Birthday Cards for my Mum and a Naughty Squirrel

(Warning – image rich post!!)

I don’t seem to have blogged for several weeks, except for the weekly WOYWW blog hop – for details click on the logo in my sidebar – for over a fortnight I’ve been laid low with a dreadful throat infection/flu-type virus and although I’m tons better now, my throat is still a bit sore and I haven’t got my voice back completely (I was voiceless for over a week!). I’m also feeling pretty wiped out as a result. Still, it’s the time of year for it and I’m not the only one who’s been suffering.

My main project recently has been to make a collection of birthday cards to give my mum for Christmas. She is hard to get presents for these days as she’s 90 and wants to get rid of stuff rather than acquire more, and she always appreciates things I’ve made, and these can be given away, which is even better. I have tried to keep them fairly simple as card making isn’t my No. 1 favourite thing to do, but I do enjoy embossing and inking and experimenting, so I’ve been having some fun. I am not going to give them all to her but put some in my ever-diminishing stash – there’s always a panic on when it’s someone’s birthday and a card has to be made in a hurry, and everyone’s birthdays in our circle of family and friends seems to be in the first half of the year.

I’ve made a box to put them in, which I thought she could use again to put cards in when these have all been given away. I used my Crafter’s Companion Top Score Multi-Board to make the box out of black cardstock, and decorated the sides and top of the lid.

I designed the label using Serif CraftArtist – I wanted a soft, romantic shabby chic look for this box, which I hope I have achieved.

The embellishment is made from two small crochet flowers I made a while back, which I sprayed with some pale pink glimmer mist (which doesn’t show!!) and secured with a pretty green brad over some organza ribbon.

Here’s a picture of some of the cards in progress – I uploaded this a while back on a WOYWW post. I have made them all the same size (A5).

Now for the cards in detail. Here is a pair of similar cards using clear heat embossing as a resist, and inking with Tim Holtz Distress Inks using my Inkylicious Ink Dusters. I love this technique as you get a lovely subtle blending of the colours. The sentiments are peel-offs.

Here’s a couple of pink cards – the first one is quite dark and might possibly do for a man – it’s embossed with a Cuttlebug paisley folder. The sentiment is cut on the Cricut, and as with all the sentiments so created, it was coloured using Tim Holtz Distress Stains to co-ordinate with the card. The one on the right was made using a doily as a stencil, using an Ink Duster and Spun Sugar Distress Ink, and then going over the white part with a white marker pen to give a bit of texture and make it look like lace. The sentiment is stamped.

The next two I am very pleased with. The one on the left is using a script Cuttlebug folder and some Core’dinations card in their “Whitewash” range which I really like – when sanded, the pastel shade underneath shows through. I made the flowers by stamping with some stylised flower stamps I’ve got, and then painting them with distress ink and hand embossing them, before gluing them down onto the card, and adding some orange Stickles glitter glue for a bit of bling. The background was inked with Distress Ink using some sequin waste as a stencil, and the sentiment cut on the Cricut. For the one on the right, I used a small oval die cut piece of decorative paper I had left over from another project, using a Spellbinders die, and I stamped and heat embossed the butterfly in gold, cut it out and painted it using pearlised acrylic inks. The iridescence doesn’t really show in the photo. The background was distress-inked with my Ink Dusters, and the sentiment is stamped.

The next two are done with some Tim Holtz Texture Fades embossing folders, and the sentiments cut on the Cricut. The one on the left is quite plain, but effective, I think – again it’s done with the Core’dinations Whitewash card, sanded and inked with Old Paper Distress Ink. The one on the right was inked in several green shades, and some of the embossed motifs outlined with a white marker pen and then emphasised with some Glossy Accents.

The next two are very simple, just using two different colourways of papers from one of my Tim Holtz paper stacks, which I then edged with a bit of gold rub’n’buff (which doesn’t show on the photo) and added some ribbon. The sentiments were cut on the Cricut.

I hand-painted some stems on the next card and then glued on some yellow hibiscus flowers from my stash, that I made from one of Penny Duncan’s cut files. The sentiment is stamped.

Here are the pictures of a doily being used as a stencil (small trial piece on the left) – I stencilled onto some decorative paper.

I used this as a background for the second card below; I then used the same doily to create the pink doily card above, and as a result the doily was really inky in graduating shades of blue and pink, which I really liked, so I cut it up and used some of the motifs to make these last two cards with, both of which have peel-off sentiments.  I arranged the different elements to make a suitable design, and on the right background, and with the addition of some stickles, they look quite exotic! I’m really pleased with this pair! Doilies definitely have potential for art!

I have also made some extra backgrounds which I am going to use for my card stash. Here are some nice dark, grungey backgrounds I created by embossing some black Core’dinations card with the Cuttlebug and sanding down to reveal the orange core, and then adding some heat embossing in a mixture of gold and copper, and also some black distress embossing powder. They are really gritty!

I had to trim off the edges of the various pieces of card that I used to make the birthday cards so they’d fit in the embossing folders, and I thought they looked really pretty, so stuck them down onto a piece of plain white card – not sure what I shall do with this yet but it’s got potential!

Here are some more backgrounds using the Core’dinations card again – the first ones are using the Cuttlebug script folder – I love this one with the “Whitewash” Core’dinations!

The second ones are using card from the Core’dinations “Gemstones” range – this has a nice pearlised sheen, but not much difference of colour underneath so there isn’t much point in sanding them.

Finally, here are what I call my “smooshed backgrounds” – I used some small pieces of card to smoosh up my distress inks from my craft mat after I’d spritzed it with water. The card isn’t very good quality and has gone a bit spotty, but I thought these were quite pretty, and could be used either as backgrounds or cut into flower shapes and made up. (Also, they are free!!!)

Completely off the subject, look what I managed to photograph the other day – the beastly little monkey!! Hope he doesn’t get too much of a taste for our bird food because it’s the BIRDS I want to feed, NOT SQUIRRELS!!! The window looks pretty mucky but that’s because it was wet – it had recently stopped raining (well that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!!).