Froggy Birthday

 A fun birthday card from me today.  I had a little stamping session with a set of frog stamps and enjoyed colouring the images which were then die cut ready to be made into cards.  The frog is leaping about - as they do - in celebration of someone's birthday which should raise a smile I think.  The background was stamped onto a piece of white card and the sky area brushed with some blue ink before adding the die cuts.  

 Water - a retired Stampin' Up stamp
Grasses - stamps from Inkylicious
Frog and waterlily - unbranded stamp/die set
Colouring - Inktense pencils and water brush

Today's Card

I do hope you're not bored by my recent posts using items from the famous Gummiapan mystery bag and after this one there might be a break from seeing them while I put the rest to one side and get into using other items from my stash.  For this one I die cut the cow head in black and again in white so that I could swap the pieces around to make a couple of Friesians.  Next I had a scrabble around in my pot of miscellaneous die cut bits and pieces, mostly left overs from previous projects, to see what I could use to build up a card.  The result is this country scene.  The  back layer is a brick wall effect achieved with an embossing folder, followed by a snippet of patterned paper which looks like sky and green for the ground.  The cows are peering over a 'fence' made using three strips from a die set which has a quite different purpose and finally I added some corn and grasses  which were also loitering in the 'useful bits' pot.

 Wall - embossing folder from Stampin' Up
Landscape background - New Horizons DSP also SU
Fence - Beautiful Brush Strokes dies SU
Corn - from Hey Chick set SU (retired)
Grasses - from two other retired SU sets

Snippets Time Again

 Time for a new challenge in the Snippets Playground and I've used yet another item from my recently purchased mystery bag of retired dies and stamps from Gummiapan UK.  There were dies of two sizes in this set and I've used the larger of the two.  I translated the Swedish name of the set to be 'oval gems' but really had to think hard of ways to use them effectively.  I finally decided the larger die of the two would perhaps work as a sort of paperclip to hold some snippets of torn papers so I cut it in dark brown card and added a bit of gilding wax for interest.  The torn papers were all from my snippets collection and as usual the only non-snippet thing here is the base card which is 5" x 7".  As one of the torn pieces was a music one I've added a treble clef, also cut from a dark brown snippet and touched with gilding wax.  Another great and varied prize this time around, good luck everyone.

Oval 'paperclip' - Gummiapan UK (retired)
Notebook Punch - EK Success
Treble Clef - a very ancient die from Marianne
Sentiment - Tim Holtz stamps