Some snippet makes

I have been having a major sort out. My snippets are now all together, lots of my unmounted stamps are in A5 folders and I'm just waiting on a delivery of eze-mount before I continue. I had some lovely images I had coloured in before Christmas and found the perfect papers to complement them amongst my snippets.
First another Hobby art scene coloured with aqua markers and distress inks. Not sure where the papers are from (other than my snippet drawer!)

Next were some stamps I got free on the front of a magazine (Quick cards made easy). I stamped and coloured these on Christmas eve, but hadn't done anything with them. They go pretty well with the snippets of Pink Petticoat papers I found.

These remind me of one of my Christmas presents - a gift box of tea.

Aren't the boxes so pretty?
I'm entering all three of my cards into Pixie's Crafty Snippets Challenge, who has taken over the keys from the lovely Jules. Hey, Di - do you think those boxes would count as snippets?! Thanks for looking. I'm off to drink some afternoon tea!

Happy New Year

We spent yesterday walking through Sherwood Forest blowing a few cobwebs out and getting some much needed fresh air and exercise. The weather was perfect for a stroll, although the wind was a bit chilly, so it was good we were wrapped up. The afternoon sun gave everything a warm glow and I took a few photos of trees  and wildlife. I was particularly please with my Nuthatch.

These next photos of the river Meden are so different  to how it looked five years ago. Subsidence and flooding have created a permanent lake on both sides of the bridge.

 I am sure most of you are aware of my fascination with trees (stamps and real ones), and this area of Sherwood Forest has some beauties. It probably looks much as it did several hundred years ago, with no pylons, telegraph wires or buildings as far as the eye can see. It probably doesn't look that much like a forest to most - more heathland, I suppose.

I love this particular tree. It reminds me of the one on 'Who do they think they are?'
I had a great day, and aim to do more walking (and bird watching) in 2012, with my family. What else, though? I aim to try and lose a few pounds, although I hope to do it by more exercise and more sensible eating, as well as getting a bit more sleep, rather than dieting. On a crafting level I aim to use what I have got more, which may lead to buying a bit less - who knows? I have also decided to share the card making I do for work with another crafter, so hopefully allowing a bit more time for less directed creativity. I want to try and keep my desk tidier and finish more things before I start the next! You wouldn't believe the half made efforts I uncovered during my mass tidy on Christmas eve.
No cards in this post, but I will be back (probably tomorrow) with a few, I'm sure.
Happy New year to you all. May it be healthy, prosperous and full of wonderful things (particularly of a crafting nature) x

Happy Monochrome New Year at Sir Stampalot

Good Morning and a Happy New Year to you. Today is the start of a new Challenge at Sir Stampalot where the theme is Monochrome, and by this we mean your choice what colour you work with so long as your card is all in shades of the same colourway (you can of course use white cardstock).

I went for shades of Blue, in fact it is all done with Chipped Sapphire Distress ink.  The central scene is stamped on to water colour paper and the sky was done with ink dusters. I used a water brush to pull a little bit of colour from the stamped images. The images are all from the Hobby Art Scene it coastal set and the Harbour set. The background was created with Hero Arts Antique flower design block.
The card flourishes were cut with a Marianne Design Die. The card candy and charm were from my stash, but I found this lovely set of Nautical charms on Stampalot's website that I will be buying very soon. 

The prize this month is a fabulous surprise... hand selected by the lovely Janice. I am sure you will love it!

I am really looking forward to visiting you and seeing your lovely creations. Pop over to the Stampalot challenge blog and look at the fabulous inspiration from the Design team. 
thanks for looking and for all your lovely comments.

Less is More plus a bit of Brayer fun

 It has been a few weeks since I managed to enter Less is More, but as I am enjoying a few days of crafty play, I thought I'd better turn my thoughts to this week's Challenge where the theme is one word. I have looked through lots of stamps and finally came up with this.

A very simple watercoloured house. The stamps are from Chocolate Baroque and haven't been inked nearly enough!
 There are some fabulous CAS cards on show from Chrissie and Mandi, and I am looking forward to spending a little time visiting my fellow LIMettes.

