Oscars Red Carpet Inspiration

Claire set a doozy of a challenge this week - to be inspired by the red carpet fashion of the 2013 Oscars ceremony http://waltzingmouse.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/red-carpet-challenge-links-open.html

My favourite dress of the night was without doubt Hale Berrie's Versace number - designed to make her look like a Bond Girl in ready for her to be just that in the next movie - and it was stunning - classy and elegant but making an on-trend statement with all that loverley metallic shimmer - yum!  However, I wasn't sure I could make a card purely based on this dress, so I decided to be a rebel and use my 3 favourites together in one card.

Gloria Rueben's deep purple ruffled dress adorned with a fluffy flower train looked wonderful (although I have no idea who made it or how she managed to walk in it!) and Nicole Kidman's uber-sequined and super shimmery dress was chosen by her husband Keith Urban - the encrusted top caught my eye but I was less impressed by the swirly bottom....

Anyhow, just like all the high street stores fashion designers, I took the bits that inspired me from each dress, diluted them to suit my price bracket, and came up with this:

I used a precious sheet from my all time favourite paper pad Paris Nights from GCD Studios to represent Halle's dress and I die cut a fancy frame from gold paper with a spellbinders die to represent the faux buckle on Nicole's dress.  I stamped the word Mum using the extremely useful Compact Family stamp set from Waltzingmouse using stazon ink so it stuck to the pearlised paper.  I added some texture to represent the folds on Gloria's dress by spritzing some purple card stock with water and roughly folding it.  Once dry double stick tape give you a nice tight finish and holds the pleats down.

Then I finished with a great big flower - again inspired by Gloria's dress - but I'm really thrilled with this flower as I made it myself from a quite unexpected source - the smallest die from Claire's exclusive Opera Tags compatible spellbinders die :-)   Simply cut 7 tags and use a tiny brad through the hole to hold them together, fan them out  and you have a pretty fancy flower even if I do say so myself!  I took further inspiration from Nicole's dress and used black, copper and gold sequins to encrust the centre of the flower - not as many sequins as on the dress itself I'm sure - but the feel is still there I think.

I can't wait to see which dresses inspired everyone and where they took this challenge - it's a really interesting one - thanks Claire!

Colourful Blog Party

It's blog party time again over at Waltzingmouse stamps and this month it's all about colour - and being close to Halloween, they've gone for a spooky palette of black, purple and orange.  Now as much as those colours would lead you down the Halloween path, I don't really "do" Halloween (it's not big in our area at all) so I've struggled to come up with an idea.

In the end, I went for a very simply tag card using the new Opera stamps and gorgeous matching dies, paired with a simple sentiment from compact sentiments using the suggested colours.  I would never have paired orange and purple but I kind of like it - even though none of my purples match!

I'm looking forward to seeing all the spooky offerings from the rest of the party goers :-)