Makin’ it big in America!

Challenges:
Midnight Madness Sketch Challenge – sketch

Passion for Promarkers – music

Crafty cardmakers - birthday

My Partner in Crafting Crime – teenagers.

Hi all, and today’s card uses a background paper from Crafter’s Companion of fab blue and white stars, just brilliant for the theme I have chosen for this all conquering hero of the rock world. Doesn’t the image remind you of a character from Scooby Doo? LOL. I think it is those flared trousers! He was actually a kids’ colouring book freebie I once found on the internet, but I thought he was great for all those star-struck wannabes, those teenagers who dream the dream. I coloured him in with my Promarkers,having incorporated a white triangle to this image, the shape being used this week over at Midnight Madness. Whilst being unusual a shape for a sketch I think, it really adds dynamism, helping to inject some energy to the card. Maybe, that is just me! LOL. The red and white striped paper echoes the star spangled banner as do hopefully the extra blue and red triangle card mats behind the white one. The music notes were punched out of both matt and shiny black cardstock and I also popped on transparent stars for further dimension. The sentiment was created on the PC and then matted onto holographic silver foiled card before being mounted on foam pads.

Hope you like today’s offering to blogland!

Tine :)

Peneope's Party Wagon

Challenges: Mo's Digital – inspirational photo

Creative card – girly

Sweet Stamping – favourite stamp or image. ( I love all Mo’s, she makes it so hard to choose!!!!)

Secret Crafter – what are little girls made of…(pretty frocks , esp., pink ones! LOL.)

Crafty Cardmakers - birthday.

The main pink background is a gorgeous digi paper from Cardmaking and Papercraft and I have used a zig-zag cutting blade around the edge of the white card base. I also ran some white card through my cutter using the same blade to get the almost ric-rack like zig-zag strips. These lie on top of the 3 plain, but suitably vibrant, coloured card mats beneath the image. For her party hat, I have paper-pieced the green spotted sections and the ribbon using a freebie digi from DoCrafts. As it was a digi, I rescaled it to make it more compatible with the size of the drawing and I then added shading to it with my Promarkers.

Now for this totally brilliant image called Peneope’s Party Wagon, (as drawn by Mo of course!) of a young girl all dressed up with somewhere to go. As I see it, Penelope has got all dressed up in her favourite outfit – all pink and flouncy, and as pretty a dress as every little girl should have in their wardrobe. She sets off for her party having been so excited all week. She had festooned her little cart days ago especially for the occasion, as she knew she would need it to transport her remarkably large present. She had chosen the wrapping paper & ribbon for the present herself on last week’s shopping trip, having found a perfect one in her favourite colours. Mum had quite sensibly taken over at that point and neatly wrapped it herself so it was done properly. - I do hope she remembered to take a card too…. LOL. The whole image has been coloured with Promarkers.

There you go, a story to go with my creation today!!! Hope you all like my card.

Tine :)

Anniversary Cards

(Sorry ladies, I don’t normally do this, but time is limited so I have had to pop all of my creations on one post….hope you don’t mind too much, but as I am sure you have seen from the photos, all these cards do relate to one another too).

August, in my household means Anniversaries. Yes, not only my own wedding anniversary is coming up but it was my parent’s, my sister’s, brother- in- law’s…..........etc. Handy in one way, as I am less likely to forget anyone’s special day, but it means a lot of card making with Wedding/Anniversary themes at the same time every year. LOL.

So, as ABC’s challenge this week asks us to create a card depicting what August means to us, it has to be an Anniversary card for my entry.

The first card uses the layout suggested at Sketch Saturday and is steeped in extra meanings. Did you ever do Art History at school? Do you remember anything about the Marriage of Arnolfini, where everything in the painting represents something else….? Well, my card is obviously not up to Van Eyck’s standards, but you get the drift…LOL. The peach colour was the colour of the bridesmaids, the horizontal punch work is an infinity loop, and there are two lines of ‘sewing’ representing the two wedding rings. Then there is the power of three. Not only do the 3 roses echo the 3 on the bride’s head dress but the number 3 has been regarded as special for centuries. The Chinese see 3 as a perfect number, but it is also seen by many as the spirit, mind and body/ past, present & future/faith, hope & charity…. Not to mention all the religious significance to Christians, Hindus, Buddists etc. All very apt for a marriage. So, I have embellishments to the power of 3 - 3 flowers, 3 fronds & 3 jewels on her veil - and with the 2 peach circles, the third circle is cut out in the centre. The circles & dots are also significant as a circle is seen as perfect, a whole, a completion and without end, and is one reason why people exchange wedding rings during the ceremony.

