Bingo Time with the Southern Girls

We've got a really fun challenge this week at Southern Girls Blog. Yes, a bingo board so the challenge is to use a line on the board or you can be real greedy & use all the board but the main thing is to have fun, our sponsor for this week's challenge is Lacy Sunshine & I absolutely love the image I chose to work with & only hope I have done it justice. I will not tell you how long this took me to colour but it was a lot of fun. I used the line : dies, image, bling.

I kind of cheated a tad as I loved the colouring & the image so much I wanted it to shine, so I used a die (from Essentials by Ellen) & some gold glitter paper; so my bling & die is a combined element. I've used my Copics to colour up and added a bit of detail with my pencils & also re-outlined some of the finer deatil with a 0.1 Copic black multiliner.

My image is called Poppy Woodland Enchanted Kingdom Fairy House & is part of the enchanted kingdom digital stamp range by Lacy Sunshine stamps. So I hope you can join us in playing bingo & you could be the lucky winner of a Lacy Sunshine stamp too.

✿ Karen ✿

I am in love with PRILLS!!

I had the opportunity recently to attend a workshop at Krafters Cart where we created this beautiful card. I must admit when Meetu advertised the class I thought that's not my normal style but I'm thrilled I did decide to book in as I loved it ALL!

A lot of the elements were prepared for us but I'll try & recall what we did. We sponged each flower & leaf with a co-ordinating Memento ink. Then the fun started we dry embossed the back of each flower petal with a Tonic embossing stylus tool. I mainly used the one with the biggest ball even on the smaller flowers as it was fastest. The big ball was amazing it really made each petal bend beautifully & the wee mat that comes with the set is deep & spongy so it also really helped a lot. At first I was using an old mouse pad I had taken & I borrowed the 2nd biggest tool of someone as my old ones with tiny balls weren't giving the depth that others were getting. Using my old mouse pad with a Tonic big ball stylus it was working but slow going & not really that deep a pop, so I would personally recommend buying the whole set & getting the Tonic pad as well. The whole set is $35 from Krafters Cart. I do love that about Tonic how reasonable all their products are.

We even dry embossed the leaves a wee bit but just dry embossing down the main central vein.

The flowers in this set are Heartfelt Creations Dogwood Flowers and whats also very cool as I discovered is that the Heartfelt Creation flowers actually stamp out clusters of individual flowers so even though it looks like a lot of flowers it's actually 3 stamps for the flowers and 2 for the leaves so the stamping & die-cutting is not really that onerous. Looking at the cluster above I'm guessing the leaves have been stamped twice to give us the number we were working with.

The flowers were glued down on the mats (Spellbinders) then we added a pool of Art Glitter glue (another new product for me) & added some mini Prills. The colour I used was Lettuce Entertain You! The Art Glitter glue dries clear & it was fabulous to work with.

As my title says I am in love with these, I'm not sure if a stick-on pearl will ever cut the mustard again. I think this little jar which cost me $8 will last me a very long time as a little goes a long way.

Well I discovered lots of great new products to play with & I'm sure some lucky person that receives this card will be pretty blown away about how fabulous it is. Thanks Meetu I had a ball & I'm looking forward to the next crafting day.

✿ Karen ✿

Southern Girls Challenge - Sticky Business

This week we want to see things stuck on your project, i.e. things like washi tape, sequins & enamel dots. I decided to do the latter as I often stick sequins on cards & I personally have never really liked sticking washi tape on cards. This also meant I could use some of those enamel dots sitting in my craft drawers feeling unloved.

 I knew I had the perfect stamp set or in this case purr-fect stamp set I had bought a while ago from  Krafters Cart who once again are sponsoring this week's challenge with ppinky dolls. The stamp set is called Purr-fect friends (My Favorite Things).

I coloured the very cool cat image up with my Copics which made the whole thing really easy. I matched the letters to hopefully match my colouring.

Recipe
Stamp set: Purr-fect friend (MFT)
Ink: Memento Black, Versamark
Card stock: XpressIt blending card stock, white, black, Melon Mambo, Tangerine Tango, Bermuda Bay, Daffodil Delight
Copics used: BG10, BG13, BG15, RV25, Y06, YG06, YG25, YR15
Dies: Double stitched rectangle (SSS), Purr-fect friends (MFT), Big Hugs (MFT)
Other: Brights enamel dots (SU! to match the cardstock), dimensionals, white embossing powder

Well I hope you can join us with getting "sticky" and once again thank you to our 2 fabulous sponsors who are offering you the chance to win some free goodies.

