Addicted to Stamps

As the theme this time on Addicted to Stamps is 'anything goes' I decided to show this card which should fit the bill.  The image from Polkadoodle is one I'd stamped a while ago which came to the surface during my tidy up and hadn't been coloured. I used Coloursoft pencils and then added a bit of glitter to her glasses and the spots on the toadstool.  Various oddments of paper were gathered together and combined along with some paper clay roses (coloured with Distress marker to match) and a couple of stamped and cut out butterflies.  These had been made ages ago when I acquired the stamp set from Clearly Besotted and were lurking in a little plastic box just waiting to be rediscovered!

Men Only!

There is a new challenge called The Male Room which launched today in which everything has to be male orientated - it seems male projects are the ones which people struggle with so it will be great to see lots of inspiration from the design team and of course the people who join in. For the first one they've eased us in gently with an 'anything goes' theme and for my card I've used a free stamp from Docrafts (Papermania) which has been stamped three times, embossed and layered for dimension.  I designed the background paper using various blend modes in Craft Artist so I didn't want to cover too much of it with lots of embellishments. I simply added a computer greeting with a couple of die cuts which I 'found' when tidying my work space.  I really enjoyed making the backing paper and was prompted to do this because Michelle has been on Create and Craft this week with Craft Artist pick of the week and seeing her demonstrations always fires me up to use the programme more. It is a shame really that there has to be so much 'waffle' in these shows rather than 'wall to wall' demonstrations but sadly that's the nature of shopping channel shows - after all they are there to sell!!

More Paper Piecing

This second card for the Make My Monday challenge is the more traditional kind of paper piecing, where a pictorial image is stamped and some of the elements are then re-stamped and cut out of coloured or patterned paper.  This was a free stamp which came with a magazine a while ago and not used until now but I thought it would be ideal for this technique where I've cut out the clothing and the little patches from coloured paper.  The remainder of the image was coloured with Coloursoft pencils.

House of Cards Challenge

As there are five Mondays in July the choice of style for the challenge at House of Cards has been left to us so in my 'using it up' mode I went ahead and made a card with some of the bits and pieces I had left in the colour scheme for July - wrong!!  That should teach me not to make a challenge card until the post has actually been publlished with full details!! We've been given a photograph as inspiration for this final free choice week so I had to get my thinking cap on to make something else.  The link to the photograph is somewhat tenuous because I've just used the colour of the wallpaper for the flowers on this classic style card.  During my sort out of the working space I came across a page of stamped and embossed flowers which needed colouring so I used a Sakura stardust pen and then cut them out, adding some coppery leaves (Memory Box die).  The background paper was left from a sheet I printed to use yesterday and the die cut strip and embossed panel were from the 'bits' box. A computer sentiment on punched and die cut shapes completes this card.

Here is the photo

and here is my card

Make My Monday Challenge

I started this morning with a thorough tidy of my working space and guess what - I can actually see and use the whole of my glass mat!!  In the course of this I came across miscellaneous die cuts, scraps of embossed card, printed images (uncoloured), part sheets of paper - I could go on but you would soon be bored.  It was fortuitous that the challenge on Make My Monday this week is paper piecing - plenty of paper here so I stamped a large flower from Chocolate Baroque Ruby Tuesday set, along with some leaves on various coloured scraps and cut them out., piecing them together to make an embellishment.  What I didn't have to hand was a nice piece to use as background so I've printed off a sheet of CB download Love Letters design (now of course I have half a sheet left). The birthday stamp is from Stampin'Up, punched out and popped onto a Sizzix label shape cut from the same scraps as used for the flower.

Now I'm in tidy mode I'm going to try to be more disciplined and put things away  regularly and also try to use up the left overs straight away on another project rather than letting them pile up.  It would make sense really to actually throw out all my scraps and start from scratch but I don't think I can bear to do that even though it often takes me ages trawling through them to find just the right piece to use (they are stored in more or less colour-coded clear boxes though).

Take a look to see what the MMM design team have done with their paper piecing this week.

Special Day

Another blue card to share today which I made using up various die cuts and a digital image all of which were lying around on my work space and are mainly either left over from other projects or were cuts made to try out dies to see how they looked when cut.  The embossed panel was part of an A4 embossed sheet and the lacy edge was the first piece I cut with this Cheery Lynne die to see how it cut and how easily it came out of the die - beautifully in both cases!.  The circular pieces were a Nellie die which I've had a long time. Image was a digital one and the central blue area is made up from part of a Die-sire set combined with a fancy corner from Marianne. I still have a bit more tidying up to do before I will be able to see and use the whole area of my glass cutting mat - it keeps disappearing under a mountain of card and paper scraps!!

One of my blogging friends Sue suggested I should enter this into the Pan Pastels challenge this week where the theme is embossing so here goes.  Thanks Sue.