Now, while all this symbolism might well, be lost on the recipient, at least I hope the card looks good enough to stand on its own merit! The infinity loop punch is from Martha Stewart, the peach paper is re-coloured from Crafter’s Companion Love CD, the dotty embossing folder is from Cuttlebug , the image is Precious Moments and the flowers and gems as they say, from my stash.

The second card is the more simplistic in layout of the 3 cards. It features an image from Digi Doodle Shops called ‘Junior Bride and Groom’. I apologise for the white looking so blue, it could be a bad photographer, but I am blaming the lack of sunlight whenever I want to take photos!!!! LOL. Yes, this couple too had peach bridesmaids… obviously a trend at the time… LOL.

Now for the third card…(I know, I should have done them all the same as a batch lot!!!! LOL) The last of this trio is the more complex of the 3, using the design over at Sketch and Stash this week, but it has also made into an easel card. Echoing some of the elements of the first card, this uses a different Crafter’s Companion design from the Love CD, but again it was re-coloured. I have also created a couple of steps from card which retain the easel element and I used the punched out surplus from the MS infinity loop as confetti petals. Gosh, I do hope this explains it all!

Challenges:









Sketch Saturday – layout sketch









Sketch and Stash – layout sketch





ABC – A is for August

Charisma – easel

Digi Doodle Shop – flowers

Cooking it up with Katie – flowery pink square

Papertake - something old, borrowed and blue

Prairie Fairy - frame it in a circle.

Will have to go, so bye for now. I would love it if you could leave me a comment if you have time so that I will know that you have passed by. I do appreciate your visits to my Blog and I apologise again for the inconsistent photos today.


Tine :)

Merilee Santa’s Helper

At I ♥ Promarkers this week we are asking you to use acetate on your card and the DT have all been using images from Digital Delights. This one, as you can see by the title, is called Merilee Santa’s Helper. There is such a lot going on with this card that I will deal with its construction section by section, if you are interested. I will try to keep it concise so you don’t get bored! LOL.

The image has been coloured with Promarkers, other than the present Merilee is sitting on. That is a Cuddly Buddly paper used for paper piecing though I added shadows to it with my Promarkers (you can just about see them on the photo I think).

The back of the card follows the layout as suggested by the lovely sketch on CLP using a red paper from HOTP & a spotted one from Cuddly Buddly. Green card with a woven texture forms Merilee’s mat. A gorgeous red satin ribbon creates the horizontal lines on the sketch and hopefully matches her red hair ribbons. A bow with sewn on bead tops that section off.

Next layer is a half a tree with presents to Merilee’s left hand side. Both the tree and presents images were on ‘Arthur’s Free Clip Art’ and I layered them in my graphics program and cropped the tree so I only had half of it remaining. This was printed onto card and attached behind the background layer.

The acetate layer comes next. I did a trial run with a bit of scrap paper first so I knew roughly how much of a bow shape I would create by adding on a few centimetres. Once I had decided the size of acetate I would need to create my effect I had to set about printing on it. The tree was a duplicate of the one behind it so that I would get a 3-d effect. The garland on the opposite side was an image from a CD that I re-coloured green. Once printed off, the acetate was attached either side of the card base and embellished - with gems on the tree to form Xmas lights and in sets of 3 for berries onto the garland. The holly leaves also on the front of the acetate garland, started life as snowflake believe it or not - punched out of white paper which had been coloured to get the right shade of green with my Promarkers, and then the green snowflakes were cut into sections. I think they make plausible holly leaves…..LOL.

Right, hope that was concise enough for you inquisitive types without boring you! LOL. Why not pay the other DT girls a visit too, and see how they created their acetate-featured cards this week. I hope we have inspired you to play along with us this week and have got your ‘little grey cells’ working. We are being Sponsored by Digital Delights so you have a chance to win some digis for your stash just by joining in! So what are you waiting for?...get those Promarkers at the ready…..

Hope too that you all like my card enough to leave a comment as you browse along, as I do like to know when someone visited - and you will be all pleased to know that my Comments box has now returned from going AWOL, to allow you to do so!!!!!

Tine :)

Challenges:

CLP – design sketch

Sir Stampalot – bling

Creative Card - girly

Cute Card Thursday – open challenge.

Fairy Wonderful Finna

Hi everyone. I will try to keep this relatively brief as I have a chilli con carne to make! LOL.

Mo’s Challenge this week is to make a card featuring wings, whilst Digi Doodle suggest using your favourite stamp. Now, whilst I love to obsession Mo’s images, I think it has to be beautiful Finna that just edges it for me…I know, I can be fickle, but she is the most gorgeous image! It just had to be Finna for my choice to fulfil the criteria at both these challenges. As you can see, Fussy ‘n’ Fancy dictated the colourway along with Stamp Challenges who’s photo is rather Barbie -fuchsia pink overall. Having gained my sketch from Dare You… (though I moved the position of the mats to the opposite side of the card)…. all I had to do is get my Promarkers out and start colouring, matching it all to the chosen background which was a digi from Create and Craft and tonal papers.

