St Luke's Single Layer Challenge

This month at St Luke's there is only one rule and that is to have no layers on your card - stamp, draw, ink, emboss - whatever technique you fancy  - just do it directly onto the base card.

Now I know for some people a one layer card is a very scary prospect, it was for me when I first started to try, but it does get easier with practice - and you've got a whole month to play along and get in lots of practice and you may even end up as the recipient of this months prize.  We are being sponsored again by the lovely people over at Lili of the Valley and we have a pair of their gorgeous stamps to give away.

I decided to make two inspiration cards - both engagement cards - one full on and one as clean and simple as it can get.

For the first card I drew a double border with a thin black pen.  I then centred a nestability die cut fancy label shape and drew around it with the same fine liner and coloured the negative spaces in black.  I left the die cut shape in place as a mask and masked off the border with post-its.  I stamped a penny black image from the "trims" collection in a variety of inks and added matching stickles to each as the image resembled fireforks to me and went with the celebratory feel of an engagement.  I stamped a Waltzingmouse sentiment in the label once I removed the mask and finished by adding some square black gems to the corners.

For the second card I took another nestie label and this time fixed it with a little masking tape on the inside of the card and dry embossed with a ball tool on both the cutting edge and the inner embossing edge.  If you've not tried this before, it's a nice easy technique - easier with a lightbox (but I didn't have time to dig mine out so it is possible without one).  Secure the die inside with the cutting edge facing the outside of the card, turn it over and rub gently with a bone folder - this creates a soft line on top of the cutting edge so you know where to put your ball tool to begin.  The trick is to go over the lines a couple of times to get the depth (I use a double ended tool and start with a thicker end then use a narrow one for definition once the fibres have stretched) - if you go too hard and deep too fast, you just rip the card stock.  You can do the same thing on an embossing machine but I think you get a deeper impression by hand.

Once I'd created my raised shape, I just stamped and embossed the same sentiment from Waltzingmouse with WOW Amber Rose Embossing Glitter and went over it with a little glossy accents for extra shine.  I finished with a tiny silver gem on the start and finish of the sentiment and added a slightly larger silver gem in each corner of the label.

See - one layer cards don't have to be difficult or scary...........

One Layer Stripes

This week's challenge at Less is More is stripes, and as it's the second week of the month it's one layer week - so stripes but no layers - dang - I have lots of striped paper but no striped stamps! http://simplylessismoore.blogspot.com/2012/02/week-54-one-layer.html

A lot of head scratching and sorting through all  my drawers and I managed to find a couple of stripey things and have actually made 3 cards in the end.  These challenges are good like that, otherwise I just use the same stuff or new stuff all the time - this made me dig deeper and older!!!

This one is a bit outside the box, but I think the train track counts as stripes!  Stampin up wheel and TPC trains, planes and automobiles stamps.  I think this was in part a reaction to my blogging buddy Deborah's news - wish you lots of luck for your move to the States.  Wish we were coming too to share in all that US crafting goodness :-)

For this one I was inspired by Mandi's stamping stripes into nesties but I twised it up an stamped my stripes as a border strip after inking and embossing my nestie shape.  The flower is Hero Arts, clear embossed and glittered.  DI's blended and pearled to make the frame.  The stripes is actually a layer from my papermania cake stand stamp - told you I had to look at things hard this morning!  The sentiment is from an Elzybells set which has just been re-released by Penny Black (yeah!!!)

I'm not so thrilled with this one - very simple embossing folder with a sentiment stamped in the gap that is on the folder.  Just don't think the sentiment works, and I can see this being recycled with the sentiment covered for an non one-layer card.

That's it for a while as I have a very bad headache today - a phonecall at 4.30 am about the alarm at work is probably to blame....   Time for lunch and a quick nap I think!

Catch you later

LIM Week 15 - Embossing

Well, I thought blogger was going to ruin my weekend with its "1 hr maintenance" that last 3 days!!!  However I was sooooooo relieved when I finally saw it was up again last night so that today's LIM challenge would be able to go ahead - phew!  I'm still waiting for some of my lost comments to reappear but they are still working on it apparently so fingers crossed.

This weeks challenge was to do embossing - either dry, or heat embossing.  I had several ideas, one was to use a lovely new poppy from chocolate baroque, but I embossed it twice and both times were disasters!  Any tips of avoiding "dots" where you don't want them, removing too much powder where you do want it whilst trying to avoid the "dots", and stopping your paper curling would be much appreciated!!!

So I switched from evil black embossing powder to clear (much easier to hide your mistakes!) and decided to use my old favourite stampendous agapanthus stamp and to do a emboss resist technique.  I used a wavy rectangular nestie to dry emboss a frame into which to stamp.  This also creates an area to fill with colour to show up the clear embossed image.  I used victorian velvet in the middle and blended dusty concord into that and up to the edge of the frame.  I used a dark flesh polychromos pencil to carefully add a coloured line to the middle of the embossed frame to bring out the victorian velvet.  A simple sentiment from there she goes finishes it off, but I wish I'd done it in black as the purples don't match....

Right off to do a bit of shopping - will be back to comment on all your entries later while I watch Eurovision - come on Blue - no nil points please!!!
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