Animal Theme

 The Allsorts Challenge theme this time is **anything goes with an option to include four legged friends (domestic)**.  I've chosen to use a quirky cat stamp for this fairly quick and simple card. The cats were stamped onto a piece of watercolour paper which had been 'Brusho'd' followed by a bit of partial colouring done with pencils.  A strip of the left over paper was punched to look as if it had been torn from a notebook and everything was popped onto a piece of script paper.

Stamp - Trilby Cats from Crafty Individuals
Sentiment - stamp and die from Sizzix, years old
Colour - Brusho and Polychromos pencils
Punch - from EK Success, also an old one

Stamping Sensations March Challenge

 There is a new challenge on the Stamping Sensations site and this time the theme is **anything stamped with an option of wings/tails**.  It so happened I'd stamped and coloured these owls yesterday and they were sitting patiently waiting to be made into a card.  I had this landscape designer paper handy and decided to die cut some tree trunks.  The leafy areas of the trees were also die cut from scraps of white card after I'd randomly stamped leafy texture in various shades of green.  There were no dies with the owl stamps so these were fussy cut.  Great inspiration from the Design Team and  a lovely prize for the person lucky enough to be drawn at the end of the month.

Owls - Adorable Owls stamp set from Stampin' Up (Sale-a-bration)
Trees - Aspen Trees dies and stamps from Stampin' Up

Class in the Post

Here's another card which came as part of the class in the post mentioned yesterday and this time I've adapted it to make a 5" x 7" card with the addition of a piece of toning patterned paper and another layer of grey card to match the centre mat.Everything for each card in the class comes ready cut to size - just needed to stamp a sentiment, assemble everything and pop it onto my chosen larger background

Everything apart from yellow layer is from Stampin' Up Playing in the Rain

Umbrellas

I decided I really needed to kick-start Mr Mojo who seems to have been on a prolonged break so I treated myself to a class in the post from the lovely Jenny Moors.  Getting these classes presents a great opportunity to have a play with some of the latest products from Stampin' Up and I thought this one using umbrellas and some cute critters would be fun to play with.  The SU cards are usually small in size with the American postal system in mind but I  much prefer to make larger cards so I have the added challenge of trying to do just that.   This is the first one I've made and I managed to turn it into a 6" square card by adding a square of  raindrop paper which I knew I had somewhere in my stash and I also added some additional stamped and/or die cut elements using magazine give-aways which I've had for a long time (just needed to find them though 🤣).  There are four more card sets in the class and hopefully they can all be made larger using bits from my stash.  Watch this space 😉!!

 Umbrellas and Clouds - from Playing in the Rain Stampin' Up
Wellies and Puddle - using a magazine give-away stamp/die set
Sentiment - from the same stamp set
Rainy Paper - from my stash
Other layers came in the class kit Stampin' Up
 

Snippets Challenge #448

 I had a lucky win recently from a Challenge blog and the prize was this great Snowman die set - hence my entry into the Playground challenge this time is a Christmas card..  As usual the only part of this project which didn't come from my snippets collection is the blank square card.  The snowflake background was trimmed from a fairly large snippet to fit and then I pulled out white, red, green, black, grey and orange to die cut the many layers  which make up this fun snowman. The sentiment was stamped onto another white snippet and fussy cut and finally even smaller snippets were used to add some snowflakes.  

Snowman die set from Sizzix (Tim Holtz)

Nesting Bird

 I'm sure Spring must be just around the corner and I enjoyed putting this card together although I have to say there were more dies in the set than I imagined and it did turn out to be a bit fiddly.  The leaves are so tiny!  I stamped and coloured the first layer of the nest together with a branch and of course the bird, before die cutting the rest of the components.  I had no idea how I wanted to put things together to build up a card but eventually decided on some ovals as a backing and then found patterned paper and other pieces of card to complete the job.  As usual I had a few 'dry runs' before I decided on the final layout, adding in a stamped, coloured and die cut spray of berries which I came across, left over from a previous project.

Nest, Branches and Bird - Nested Friends stamp and die sets Stampin' Up
Berries - Forever Fern stamp and die set also SU
Tiny Bird on Sentiment - Memory Box die set

Two Current Challenges

 I've been missing in action for a while, due mainly to a 'major fault' with BT landlines in this area which started in mid December and seems to have been ongoing forever 🙄.  This of course caused intermittent internet connection which was irritating but at least I wasn't entirely cut off.  That is until the major fault was finally rectified, at which point I lost broadband completely and had to wait almost another week for an engineer to investigate.  Thankfully he appears to have solved the issue so hopefully I can get back into the swing of posting on my blog.

Today's card was made with two challenges in mind so I'm popping into the Snippets Playground and actually remembered to take a picture of some of the snippets remaining after I'd snipped into them.  Everything apart from the blank card came from various snippets collections.  The owls were stamped onto scraps of white, coloured with alcohol pens and fussy cut because they didn't come with matching dies.  The hearts, leaves and flowers as well as the sentiment were all die cut using random dies from a selection of sets.

The mention of hearts takes me to the Allsorts challenge where **anything goes with an option of featuring hearts**

Adorable Owls - stamp set from Stampin' Up (Sale-a-Bration)
Hearts, flowers, Sentiment etc - dies from various retired Stampin' Up sets