There are just not enough hours in the day to devote to colouring. LOL. I very nearly added glitter, but resisted, letting the Promarkers do all the work instead. The sentiment is from TLC and the gem is from my stash.

Well, off to the pan I go….. but if you have time I would love you to leave a comment in the box for me so that I know you have visited. (Yes, it’s working again now, I have been so-ooo alone :( !!! )

Tine :)

Challenges:
Dare You To Digi Stamp – sketch

Mo’s – something with wings

Fussy ‘n’ Fancy – black and pink

Simon Says Stamp – song title (Wind Beneath My Wings - Bette Midler)

Stamp Challenges – photo inspiration

Gingersnaps - markers

Digi Doodle – favourite stamp.

#26 Dixie Daisy

Hi, and here at I ♥ Promarkers this week we are being sponsored by Joanna Sheen and we are asking you to create a card using a sketch drawn up by our very own Wynneth - and of course, you must use Promarkers to colour in your image!

For my card I have used two backing papers from Crafter’s Companion, one featuring large stars and one with smaller ones but with long rays. The large star design is the background paper of the card and has been stamped using black ink and a swirly stamp at opposite corners. The paper with small stars I have sprayed with Crafter’s Companion’s Multicolour Spray and Sparkle for a good dose of pizzazz for this rising starlet of an image, and this is the paper I have chosen to run vertically down the centre of the card. Having mounted these papers onto silver mirri, I then got out the sewing machine to secure it all with black thread.

I then went back to the digi background paper and re-coloured it to a really girly pink which also happens to match the rays from the other stars perfectly. Now whilst this pink, starry, rectangular mat might be not actually on Wynneth’s sketch there is a purpose to it. I have used this extra mat to form the shapes at the opposing corners on the design sketch – see, - “method in the madness”, as my mum used to say. This mat too, was then mounted onto silver mirri and sewn.

Now I am sure you cannot help but have noticed the wonderful image available at Kenny K called Dixie Daisy. Isn’t she just fab? …and what is more, she was free during July! Isn’t she wonderful? So vibrant and full of energy. I coloured her in with my trusty Promarkers to match the papers and a popped on a gem from my stash for an earring. I then added further to the ‘bling’ element with gems to the relevant opposing corners.

Hope you like this week’s DT card and if so, I would love you to leave a comment for me – hopefully a nice one. LOL. Why not pop over to all the DT’s blogs to see how they created their cards this week and I hope you will join in with our Challenge yourselves. We look forward to seeing your entries and good luck!

I am going to enter this card in for Challenges myself:

Paperplay – anything goes

Creative Card Crew – girlie

Gingersnaps – markers.


Tine :)

Priscilla’s Sunflower

This has been an arduous few days. When I found that my Comments button link wasn’t working (and it looks like it must have been out of action for the last couple of weeks, it took ages to sort out……consequently, my craft time has been seriously eroded into by emergency blog repairs. So, if you had tried to leave me comments on my last few cards and couldn’t, I do apologise. I did wonder where everyone had gone! LOL. Still, fingers crossed, everything should be hunky dory again now.

This card features an image using a sunflower head from Priscilla Styles but over at CDAC’s colour challenge, Priscilla was asking participants to confine themselves to cream, yellow and green. I was very good and managed not to add in a good dose of brown, LOL. I coloured the image in with Promarkers , (now then, you wouldn’t really expect me to use anything else would you, LOL) hoping for a golden glow to the flower head.

The background is constructed from yellow paper embossed with a Tim Holtz embossing folder and the stripey paper was a digi paper I re-coloured to fit into the colour scheme required. Once these papers were cut to the shape of the circular base card I used 3 different ink pads to ink around the circumference, 2 shades of green and one of yellow.

The actual shape of the card and the sketch used came from this week’s challenge at Mojo Monday as the circular version they offered as inspiration seemed just perfect for this floral image. I found the yellow grosgrain, golden satin and dark green ribbons in my stash, but had to be a bit creative with the lighter green ribbons either side of the centre as I didn’t have the right colour I wanted, so I got out my Promarkers again and coloured my beautiful white satin ribbon light green instead!

Today’s card is bit of a change for me so I do hope you like it, and as my blog is now fixed, if you do like this card, you are now able to leave a comment!

Challenges:
CDAC – cream, yellow and green with sunflower image


Mojo Monday – sketch

Creative Cottage – touchy feely

Polka Doodles – generic.

Have a good day everyone!
Tine :