Happy Mail

 Yesterday  I received some 'happy mail' which was lovely.  A very generous blogging friend had offloaded  gifted me some of her snippets in the form of some die cut parcels.  I had recently seen a couple of cards using this die with a background of a stamped 'word cloud' and had thought that surely I could produce my own word cloud on the computer so I set to work and this simple background is what I came up with. Also, unlike a stamp, my cloud can be re-sized to suit. Incidentally, I've since discovered that there is software readily available which will do this easily but on the whole I'm quite happy with my results and I did enjoy 'tinkering' anyway.  After printing the background I used an oval die to cut a shape and luckily I had some DSP which toned with the colours in the die cuts which I'd been sent.  I was warned that there were some seriously tiny pieces in the envelope (the infill for the small bows in particular) and putting the group of parcels together was a bit of a challenge but I did manage not to lose any of the pieces. A fairly plain card but I did add a scattering of toning gems.

So, thanks to inspiration from blogging and the generosity of a friend (you know who you are), I've tried something different to keep my old brain working 🤣

Word Cloud - produced on the computer using Craft Artist
Parcel Die - from Gummiapan

Ladybird and a Touch of Mixed Media

 I have a card to share today which is the result of playing around with a few mixed media ideas on a tag. I started by sponging the tag with a little green ink and then dug out a few stamps, most of which came from a magazine give away probably at least a couple of years ago.  I partially stamped some numbers overlaid using a crackle stamp with a grey inkpad then used black ink for the dandelion seed heads.  The leaves were die cut from some scraps of green card and the ladybird cut twice - once in black and once in red then trimmed the red part to overlay.  Some gloss was added to the wings.  A small red bow and a die cut greeting and we have a clean and simple mixed media (sort of) card.

Crackle stamp - a very old wood mounted one
Numbers and dandelions - from a Phill Martin magazine kit
Leaves - from a Stampin' Up die set
Ladybird and Hello - dies by Gummiapan