Normal Service........

...........will be resumed as soon as possible! No crafting at the moment as I've been away on a cruise and only arrived home on Friday morning. Unfortunately we both contracted Covid on the cruise, so for the last few days were confined to the cabin. I will be back crafting in the next few days but thought I'd let you see where we've been.

Falmouth

Scilly Isles

Any ideas what this is? 

I thought not. My photography skills with an Iphone in the middle of the night are not very good. It's an air sea rescue helicopter hovering just above our balcony, ready to airlift a sick passenger.

Cobh Ireland

 

Fingal's Cave

Dutchman's Cap (Bac Mór)

Lerwick

St Magnus Cathedral Kirkwall

Forth Bridge

and finally we were woken up by our Ring doorbell in the early hours of the morning

R.I.P

Peace On Earth

This was a bit of an experiment. I found,  tucked away at the back of a drawer, a pack of watercolour cards. I stamped the image, a magazine freebie and NBUS with Ink 3 no colour ink. My idea was that it would just look as if it had been watercoloured.

However it just didn't look right to me. So I very carefully went round the outline with a grey Unipen.The sentiment from the same set of freebies was stamped in grey ink. That looked much better but I'm not sure I like the featureless faces. I really want to add eyes, nose and mouth, but think I'll try that out on a piece of scrap paper!

Challenges:

Happy Little Stampers Watercolour Challenge

NBUS

Time Out Challenge - Festive

Christmas Pines

After my last card I decided to give the same stamp set another airing, this time using more natural colours.

 

I also used up the salvaged back of the card that I threw away the other day . I stamped the trees in Rustic Wilderness and Soft Suede for the trunks, then over stamped with Crushed Olive to get the two tone foliage. The deer was stamped on a scrap of card with Soft Suede and die cut with the matching dies.

 

Challenges:

Addicted to Stamps and More - Christmas

NBUS - the deer and matching die are both NBUS

The Snippets Playground- snippets used , card mat and deer

One Layer Christmas

I'm obviously in a Christmas mood at the moment! 52 CCT are asking for one layer cards so it seemed like a good opportunity to use some more of my NBUS stash.

 This is a Gina K set that I think was a Stamptember set from SSS a couple of years ago. I stamped and embossed the trees and sentiment in silver then silver embossed them. I tried doing some shadow stamping on the first one - but that ended up in the bin!

 

Challenges:

52 CCT

NBUS

Rudolph Day - August

Well it's three weeks since I last blogged! My excuse is that during the very hot days my craft room was unbearable even with a fan. I was also in the middle of a watercolour painting that  had to be put on hold as the paint was drying too quickly, so I still have that to finish off. But I have made a Rudolph card!

I cut the red mat out with a die that looks like s fringed blanket (NBUS), but as it is an American size it was too long for our DL cards, so I just chopped the ends off. The Noel stamp is from Woodware and I thought it was time it had another airing and I fancied doing some paper piecing. The Christmas paper with little penguins on is out of my stash. Added some bling with pale blue rhinestones to tie in with the paper.

Challenges:

Rudolph Day at Scrappy Mo's

Time Out Challenges - Festive

The Holly and Ivy Christmas Challenge

NBUS Challenge

Butterflies for Less is More

It's a long time since I played at Less is More, but I has a spare hour or two so decided that I would join in with their current challenge of butterflies. I also needed a female birthday card!

 

I searched through my dies for some butterfly ones - I think these are some very old ones from Spellbinders and also rummeged in the snippets drawer and found a piece of brusho'd paper that had been much of a success. I cut the two embossed butterflies out and glued them flat straight onto the card blank. Then I had just enough left to cut out the openwork top layer of both and attached them by just glueing the body down. The hemp card blank is another old item from my stash which came from Card Creations before it changed hands, sadly I don't think they stock them any longer.

 

Challenges:

Less is More - Butterflies

Allsorts - Butterflies

Moving Along With The Times - Anything goes

Happy Little Stampers Watercolour Challenge - Anything Goes

July Rudolph Day

It's Rudolph Day again- well actually it was yesterday, but we have until 31st to enter! I was recently looking through some old cardmaking magazines and saw an idea for using designer papers which I thought was a great way of using some up.

So I raided my stash of Christmas paper and made one. The black borders were some very old stick on ribbons and the sentiment was cut from black glitter paper.

Then I made another.

The sentiment  used the same die  and the borders were from the same set (ex QVC, I think).

And then I made a third while I was on a bit of a roll.

 

Challenges:

 

Rudolph Day - Scraps of Life by Scrappymo

Christmas Craft Creations

Christmas Rose

I made this card a couple of weeks ago after I received this lovely die from Charlie and Paulchen.  I cut the flowers out of snippets of white card then inked them with some distress inks. I think I used Tattered Rose.

 

It took me a while to work out how to put the cut out bits together ( it would have been useful to have a little guide put in with them). I mounted them onto a snippet of distressed looking red scrapbook paper and wrappedsome gold ribbon round it. Then as I still thought it didn't look very Christmassy added some gold rhinestones. Maybe it also needs a sentiment on the front.

 

Challenges:

 

52 Christmas Card Throwdown - Christmas Florals

Crafty Catz - Christmas in July

The Holly and Ivy Christmas Challenge - Anything Goes

Snippets Playground- Christmas in July

Allsorts Challenge - Christmas in July

NBUS

Oporto Port House

I hadn't realised how long it has been since I last did a blog post. Note to self - must do better!  no cardmaking has been taking place but I have done some more scrapbooking, an online art course and some major clearing out of books and magazines stored in the garage!  Now I only have to contend with the fact my craft room is like a sauna, despite having the window open, blind down and fan on! Anyway on to crafty things and here is another layout for my Canaries Cruise scrapbook.

Our first port of call was Oporto where we did an excursion to a Port House( I had to look up what they were called) which included sampling some of their products. As Roy is totally teetotal I had double tasteing!

The embellishments were cut out on my Cameo.