Hot off the press!

Talk about cutting it fine...this is my entry for this week's Simply Stampin Challenge, which closes in just ten minutes time!

The challenge was to use the following colours...

...which was totally outside my comfort zone! I was pleasantly surprised by the combo and this is the card I made:

I've used the Simply Soft stamp set and a sentiment from Silhouette Sentiments. Sorry for lack of description but the challenge now closes in 4 minutes - eek! Wish me luck ;)

Happy Birthday Urban!

It was my friend's little boy's 3rd birthday today and I knew he'd love a card with his name on it.

I got my little one on board again to help cut some letters using the Big Shot and my Timeless Type alphabet dies. We used patterned paper from the Just Add Cake set.

The layout is based on the sketch from this week's Feeling Sketchy Challenge - week #7. 

The image is a cute digistamp from Pink Cat Studio which I've coloured with my promarkers. I added some faux stitching (I can't stop using it at the moment!) with a red marker and added black dots at the ends of each 'stitch' to make it more convincing.

As well as the Feeling Sketchy challenge, I'm also entering this card into the following challenges:-

Lollipop Crafts Challenge # 80 - Just for Him
Allsorts Challenge Week 154 - Card for a Man or a Boy

Colour Create Challenge #96

My lovely 3 year old has been so well behaved this week that I got her involved in cardmaking. She absolutely LOVES using my Big Shot so I let her do all the handle turning :)

Yesterday 'we' made a card for the Colour Create Challenge #96, which was to use a colour scheme of Green, Brown, White and a touch of Lavender or Purple. It seemed an odd combo to me and I wasn't sure how the purple would work with it. When I picked out some shades to try though...oh my! Gorgeous stuff!

I decided to go for a clean and simple design to balance out the detailing in the stamp I used (Faith in Nature). The stamped image was coloured using my SU inks with water and a paintbrush. The sentiment is from a Hero Arts set I was lucky enough to win recently.

I really like the retro 'mod' feel this layout has to it.Must remember this one for the future!

Clean and Simple

I'm a huge fan of CAS (clean and simple) cards. I'm not so good at making them though. They require a lot of thought about how to make an impact without using too many elements, and how to use negative space effectively.

Having a sketch to follow makes this easier for me and I really liked the sketch provided by Card Positioning Systems' Challenge #265. 

I teamed the sketch with the theme of 'Birds' given in this week's CAS-ual Fridays challenge #52 and the gorgeous colours in the last Play Date Cafe challenge. The deadline for the latter has passed but I was so in love with the colour scheme I still went with it.

For my card I used a simple white background and printed on a digi stamp from Pink Cat Studio. I coloured this with my Promarkers and found patterned papers from Stampin' Up! to match. Simple, yet fun.

I've photographed this against a background of patterned paper, but it is just a white card.