#81 Anything goes - Quiet Fairy

Theme at I ♥ Promarkers - anything goes
Sponsor - Letraset (pkt of Promarkers)

Don't these week's just fly by? This week you can use any image you want of course (don't you all just love 'anything goes' weeks, LOL), just so long as you use Letraset products to colour it in - Promarkers, Trias, Flexmarkers or Aquamarkers.

I have used what I am sure will have been proving a popular design sketch from Cute Card Thursdays for the front of the card and for the base design I went with a tent fold card in shiny black. It is a lot more simplistic than a lot of cards I have been making but I reckon it is good to shake things up a bit & do things a bit differently for a change. The image is from A Day for Daisies and is called 'Quiet Fairy', a fairy rose which is a very tranquil image & seemed almost Oriental to me - so I used the ADFD challenge of using twine to create my own tassel which I thought might add to this Oriental feeling as well my use of the black background.  I shall try to explain how I made my tassel at the end of my post if you are interested. I didn't however want to be too obvious & go with the colour red, no matter how traditional a colour to go with black on Oriental themed cards, so chose peach colours instead which I hope also adds to the overall soft feel.

The tent card shaping at the side

Cutting my papers to follow the design layout guidelines, I then carefully distressed the edges of the triangular layer before sewing into position. The original sketch had a verse where my 3 gems actually are but I thought it better to fill out the space on the back with my sentiment (so I hope the Cute Card Thursday ladies don't mind this slight alteration) but I did balance out the design they provided with the matching gems.

For the reverse of the card I layered up a sentiment from Raindrop Echo Designs adding my own words of greeting underneath.

Challenges I would like to enter this card are:

Cute Card Thursdays - design sketch
A Day For Daisies #25 - twine (+ADFD image)
Cuddly Buddly - say something nice
Order of the Opus Gluei - create with roses (rose fairy)
Craft Us Crazy - anything goes
Creative Card - anything goes
Passion for Promarkers - anything goes
Heart Song Inspirations - anything goes (or fav col combo)
Outlaws - Copic/Promarker Friday Challenge - anything goes
Cupcake Inspirations - photo insp (colours)

Making my tassel

I will try to briefly show you how I made the tassel. I had to put it down to photograph it which wasn't always that easy to do. LOL.

I found some scrap card and folded it in half. So the total length of card I used before it was folded in half was exactly double that of  the length of tassel I wanted to finish up with. I then wrapped the twine around the folded card. How much you wind depends on how thick you would like the finished tassel to be. (You can see the tension on the twine as it is trying to wrap around itself).

How you do the next bit is up to you but I put a piece of the yarn through the loop at the top of the card. You could have just pulled the wound yarn off the card base & then added the securing thread afterwards but this way I knew I had got each strand accounted for. You could also cut the bottom end of the tassel at this point, using the gap at the bottom of the folded card as a guide for the scissors. I thought I might leave it till later on. Having slid the wound twine off the card base, I knotted the piece of twine I had threaded through the top to secure all the strands together.

With another length of twine I threaded up a needle with a wide enough eye to take it & wrapped this twine around the top, using the needle to sew into the back of the tassel when I had got a sufficient amount of twine there. I then cut all the loops at the the bottom of the tassel making sure they were all even.

As I wanted a thicker element to the top of the tassel to create a kind of fancy finish, I cut off another length of twine, folded it in half & held the looped end in one hand & the cut ends in the other & twisted the 2 together so that I got a lot of twists all the way up from one hand to the other. (This is where I needed another pair of hands to do the photos really!) I then carefully took the looped end towards the cut end so that they were now both in one hand but grabbed what was the middle of the twisted length with my now free hand & let the two sides twist together using the created tension. I do hope I am explaining this well enough.....

The doubled up length I started with.......

...& the finished amount of twists.

The picutre above shows what it looked like once the two sides had twisted themselves together - with a knot at the end to secure. Sorry, this photo is slightly blurry but I think you can see it well enough. I then used the needle to sew this thicker, twisted element into the 3 looped design at the top of the tassel & once completed I used glue gel to adhere to the card.

Happy crafting everyone. :)