April Showers

It's been a while since my last post, but given the awful rain today, I thought I'd take the opportunity to bring the blog up to date with my latest cards.

I've had a few cards to make this month, the first being an anniversary card for my aunt and uncle.  Being relatively new to card making I haven't yet built up a big collection of stamps, so once again reverted to my 'Love Is' stamp by IndigoBlu which I stamped and heat embossed in gold embossing powder. I found some lovely foiled 'Happy Anniversary' in my local craft shop, which worked well with the ivory base card and gold mirri card.  I always feel my card inserts look a little plain with just a verse or sentiment, so this time I used a beautiful paper called 'Elegance' downloaded from Pink Petticoat, together with a sentiment from verses4cards.

I have to say I love the Pink Petticoat website, it's full of beautiful printable digital image stamps and papers. Best of all the papers come in both positive and negative designs, in a beautiful colour palette. I'd definitely recommend visiting their site!

My next project this month was to make a birthday card for a friend. I've just purchased my first House Mouse stamps and instantly fell in love with these cute little characters.  I chose the 'Birthday Cupcake' stamp and set to work with my Promarkers (after watching the very talented Joanna Sheen's Promarker & House Mouse tutorial on You Tube).

On the first card I used the Fairy Dots backing paper from Pink Petticoat. The same paper was also used for the insert.  The sentiment was cut using Spellbinders Moroccan Accents.
 
The second card used the same stamp, but this time used the Ice Cream Curls design in negative format for the backing paper and positive format for the card insert.

There will certainly be some more appearances from these cheeky little characters on the blog soon, as I can't wait to try out my other stamps!

Here is the final card of this month's blog. It's a card I made as a 'Thank You' for a friend at work.

For this card I used the Taj Mahal stamp from Clarity Stamp and had a little experiment with Craftynotions gilding flake, double sided adhesive and some acetate sheet.  I was pleasantly suprised by how quickly this card came together.

The Taj Mahal image was stamped onto the adhesive sheet using black archival ink and then covered with the acetate. The gilding flakes were then stuck to the reverse of the double sided adhesive. The excess flake was brushed off and then buffed with Scoochy Foam, so they appeared behind the stamped image.  The image was then layered onto some gold mirri card. The card was finished off with some Dotted Swiss Cardstock from Bazzill Paper, plain black paper and a few Kanban self adhesive pearls.

I have to say that I love the gilding flakes, they give such a luxurious finish!

Well, I think that's about all for now. I'll hopefully have some more time for crafting soon, and a little sunshine would be nice too!!