Parchment with Dragonflies

As I said the other day it is many years since I did any parchment work and now that I've come back to it I'm wondering why it took me so long.  I have to admit that things are so much easier these days with the wonderful Groovi system from Clarity Stamps which does away with the (for me anyway) very tedious business of tracing images.  I don't think this system really takes anything away from the pleasure of actual parchment crafting because once the image is traced you have freedom to emboss, snip, incorporate intricate lace work etc as the fancy takes you and as your skill, and patience, allow.

I have a small selection of Groovi items and this is more or less my first effort where I thought I'd go for something fairly simple to begin with and hopefully as time passes and I get going I can get back into some grid work and cutting although I will certainly have to practise these particular skills before they will be fit to be seen.

Enjoy the rest of the Bank Holiday weekend - you can maybe guess what I might be doing at least for some of the time!!

Various Groovi plates used
Colouring done from the back using Distress markers

Rudolph Days - August

It seems to be time  again for the Rudolph Days challenge - my how this month has just rushed by and I'm not too sure where the days went really.  Anyway I have another Christmas card which should fit the bill.  This time it is a DL size with three leaping reindeer.  I used a scrap of patterned paper for the sky and a torn strip of white card for the snow.  The reindeer and the greeting have been popped onto a silver pearl background and once the die cutting and layering were done this was a fairly quick card to make.  I simply popped tiny pieces of blue card between the reindeer layers so that they showed through on the details .

Reindeer - Tonic dies
Sentiment - Tonic dies

Leftovers

I must say it took me a while to realise that if I was careful when placing dies onto card before cutting them the 'waste' could be saved and used for another project.  Of course it doesn't work with all dies but many of them leave usable pieces.  This card was made using one such piece - the black layer - along with some scraps of paper which had been coloured using Pixie powders.  There was enough of this coloured piece to layer behind the black so that it showed through the apertures and also a tiny piece left which was enough to cut the top layer of the butterfly and a small circle for one of the sentiment layers.  A purple scrap was used to die cut a border and also a butterfly layer and circle for the sentiment.  Waste not, want not as they say!!

Floral die - Wild flowers set by Tim Holtz
Border and butterfly - not sure as these were lying unused on my desk

Pixie Snippets Weeks 295 and 296

Despite Di's opening remarks on the Playground post this week she has made a beautiful card for us as inspiration to use up our own snippets and as always has given us details of how the result was achieved with hints and tips as well thrown in.  Just follow the link in my next paragraph to take a look and maybe use up some of your own snippets to enter for an opportunity to have your name put into the draw for the prize - of course you can just play along for fun if you already have these super items.

I decided to make another Christmas card for the Playground challenge this time around and actually dusted the cobwebs off my parchment tools to use up some vellum snippets.  I've made some poinsettias by die cutting them from the vellum and then embossing in the traditional way using ball tools which I quite enjoyed after a seriously long break of several years since I last did any of this type of thing.  This is such a relaxing activity and I'm really not sure why the tools have lain abandoned for such a length of time and you could be seeing more parchment work from me at some point.

A piece of background paper was printed and trimmed to fit the card; two circular frames were cut from snippets of red and gold card; a sentiment stamped onto another snippet and die cut into a banner; greenery die cut from even smaller snippets of card and then the card was assembled adding two layered poinsettias with some gold Stickles for centres.  Cutting the circular frames has of course left me with two smaller red and gold circles to use on another card or two.

Background - printed from Artylicious Seasons Greetings CD
Banner - Sue Wilson stitched banners die with stamp from Stampin' Up
Greenery - Tim Holtz Festive greenery die set
Poinsettias - Marianne dies from many years ago, not sure if they are still available
Frames - circle dies from Spellbinders