Seeing red!

My heart sank a little when I saw the theme for this week's Less is More Challenge. The word RED leapt out at me! Now, I use red in my cards even less than pink. I much prefer cool colours - blues, purples and greens. I might stretch to yellows if I'm feeling a bit chilly. Hey ho, I thought, guess it's all part of the challenge. Then the red mist cleared a bit, and I saw "Touch of". Phew! The theme is a Touch of Red, which I decided meant that I could get away with as little red as possible. So I did!

If you look closely (might have to click to see a bigger pic), you can just see a dot of red in the flower centres! I hope that's enough to qualify! The stamp is one of the first I ever bought. It was made by Stampendous, in 1992! That's nearly 20 years ago. Have I really been stamping that long? I used it a lot when I first bought it, but it's been languishing in a drawer for years, and so I decided to bring it out of retirement. The sentiment is by Paula Pascual.

When I'd finished the card, I decided I really liked it, in spite of the red. Or, just maybe, because of it. Hmmm...

Metal embellishments

Some years ago I bought some art metal. At the time it was being used mainly for embossing, by stamping or tracing on to it and then marking out the image with various tools & cutting it out with scissors. I wasn't impressed with the results, & the remainder of the pack has been languishing in a cupboard ever since. Until now!

Now there is the Cuttlebug! I found I could cut the metal with dies, eg. Nestabilities or Cuttlebug, and emboss it with the Cuttlebug embossing folders. And then colour it beautifully with alcohol inks or Promarkers. Voila!



The butterfly was cut with a Cuttlebug die, embossed with a Cuttlebug folder, and then coloured with alcohol inks. The patterned paper is My Mind's Eye, and the plain paper I have had for so long I can't remember where I got it!


The metal used for the swirl background on the lady card was gold coloured. I embossed it with the Cuttlebug D'vine swirls folder and then carefully inked over it with Brilliance Graphite Black ink, which I then heat set. So long as you do not press on too hard with the inkpad, the recessed swirls do not take the ink. The lady and wording stamps are from Hero Arts. I've had them for years, but they just seemed to fit with the swirl panel. The flourish is by Stampington.

So I have managed to use up some more old stash!

On the second butterfly card, I did even better. The butterfly is cut from a foil yoghurt pot lid, so it was free! The foil has a lovely texture and takes the alcohol inks very well. The inside foil cover found on some brands of margarine also works well. The new Cuttlebug Victoria folder provided a background for this card. The agapanthus stamp is by Stampendous, and the Birthday circles on both butterfly cards are from Craftwork Cards. The base card is pearlescent and it was quite difficult to photograph, but if you click on it to get the larger version, I think the detail will show up better.

More non-card stuff

My mission for the summer holidays is to start getting some of my stash used - the impulse buys that I liked the look of when I bought them without any clear idea of what I would do with them, and which have since been languishing in the cupboard. One such item was a little Maya Road chipboard album. It consisted of six identical chipboard shapes, and rather than make just one album with them, I used two of the shapes to make the covers, and then cut some pages with my Nestabilities Scalloped Squares (which luckily happened to be just the right size!).



I sponged the covers with pigment ink and then stamped them with a Stamping-ton flourish and Stampendous butterflies, completing the front with a Spellbinders Ribbon Tag and a couple of flourishes diecut from Grungepaper. I punched some butterflies and a flower from the grungepaper to make charms to add to the ribbons and fibres with which I decorated the bookring holding everything together.

The photos inside are of my grandparents and great grandparents.

Quilts

A while ago I bought some of the Inkadinkadoo Inchies stamps, but hadn't got round to doing much with them. Small stamps are often difficult to know how to make the most of. Since these are all uniform in size and shape, the obvious thing seemed to be to make a "patchwork quilt" style card.

It was very simple to do. For the pink card, I coloured three pieces of paper by sponging with different pigment inks & stamped three pictures on to each one. Next I cut out the squares and framed them with scalloped squares cut with the Cuttlebug from patterned papers. I matted them on to co-ordinating colours and stuck them on to a base card, finally adding a Prima flower and the sticky-pad-mounted word.



To make the yellow one a bit different, I stamped the base card with stamps from the Stampendous Butterfly Beauties set, along with a word from one of the Inchie sets. This time I stamped the pictures straight on to patterned paper and left out the scalloped frames, before matting as with the pink card.



My next challenge is to think of a way to use the stamps that isn't so obvious!