Do check out the Southern Girls Challenge site to see what the rest of the fab design team came up with this week.

The fab Simon Says Stamp Wednesday challenge site has a cool & also easy theme this week to emboss it so I'll enter my card there as well as I've used white EP to make my sentiment pop, though I seriously need to buy some more as my pots are all looking cream!

Wow there's a few sites with crazy colours this week so I'll enter my card with them too
Colour Crazy Challenge - anything goes
Glitter & Sparkle blog - use bright colours - purrfect even if I say myself - incoming pyschaedelic kitty kat coming!

Good luck everyone if you have a go too.
✿ Karen ✿

Mermazing mermaids!!

Not sure what is happening but the crafting world seems to be mermaid crazy at the moment. I ordered from My Favorite Things & Hero Arts their mermaid stamps etc from the May releases & it took nearly 3 weeks to get my package down under & then we headed across the seas ourselves for a wee winter break in Australia so it was nice to have a play today with my goodies.

I ended up combining stuff from both releases. I also learnt that white Signo gel pens don't dry that fast! I had originally drawn scales on my mermaid's tail with my white gel pen but 10 mins later when I went to add some clear Wink of Stella I washed out my scales & made an opaque wash. I actually liked how it all looked, I actually felt it matched the beautiful glimmer paper better as I had toned down the colours a wee bit. But I went over the black lines on the tail with a black sharpie pen as they didn't look good with a white wash!

The mermaid, fish & saying are BB Mermazing from My Favorite Things (MFT). The die cut frame is Hero Art's (HA) Reef Border which was an add-on for their May 2017 My Monthly Hero, the beautiful glimmer paper is from the kit & is just sensational in real life, it was such a shame to only get a 6x6" piece in the monthly kit as it doesn't go very far!! To the best of my knowledge we can't buy it from Hero Arts at this stage.

I've used Copics to colour up the wee mermaid.
Mermaid tail: BG10/13/15, B00/02/05
Pink Hair/Top: RV21/23/25
Green Hair: YG21/25/17
Skin: E50/00 R30
Fish: YR21/15 and YR20/02

I've tried doing the hair dip-dyed which is a technique from my Kit & Clowder hair class & it's also a technique we're using in this month's colouring class, which believe it or not were more mermaids, this time a digi stamp from Conie Fong.

Well expect to see more mermaids from MFT & HA & also my monthly colouring class when it's finished until then have a "flipping" good time crafting!

My favourite shopping place Simon Says Stamp & challenge site has Anything Goes for their Wednesday challenge so I'll enter my wee mermaid card in the challenge as it truly was anything goes!

✿ Karen ✿

Just adorable

Just sharing a card I shared/taught to some gal pals last weekend as I was kind of shocked to find out so many of them have bought MISTIs & didn't know how to use them.  I think it's a really invaluable tool & my number one must have in my craft room.

Well the get together with 2 others became 5 others in the end so I had to think of something we could do simply & easily so I turned to my Adorable Elephant set from My Favorite Things & my trusty ZIG real colour brush markers which make colouring wee images like this so easy.

We also got to play with Cracked Pistachio & Broken China distress oxide ink for the background using MFTs new cloud stencil. Its all pretty self explanatory but so cute. We used aquapainters or clear Wink of Stella for our colouring or another brush marker. The sponged background & the wee images were all coloured on Strathmore Bristol Smooth paper.

Recipe:
Stamp set: Adorable Elephants (My Favorite Things)
Ink: Memento Blcak, Cracked Pistaschio DO, Broken China DO, Aig real color brush markers
Paper: Whisper White thick (base card), Bristol Smooth (Strathmore)
Dies: Adorable elephants (MFT), Stitched rectangle (SSS)
Other: Cloud stencil (MFT), aquapainter, clear Wink of Stella, MISTI, dimensionals

I see Simon Says Stamp's Monday challenge is "Little critters" so I'll enter my wee elephant card in the challenge too.

Thanks for popping by.
✿ Karen ✿