think I'll be using the clear alot for Christmas ;-)

It's all about Geometry

I've been playing with rounded diamonds this weekend  for my DT projects for Make The Day Special - my first project is my entry for this week's CASology cue card of "silhouette" which I am just about in time to link up http://casology.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/week-61-silhouette.html

I took a 9cm square panel of thick white card stock and selected a range of Hero Arts shadow inks and stamped each of the large flowers from the Folk Art Flowers set in a different shade randomly all over the card.  I masked the larger two flowers with sticky note tape and then stamped the leaves coming out from them to fill up the spaces in between.  You then get your own custom stamped floral background paper.  To take it one step further, I cut it into 4 equal squares and rounded two corners on each panel to give the geometric shape I wanted to play with and arranged them on my base card with a little gap in between.  I decided to add a silhouette focal point design using the companion dies using the bird house, birds and branches and finished with one of the lovely sentiments from the same set.

Once I'd finished the postman arrived with my new Avery Elle goodies which are in store now so naturally I had to get them inked up immediately and I was drawn to the Rounded Diamonds set with the same shapes I'd been playing with on my first card.

I wanted to play with the geometry to create some strong clean and graphical shapes as I thought this would give me a useful masculine card so I opted for blue, green and purple this time and again stamped each shape in one colour but this time directly onto my base card in a diagonal.  I added a sentiment from the sublime new Handwritten Notes set - I just love the little "extras" you can add to your messages.  To add a finishing touch I went with 3 little clusters of sequins in the same colours as the stamping.

I think the weather for most of the country is definitely the kind to keep us indoors and crafting today but we're actually off to Manchester to see our favourite comedian Daniel Kitson in a play about a tree!  (It’s early evening. it’s mid autumn. It’s starting to get dark. And on a quiet residential street somewhere in England, a man with a picnic basket, arrives at a tree. A new show about dissent, commitment, two people and a tree)  We must be mad to cross the Pennines given today's weather forecast but we follow him everywhere like stalkers ;-)