My brother has a birthday in early January, and as a keen bird watcher I thought I would use my pheasant stamp and silver birches from Clarity stamps. I stamped and masked before brayering the sky and stamping the Inkylicious trees in the background. I then used my ink dusters to put a few shadows in the snow and coloured the pheasant with promarkers. The base card is stamped with the clarity small feather stamp in very pale blue. I often make him cards that would double as a Christmas card... well, serves him right for having a January birthday!

Next up is my first play with my Christmas stamps. The Stampscape set is called The light and the sea. The only stamp that isn't from that set is the foliage on the right, which is from the Andy Skinner Winters tale set. It isn't perfect brayering, and there are a few stamps hiding fingerprints (note to self: new handcream and shiny card are not a good combination!) but never mind. I was please with the colour combo. Bet you Brenda will be able to tell you the colours of Adirondack I used in both!
A very happy New year to you all and thanks so much for your lovely comments this year. I really appreciate them. Thanks too, to all of my followers for your continued support.

A bit of a craft fest

We had a lovely Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, surrounded by family. Santa was very kind with more shades of Adirondack ink, Waltzing Mouse stamps, Andy Skinner stamps and stampscapes stamps. As well as all these I received, from the lovely Lynne, some brilliant tools called perfect layers. You can find them here. I had lots of images that were waiting to be matted and layered, so I set to. They are very easy to use, so needless to say I made quite a few cards...

These first three were all stamped with Hobby art Scene-it stamps and painted with a mixture of aqua markers and distress inks. The papers were all snippets from my stash, which I spent about four hours sorting through. I have decided to donate a bag full to the Church near school, who hold 'Messy Church' art and craft events every month.I'm also sharing these with Jules Crafty Snippets Challenge - twice in a week - must be the holidays!!!

Next are a few cute ones...

A Milton Teddy from Wild Rose studios, coloured with distress inks, (Waltzing mouse sentiment and Hero Arts little flower stamp)

... 'Searching' stamp from Sugar Nellie, coloured with Aqua markers,

...and a Mo Manning (Mo's Digital Pencil ) Digi coloured with promarkers. These were all coloured during the school holidays in August and in October, and were waiting to be made into a card. Now I feel a little more in control of my craft stuff, I have had a bit of a brayering session, and I will share the results with you tomorrow. Thanks for looking!

See you on the other side!

I've spent the last 24 hours making cards and baking mostly, with a few hours sleep snatched in the middle. I haven't made half the goodies I'd intended. Just mince pies from me and mocha cupcakes from Meg. There is a nice piece of gammon cooking at the moment. Shortbread and cookies will have to wait, and I blame the councillor who thought it was a good idea to not break up until the 23rd!
Here are my cards. The first, second and fourth are all made from snippets so I'm entering them into Jules' Crafty snippet challenge. If you want any details  about the cards please ask and I'll let you know.

Thanks for looking and a very Merry Christmas to you all!

A different colour scheme for Christmas

Well, I am trying to make a bit of space on my desk and found various half finished things. I found a tipsy tree painted with distress inks, some scraps of paper and card left over from a kaisercraft pad and a (shhh!) peeloff in copper colour. This is what I made

I rather like this colour combo and might just try it again next year, but in less haste hopefully! Thanks for looking!

Blue and Brown at Allsorts

I sat down yesterday morning to make my Dad's Christmas card as I had suddenly realised I won't see him again until boxing day! I saw some fabulous cards made from three tags on the inkylicious stand at Doncaster, so decided to make a tryptich snowy scene.

The hills are all done with ink dusters and broken china distress ink, and the trees (Inkylicious) are stamped in broken china and tumbled glass DI. The foreground stamp on the right is from Penny Black (Berry red, snow white) added to with promarkers and the tree stump, owl and fence are from a Lindsay Mason set called Build a snowy scene. 

The tree on the left is also from Inkylicious and the sentiment from Waltzing Mouse. I used promarkers for the fence, tree, tree stump and owl, before going over various bits with the quicky glue pen and glamour dust. The base card is A4, so it is a fair size. 

