Chasing Autumn

Chasing autumn through the streets 

And up the hills where horizons meet

Breezy falls of gold and red

Litter the sky and on pavement shed

Crunching motion rustling by 

Flights of colour under a sunset sky

Whirling and swirling in a fierce latin dance

Its like catching the wind - not a chance!

NB: From an original pressed leaf picture and digitised

One from my portfolio

 

One from my portfolio. I must get back to making artwork with pressed flowers. I don't know when that will be because my daughter is poorly and needs me right now. I hope she gets better soon.

Xmas Sentiments

Well this is a record for me! Those lovely people at Bah Humbug Hall set such a tantilising challenge I had to set to it straight away! Luckily I was at the 'Range' yesterday and bought some Christmas die cut sentiments by Anita. I chose one and teamed it up with black mirri card, a gorgeous silver/white glitter card and printed acetate by Kanban luxury reflections.  I've been hanging onto the printed acetate for something special and I guess this is it. I finished off with some crystal diamontes on the oval sentiment.
I took the photo at an angle to avoid reflection of the flash and in reality the card sparkles, even through the acetate so the photo doesn't really do it justice I don't think. I hope you like!

I love my visitors to comment so please do so if you can.

Here come the girls

A great challenge this week from Bah Humbug. It gave me the opportunity to use an image I've been hoarding for ages. Its from an old family photograph taken in the 1930s and includes my mother (bottom right corner).

First of all, I used a scalloped card from Papermania and gave it a red insert and trimmed the top corners.  The image was then mounted onto holographic red card and a matching tag made with ribbon and peel off lettering.I framed the image again with outline peel offs and added three little diamantes to the bottom right of the image. I also added some diamond glitter glue to the scalloped edges of the card. A sparkly snowflake embellishment finished off the card.
I can agonise over the design of a card so when I'm happy with a result I make more! This time I used black on gold and cream on green to make two extra cards.

Would love to hear from my visitors, so please comment if you can.

Something New

The Bah Humbug challenge this week is 'Something New'. That set a problem for me because there is so much that is 'new' in the craft world I would love to get my hands on but I just can't keep up with everything but at the same time I so appreciate the opportunity to do something different. I checked out craft videos on You Tube, new techniques, new ideas and just got overwhelmed with the possibilities.
I decided to make life easier for myself and check out my craft stash for new additions that had never been used. A pack of unopened promarkers were crying out 'use me'. I've had them for about six months but haven't as much as played with them! So for this weeks challenge it is using promarkers for the first time.

I could hardly believe how smoothly the ink flowed and fell in love with promarkers. Oh no! Not enough colours so I had a trip out to Hobby Craft to buy more. I gasped at the price of them but was pleasantly surprised at the check out when I discovered the price had been reduced by 50p each. Yeah!! Maybe its because there are new generations of pens out on the market - well they can wait 'cos I'm more than happy with promarkers for now (smile). I so enjoyed using these pens that I am currently making up another seven of these cards. Wow! My Christmas card box will be overflowing - happy me!

Materials used :

Dover clip art sample used as a digi image

Promarkers

Stardream card stock from Joanna Sheen

Outline peel offs

Vintage sentiments by Flower Soft

Comments are always appreciated.

'Kiss'mas

I had to use mistletoe for this challenge. It was the first thing that came to mind. So simple to make as well!

I got a royalty free clip art image from the internet and printed directly onto the cards. The resolution isn't good but hey! what can I expect it's a freebie. To enhance it a little I coloured over with Sakura glaze pens, even the red ribbon which you can't see because I stuck a real ribbon over the top...oops! Actually, I think it works better (smile).
I popped the cards inside acetate jackets that I had won in July's Bah Humbug monthly draw, how lucky am I? I made six in total and am really happy with them.
Pleasev feel free to comment. I hope you like them too.

Joanna Sheen August challenge

The challenge is to use masking. Well that had me stumped!! I did my research and thanks to a Tim Holtz tutorial on YouTube I got an idea. I have no purpose made masks so followed the lead from another Sheenie and used leaves as masks. As I was foraging through my stash of pressed botanics I realised I had done masking lots of times before but I just hadn't given the technique a name!
I chose three small chrysanthemum leaves as masks and laid them on top of a printed background paper. (Freebie me thinks, from a magazine). I used ground pastel chalk to colour on top of the background paper and then removed the masks. Rather than use a pastel fixative I used a spray of Printguard. I have found this method gives the effect of a wash rather than the matt effect of pastel chalk. I then enhanced the outline left by the masks by drawing a squiggly line in brown fine tip pen.
My masking design was finished and all I had to do was mount it onto a Kraft card from Joanna Sheen to create a notecard. I drew a line around the layer with a  brown fibre tip pen and hand wrote a message underneath.

Thats another notecard to add to my collection. Please feel free to leave a comment (smile)