GlitterAngel Art

A little birdie told me ……

Oh how I hate making cards for men!  I want to use ribbon, pearls and glitter on my cards and I don’t want anything so naff as football, beer or golf (although I am guilty every now and then out of desperation of making the odd golf themed card!).  This bird set from Papertrey is always a good solution, you can even get away with a little bit of glamour dust on the image without making it look too girlie.  The papers are from My Minds Eye ‘Away we go’, and are just perfect for masculine cards.

Last weekend we popped over to our place in Spain for a bit of a break.  The weather wasn’t the best, but we had a great time anyway.  To be honest it was just nice to spend some time together and have a couple of days off work.   These pictures are taken just down the road from our little house – isn’t it the best view, even on a grey day?

DCM - Water

It’s Vanessa’s turn this week to set the challenge over at the Daring Cardmakers.  You can make a card with a watery theme (lakes, rivers, fishies, boats etc), or maybe you'll find a way to actually use some water in the making of your card eg colouring with watercolours.

Well I had some very ambitious ideas about creating a snow globe type thing on my card with actual water in it, before I realised that was probably a bit silly and only going to cause me to have a very wet desk.  So I went for the safer option of going through my stamps.  Luckily I have quite a lot of stamps that would have suited this theme, and I decided to go for this gorgeous Lost Coast Stamps Mermaid.  It’s such a lovely image and I haven’t used it for ages.  I coloured her in with Promarkers, then painted the background with some ecoline inks and a spritz of glimmer mist to give a lovely shimmer.  I added some Smooch pearlescent paint to the pearls on her dress and the shell on her forehead, so they shimmer nicely too.  For even more shimmeriness (don’t think that’s actually a word is it!), I spritzed the light blue organza ribbon with some green glimmer mist.

Don't forget to pop over the the Daring Cardmaker blog to see what my lovely teamies have come up with.

Toot, toot me!

I have some exciting news to share today.  I’ve been invited to join the Design Dream Team over at The Scrapbook Stamp Society.  I’m really flattered to be asked.  The artists there really have come up with some amazing artwork for their digi stamps.  I’ve been trying to buy stamps recently that will give me the chance to work on my Promarker techniques, but I really don’t like a lot of the girlie/cute images available.  The images at the Scrapbook Stamp Society are just perfect – lots of angels, fairies and quirky characters that I can’t wait to play with.

The first stamp I chose to use is a Marie Antoinette image.  A few years ago Andy and I went to the Palace of Versailles near Paris.  I bought quite a few postcards to use in my artwork, and when we got back I scoured the internet for a suitable stamp to use with them, but there really wasn’t much choice, so the postcards have been sitting in a box ever since.  You can imagine my excitement when I saw this amazing digi stamp – it’s just wonderful.  I dug out my postcards and decided to use this one – it’s a reproduction of a menu from the table of Marie Antoinette.  The backing paper is Echo Park and the image has been coloured with Promarkers, then I added some glamour dust to her jewellery, some stickles to the flowers in her hair and pearls to the flower on her dress and on the cupcake.  I highlighted the birds with Glossy Accents to make them stand out.  The card is finished off with some tea-stained seam binding and a pearly brad.

I’ll be back soon to share some more projects featuring Scrapbook Stamp Society stamps.

DCM - Bejewelled

It's my turn to set the challenge this week over at The Daring Cardmakers blog and after much deliberation I came up with the dare 'Bejewelled'.

I'd like to see your cards inspired by a piece of jewellery - you can use the design, colour, stones or metal for inspiration.  If you can, it would be lovely to see a pic of the piece of jewellery that inspired your card too.

It's funny how the dare cards are always most difficult when it's your own challenge, you'd think it would be easier when it's a theme you've picked but it's most definitely not.  I spent ages browsing Pinterest looking for an idea, and then I came across this gorgeous Bvlgari ring and I loved the different coloured petals.

As I have a huge selection of pearls in most colours, I decided to stamp the petals on a nice shimmery metalic card, then match the pearls as closely to the colours on the ring as I could.

Pop over to the blog to see what the other DT members have come up with - there's an amazing selection of cards there to hopefully inspire you to join us - I can't wait to see what everyone comes up with!

What’s on your workdesk Wednesday

Since my desk was so busy this week I thought I’d join in with the WOYWW gang and show what’s on my desk today.  I’ve been busily making Christmas tags – 120 of them in total.  They’re all made using Papertrey goodies – aren’t they cute?

Quick and simple

 

I’ve just got delivery of some lovely new Papertrey goodies (thanks Chris!).  One of the sets I chose was the Tiny Treats birthday set as I thought it would be really useful for cards for children and men – cards that are always a bit of a challenge.  I’m never short of ideas for girls, but if I can’t use pearls, flowers or ribbon I struggle a bit!  This card was so simple to put together but I’m really pleased with it, and the images in the set are just so sweet.

Happy Birthday Daring Cardmakers!!

Last week's dare was Dare No 52 of Year 5 of Daring Cardmakers challenges.  I can’t believe that the Daring Cardmakers blog has been around that long.  It was one of the first sites I came across when I first discovered blogland, and it was actually wanting to join in the dares that prompted me to start my own blog January 2007 just a couple of months later.  Who'd have thought that 5 years later I'd be on the design team!

For the first dare of year 6 it's a return to our year-long celebration of flowers associated with each month.  This month’s flower is the Chrysanthemum.

I chose to use this as another excuse to use my Papertrey Bloom Builder die, and I made a little jar for the flowers to go in from vellum.  A google search failed to find a digi stamp for the jar, so I ended up drawing one. I layered some white card behind the vellum jar to highlight it and I made some 'stalks' for the flowers from strips of brown card. 

Some little pearls finished off the flowers, and I couldn’t resist a little kraft tag (told you I was putting these on everything didn’t I?!)

Pop over to the Daring Cardmakers blog to see what the other girls have come up with, there’s plenty of inspiration, so please join in!