Cherry Feathers!

So today is my first ever DT post for the Clean and Simple Team over at the new challenge site House of Cards.   What's that you say - what is this great challenge of which you speak?  Well my friend, where have you been these past months?   The House of Cards is a genius little idea of a challenge where each month we set a theme, for example this month it's a colour theme based on the delicious bowl of cherries above, but rather than a month long challenge, we change teams each week and ask you to make a card in a different style but still based on the ongoing theme - geddit?   Cool huh!

I am on the CAS team and we're up this week with a whole goggle of gorgeousness to inspire you so do make sure you check out the inspiration from my teamies http://houseofcardschallenge.blogspot.co.uk/

Despite the colour palette featuring 3 of my favourite shades of teals and aquas I decided I really wanted to stretch myself so I chose to use not just 3 of the colours (as per the challenge) but to add the delicious cherry reds too.  After an awful lot of failed attempts with stamps and inks, I finally settled on paper and buttons and here's my cherry-feather card:

I cut the 3 feathers on silhouette cameo from 3 different shades of blue card.   I stamped the sentiment using stamps from Clearly Besotted's Fancy Feathers set and mounted the white strip onto bright cherry red.  I mounted the whole white panel onto some dark burgundy cardstock and finished with 3 cherry red buttons.

I hope that I've inspired you to play along in our first CAS challenge at House of Cards and can't wait to see what clean and simple designs you can come up with based on our cherry colour scheme so hop on over and play along - you've got all week  http://houseofcardschallenge.blogspot.co.uk/

Feathery trigger

Kath's provided a stunning trigger image this week that had me jumping for joy as it gives me another chance to play with what is possibly my favourite Clearly Besotted stamp set ever (and yes I have a lot of "favourites" amongst Stephanie's stamps I know!) as the image features feathers ;-)  http://www.moxiefabworld.com/2013/05/tuesday-trigger-feather-weather.html

I was inspired by the colours of the birds - even though they are some sort of tit I believe, the colours in them screamed peacock to me so I inked up the lovely peacock feather in the stamp set using all the little bits to build it up and came up with this:

I used peacock distress ink and cottage ivy mixed directly on the stamp to get the two tone effect on the feathers and then used 3 inks for the "eye" plus sakura glitter gel pens to get that subtle shimmer you see in peacock feathers.  I stamped the same image 3 times in a fan, the way a peacock does when he is showing off and shaking his tail feathers!  I used a little gross grain ribbon to separate the sentiment which is stamped in peacock DI and Paris Nights momento ink.

Flowers and Feathers

My mojo seems to have gone on strike which is a bit of a bugger as I have lots of cards to make!  I had several attempts to make a card for CASual Friday last night with the idea of kissing a chevron stamp to a flower - they are all in the bin and I actually gave up on crafting in favour of housework last night so that might tell you how far my mojo went!

However, I am determined by nature, so I'm back this morning for another go and the black and lime colour combo at Less is More this morning lead me to my black and white chevron washi tape and before I knew it I had something not so terrible that I can post to both challenges - http://cas-ualfridays.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/cfc97.html  and http://simplylessismoore.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/week-114-colour-challenge.html

I lined up 3 strips of washi tape to make it a continuous chevron pattern and then stamped a sentiment from Clearly Besotted's Frame Sentiment set underneath in pear tart ink.  I die cut a flower from lime green felt (IRL it's very close to pear tart in colour but I cannot for the life of me get a good photo of it) and rolled it (think it's an MFT die) and added some die cut leaves using a Wplus9 die.  Finished with a simple gem in the middle.

As Stephanie is sponsoring LIM today and I got her new release yesterday, I thought I'd share another card I made - no challenge involved this time I have just been waiting for this set since I saw the sneaks so couldn't wait to play with it.

I started with the largest feather in the set and stamped it into some cloud clay which I rolled out - if you haven't discovered cloud clay it's amazing air dry clay that is super light so perfect for using on cards.  If you ink your stamps with versamark you can stamp into the clay and your stamps don't get stuck.  I let the clay dry a little and then simply trimmed the feather with scissors.   I then stamped another feather in versamark to capture all the lovely detail top to toe to form a border across the kraft card base.  Once fully dry, I heat embossed one of the fabby sentiments from the set in white to match the clay feather, drew some white lines to frame it all and stuck the clay feather over the top with pinflair glue.