Only today have I realised that it fits this week's Allsorts challenge where the theme is blue and brown. Thanks for looking and I hope your preparations are going well. I still have a week of school left, although parties, a Christingle service, and an achievement assembly are all included in that, so not much to plan! Off to make a few more Christmas cards whilst tidying my desk!

busy, busy, busy!

I'm frantically making birthday cards for colleagues at the moment. There was one last week, three this week and two over the Christmas holiday that I need to get done in the next few days. I'm just going to post the cards with  stamp  and colouring information. I am sure you can work the rest out, but if you have any questions, pop them in the comments and I'll get back to you eventually!

Stamps: Inkylicious    colouring medium: colouring pencils and gamusol

Stamp: Stampourium           colouring medium: Distress inks    paper: artylicious cd

Stamps: Chocolate Baroque and Waltzing Mouse  colouring medium: Distress inks

 Stamp: Hobby Art    colouring medium: promarkers

 Stamps: Inkylicious         Colouring medium: Ink dusters, adirondack and big and juicy ink

Thanks for looking, and hope your Christmas preparations are going well!

A very quick post

Well, I'm sorry I haven't managed a proper post yet with some cards on it . There is one in the pipeline, honest!
Panto went very well, and it's all over for another year. I had to share these photos with you.

Playground duty on Friday afternoon and the sky was looking decidedly dodgy. I was almost expecting it to snow as the clouds had taken on a very unusual colour and a wall of cloud was approaching fast. There were a few drops of ice cold rain and then the most amazing rainbow appeared in an arc right over the school. it was so intense and bright that you could see more colours than usual.

Thanks for looking!

A few more CAS cards

I have been busy all week with Panto at school, so tonight is the first time since the weekend I've had enough time to stamp. We have one more matinee to do and then it is all over for another year. The song my class sang is called 'Life is a wonderful thing', and it is the sort of song that gets into your head and is there every waking moment. I found myself singing it as I was pushing the trolley round the supermarket! Anyway, on to my cards. I started with a couple more hero arts wreath cards, but as I had run out of red gems I used red tulip paint and stickles instead, and as I'd not used the tulip paint since last Christmas it had separated a bit and was a bit runny in places. I added a rather large tartan bow to cover a splodge on the next one!

Next I got out my Lavinia Mistletoe stamp and Versafine Olympia Green. I have made quite a few Christmas cards using this design since I first saw Tracy Dutton demo it at Doncaster about four years ago.

I added a bit of icicle stickles to the berries and a sentiment from Hero Arts. I tried to stamp another, but this time it didn't quite meet, so I added a bow in the gap.

The bow and sentiment don't look quite central on this one, but it doesn't look as bad as the photo in real life!

Finally I want to share some photos with you that I took on the way back from visiting my Dad on Saturday. 

 I thought of Adirondack eggplant and peach bellini the minute I saw that sky!!! I had a chat with Brenda and challenged her to recreate it and you can see the results here. She did an amazing job! Unfortunately the journey wasn't all good as a passing vehicle kicked up a rather large stone that cracked my windscreen, and the crack that was about 3cm long on Sunday was about 20cm long by Tuesday. I am now £75 lighter in the purse. At least it wasn't today it was being replaced - wouldn't have fancied that job in those winds and rain! Talking of the weather, I hope those of you in Scotland have made it through the day without problems caused by those winds, and are tucked up safely in your homes. Thanks for looking!

Playing Bingo at Sir Stampalot

Well, it's the first Sunday in December so it's time for a new challenge at Sir Stampalot. We are having a little game of bingo, and here is your bingo card.

I chose pearls, stickles and ribbon, and came up with these two Christmas cards

The stamps are Woodware Tipsy trees paper pieced with faux stitching added. The papers are from my stash. "What is the prize?" I hear you ask. Well, feast your eyes on these goodies!

I think Santa may have had a hand in this as well as Andy and Janice!

I do hope you will be able to join in with us this month and I look forward to visiting. Pop over to the Stampalot Challenge blog for details of our rules and more fabulous inspiration. Thanks for looking!