AAA Card Challenge 287: 1+1

We have a new style of challenge starting at AAA Cards, this fortnight we introduce one of our new formats "1+1".  What exactly does this mean; you have to work with the centre circle plus add one. So this time around  you have to choose one other thing to work with silhouettes. I have chosen to work with pets as my plus one.

I didn't think I had a lot of silhouette stamps in my stash but you'll be surprised how many you do own when you start looking. I'm not a 100% sure I have done this exactly right but had a lot of fun making the card so that's a win in my books.

I started off with a 3" square and I masked of a small moon using masking paper and then ink blended blueprint sketch, chipped sapphire, scattered straw and dried marigold distress inks. I then sprayed water with my water mister but decided I would add some stars with an old silver ink pad I found. I then removed the mask and stamped the moon using Buttercream ink (ALT). I stamped Mooch with Versafine Nocturne ink. I've also used a T4 Copic to ground the cat a bit plus a few mossy rocks have been stamped in the grey ink. Mounted everything up on a 3-1/4" square Starry Sky card before mounting on my card base.

Supply List:

Stamps: Mooch (LAV), Forest Moss (LAV), Burst of Stars (LAV), To the Moon (ALT - sentiment), Mini Moon (ALT)
Distress ink (RNG): Blueprint Sketch, Chipped Sapphire, Scattered Straw, Dried Marigold
Versafine Clair ink: Nocturne, Morning Mist

Paper (SU!): Starry Sky, Lemon Lolly

Other: Masking paper, T4 Copic marker, blending brushes, Silver Encore ink (Tsukineko), Mister bottle (RNG), Buttercream ink (ALT)

Well this is certainly an interesting challenge and quite easy, I had so many ideas and to be honest the card design changed from my initial thoughts as I started creating it. I look forward to seeing what your 1+1 is and do check out the Design Team from AAA Cards Challenges they do have some amazing inspiration.

✿Karen✿

Beachy Greetings

This was the name of the class Jenn Shurkus taught for Lawn Fawn at my recent SCT Create and Connect box event and the main reason Sarah and I signed up for the event.

Jenn is one of my favourite teachers and Lawn Fawn never disappoints. We received in our class kit a wee stamp set (Shello, Friend), coordinating dies and coordinating colouring stencil for the stamp set, plus Stitched Seashells dies and Ocean Wave stencil plus some DSP.

We had a great time making some very cool wavy backgrounds and I look forward to playing some more with all these items. In class we just try to keep up. The two of us prefer Copic colouring but it was fun to try the colouring stencils and we both felt if mass producing cards these would be awesome so maybe this years Christmas set something to consider. 

In typical Jenn Shurkus teaching we made all the backgrounds, then coloured all the things, then glittered all the things! One of my crafty friends Anne Shackles had a great idea to also cut down on the amount of glitter we still see adhering to the wee images because of static and that was to use our embossing buddy first to remove the static, then glue with our fine glue pen, then glitter. Great tip Anne, I normally have to brush everything with a soft brush but that sheds glitter all over the place still.

 

We've done water splatters in the background below, in hindsight I needed a darker background to make them stand out more and if I'm honest I'd make my shells darker too and I then placed them down too low so no room for the sentiment, the joys of trying to keep up - you muck up but very minor and still a fun card. I'm pretty sure the background and the shells were all cut out of watercolour paper which was provided.

I love how we've torn our DSP to create the top white wave here. Both panels are ink blended on some Spiffy Speckles DSP to give is splatters without us "mucking them up"

The card below shows how the stencil also has a mask component to it which is one of the cool things Lawn Fawn background stencils always provides. Such a fun happy card!

And the peeks of Jenn's cards to show us we need to practice more! But a fun class and living down under we always appreciate anything beachy as it's a big part of our kiwi psyche.

✿Karen✿

Cheerful Chirps

This was the name of the class from Spellbinders taught by Kim Kesti at my recent SCT Crop and Create Delivered event. I just love these cards they make me happy looking at them but there was a lot of homework beforehand and it took so much longer than the time allotted for Sarah and I to keep up with. As this was the first class the two of us were doing it really got us to off behind the end ball. We started on our Saturday at 8am and went to bed at 11pm that day with all but 2 cards finished from the day. so it slowed us down a bit and we probably went to bed later than we thought but didn't in the end impact on our day's crafting. I'll also blame my local Turkish takeaways they were so busy on Saturday night we should have gone into the Thai next door, that also lost us 40 minutes of our crafting time.

Spellbinders were very generous with our kit we received 2 fabulous bird die sets: Cheerful Chirps Flying High and Pretty Birds; a Bamboo Scree 3D embossing folder, Spread Your Wings sentiments stamp set (but I was shocked at the quality of the stamp set, saying that its stamped OK if you were gentle but I had one real faulty sentiment which they said they would replace, Sarah's by the way stamped fine), yellow sequins and a pack of ColorWheel cardstock which had some new colours I hadn't seen before in it (Sicily, Mulberry, Violet, Orchid, Oceanside and Peach Bellini). The pack of  was half a sheet of each card. They also gave every attendee one of their fine mister bottles as well, so I now own 2.

First card we created I learnt the crown of the parrot goes behind the head and they actually had alignment lines so my front piece is a bit torn plus my sentiment got embossed a bit too so not off to a great start but it is really pretty and I'm sure the lucky recipient won't see the errors.

The second card we worked with the second die set and we created our own background just dry embossing a line every 1/2" on the base panel.

The last card we used a bird from each set plus used the wing from one of the sets to change the wee bird up too. We trimmed our embossed panel and added a wee strip of a close colour behind it but as you can see it's quite hard to get your cuts so precise and I would probably just use the whole panel next time, which would also give me more room to add all the elements to the card (it was very tight).

All the images have had some extra blending with Distress Oxides to add some shading in places or to highlight the embossing. This truly was a magical and fun class and would be my favourite if not so fiddly. I do love die cut cards but they can be a lot of work but they do have a lot of WOW. What was also confusing was we were given for our homework a generic die-cutting list so it meant we had to sort out for each card what die cuts were going on it amongst the 133 other die cuts in our tray (I just did a quick count but approx. 133) and Kim our tutor had her die cuts arranged by card so she was able to glue quicker than us. This is Kim's sneaks below. I also have to say buying the Sweet Petunia Precision Glue Press has been one of my best crafting purchases for 2024. I think glue everywhere would have driven me bonkers as so many die cuts but there's very little mess using this glue gun, it is precise and controllable.

Just blogging these cards makes me happy so another fabulous item to add to your wishlist for when fully released.

✿Karen✿