Seven Hills Crafts March Sketch Challenge

I do love a sketch challenge, although this one head me stumped for a bit and I couldn't work out what I wanted to do with it!

I eventually settled on a Distress Ink blended background with a bear and a rabbit from Mama Elephant Woodland Gifts. The banner stamp is from Mama Elephant Charmed, and the die is Mama Elephant too. I've been building up my Copic collection and switching over from my old Promarkers, so this is actually the first card I've made with Copics only! I'm still practicing my Copic blending technique, but I'm pretty pleased with how the bear came out.

Thanks for stopping by!

Seven Hills Crafts February Challenge

A really interesting monthly challenge for February at Seven Hills Crafts, Fancy Folds - to use more than one fold on your card. This is definitely not something I do very often! After Googling a load of different card fold ideas that didn't jump out at me, I came across a shadow box card which I thought would be pretty effective with my amazing new-favourite Mama Elephant Space Bear stamps!

It was really tricky to photograph the finished card, but I've tried my best holding my daylight lamp with one hand and my phone in the other! Here's a slightly closer up view of the layers.

And one "just in case" to show that there is indeed more than one fold involved here!

The bears and planets are coloured with Promarkers and have Glossy Accents on them. The sentiments are heat embossed. And the background is blended with Distress Ink, with splatters of water and white paint. Here's a pretty similar background I made for a different card last week.

I actually haven't stopped using the Space Bears since they arrived last week, I absolutely love them! I was also pretty pleased with this card, also using a die from Mama Elephant Pizazz Pieces.

*This post dedicated to the awesomeness that is Space Bears!*

Seven Hills Crafts January Challenge

Great to see the Seven Hills Crafts monthly challenges are back, they're always one of my favourite things to do. This month is a colour palette challenge.

I've gone for the middle set. No surprises, when I looked back at my top 9 Instagram posts of 2015, they were all pretty much blue! Perhaps I need to give the other two a whirl as well then! I've used my brand new MFT geometric background stamp, along with a Mama Elephant bunny, Mama Elephant scalloped die and an Avery Elle greeting. The background was heat embossed and coloured with distress inks.

Crafty 2016!

Hello, and happy new year! Here's to a crafty 2016! I definitely have plans to get more painty and inky and messy this year, there's so many things I want to try, like some art journalling and canvasses. Now that my daughter's started nursery school part-time (yes, time has gone by that quickly!) I might get a few hours to myself in the daytime to do these things. Housework is my bottom priority in 2016, sorry to my husband!

So I've been mostly been making cards recently due to Christmas and my current ink/paint obsession, but also some scrapbooking. Another thing the new year does is makes me realise how far behind I am with that. I haven't scrapbooked any photos from the second half of last year, so I've just put in a massive Snapfish order. And here's a couple of pages I've done recently.

(June 2015)

(Christmas 2014)

For Christmas my lovely mum gave me a voucher to spend at Make the Day Special, or as it is now known, Seven Hill Crafts, newly reopened with a smart new website. Here's what I bought with it as soon as it reopened to get my 2016 creatively kick-started. I couldn't resist opening the Altenew flowers to have a go straight away, it's just a shame I now have to work all of this weekend! I just have to keep myself away from the internet as I now want to buy loads of ink colours to stamps flowers with.

Also for Christmas, I asked my husband for these Gansai Tambi watercolours and one of the Mama Elephant die sets (gotta love crafty Christmas presents!). The other I got from Seven Hills Crafts as I was lucky enough to win their November blog challenge, yay!

And finally for this massive blog post, a birthday card I made using the Gansai Tambi paints (and Avery Elle stamps / Lil Inker die). I have to say, I love working with these watercolours, possibly even more so than my Zig Clean Color Brush pens. I just love inks and paints at the moment, can't get enough of them!

Thanks for reading, see you here again soon!

Make the Day Special November sketch challenge

Sketch challenges are my favourite kind, both in cardmaking and scrapbooking, so I was very excited to see this month's Make the Day Special challenge!

Here's my card, using Mama Elephant Cozy Christmas and Reindeer Games stamps, Mama Elephant Merry die, Lawn Fawn border dies and Deck the Halls stamps. And a Distress Ink blended background on the tag.

I was really pleased with it so I made another card based on it, using almost the same techniques and supplies. I cut the aperture in this card blank a while ago to make a reindeer spinner card, but I re-purposed it instead!

Reindeer Games

The Reindeer Games stamps by Mama Elephant are honestly the cutest set of Christmas stamps I've ever seen! Here's what I've been making so far...

You can see the Snow Capped Mountains die also fell into my basket when I bought the reindeer, but it does make a perfect backdrop for them!

And on this card I also used the garland frame from the Mama Elephant Charmed set, and die cut the "merry" from canvas paper. (this die also fell into my shopping basket!) The background stamp is by Lawn Fawn, I was lucky enough to win a gift card from their Instagram page and this is what I chose, thanks Lawn Fawn!

Fame!

A bit of fame to report, I was picked to be "Designer for the Day" at Papercrafter Magazine! So my Christmas card using the supplies I was sent got a whole page in this month's magazine. You can also see my card in detail on their blog here!

I made this similar card recently too, using a cute Whimsy Stamps greeting and a Studio Calico background stamp, and the same embossing/Distress Ink resist technique.