AAA Card Challenge 292: Sketch Challenge

Hi everyone and it's time for another challenge with AAA Card Challenges and this fortnight we have a sketch to play along with. I do love the twists some of the Design Team have used for the "any shape".

I've gone with the twist of any colour and have used a graduation/ink blend of  darkest blue to lightest blue to lightest green to darkest green using a Wavy Stripes stencil (TE) and some post-it notes for masking.

Supply List:
Stamps: Friendly Silhouettes (GKD)

Green Inks (all PFS): Fresh Pear, Key Lime, Olive (lightest > darkest)

Blue Inks (all PFS):Slumber, Storm, Stargazer (lightest > darkest)

Other: Wavy Stripes stencil (TE), Versafine Clair Nocturne ink, post it notes, Hammermill card stock, blending brushes (TE)

I'm loving my rainbow of blues and greens which make a great scene for the silhouette trees, I hope you can find some time to play along with us. Thanks for popping in and definitely check out what other creative ways the AAA Cards Design Team came up to inspire you as well, there are some great fun ideas to get your creative juices flowing

✿Karen✿

AAA Card Challenge 290: and it's follow Sue's Lead

Hello everyone we have another fun challenge at AAA Card Challenges to follow one of the Design Team's lead and this week we have the very talented Sue Symens as our lead and she's created a very classy and elegant CAS card as our inspiration.

Sue makes fabulous cards with die cut words which are very CAS, but she's really stepped it up for the challenge with the gold embossed areas on the black.

I have been inspired to use gold and black behind my cut out sentiment. I have added the gold using some gold striped vellum I have as a scrap in my stash. If I had more of it I would have made my mats 1/8" increments rather than the 1/4" I chose to do so I could have squeezed in a bit more of my bear holding the gold glitter heart.

Supply List:
Stamps: All Inside (EBE)

Ink: Warm Buff (PFS)

Dies: Wild About You (SSS)

Well I hope you can play along and put your "twist" on Sue's fab card.

Thanks for popping by.

✿Karen✿

AAA Card Challenge 289 : and it's OUR birthday party

Last year AAA Card Challenges celebrated our 10th birthday, gosh and we're another year older and turning eleven. So we'd love if you could join in with us and share clean and simple birthday cards.

I decided I would use a NBUS stamp set so I could justify buying it in the first place and Fabulous Flamingoes (MFT) fitted the bill; it would be fun to play with and it's been sitting uninked for a year in my stash. I've been inspired by Carly Tee Miner who inspired me to buy the set if I recall rightly to create a mono-chromatic CAS card, my card does have a tad of yellow too but overall it's pink, pink and more pink with a wee splash of summery yellow.

To create the card I masked off an area on my card with post it notes top and bottom, then ink blended some Kitsch Flamingo distress oxide ink (RNG). Removing the top post it note I stamped  the tropical island with Versafine Clair's Glamorous ink.

The flamingo and hibiscus flower were Copic coloured up and die cut out and popped up with 1mm stamping foam. A wee white Gelli roll dot to the cheek and a teeny bit of Prisma glitter (LF) to the flower centre.

Our sister blog AAA Birthday Cards is also celebrating it's 6th birthday so I will play along with them too. 

Well I hope you can join in with one or both of the AAA challenges celebrating another year of bringing you card challenges. Thanks for popping in.

✿Karen✿

AAA Card Challenge 289 : Colour Challenge time

And have we got some really fun and cool colours to play with. I can tell it's Spring in the Northern Hemisphere when I see a challenge like this.

My original thought was a cute bunny holding a bunch of flowers as we're allowed neutrals as well as the colours but then spotted my Bold Blooms (GKD) and I thought it was perfect as not too big and yes its bold! So stamped the image of the corner of my panel and Copic coloured it in.

My Copic colours used:

Well I hope you can join in with us we'd love to see your cards filling our gallery. Please do check out all the inspiration from the AAA Cards Design Team.

Thanks for popping in.

✿Karen✿

AAA Card Challenge 288: Sketch Challenge and my first Christmas card for 2025

It's time for another fun challenge with AAA Card Challenges and we have an easy sketch to play along with. As we're half way through April I thought let's make a Christmas card so I can say I have started! I'm not sure about you but I never ever seem to have enough every year.

This is the sketch to play along with:

I've used as my shape a die cut circle with the same sized circle die-cut with a snow die on top. I've kept the background circle colour very light to let my Copic coloured image "shine" and pop out. I've also added some stickles and glossy accents to parts of the image as well.

Copics used (darkest > lightest):
Wee reindeer: E37/33/53/51 R20 R35/32 Y35/21
Car: BG01/000/0000 N6/4/2 Y35
Tree: YG17/25/21 Y35 R35/32

Supply List:
Stamps: Loads of Joy (MFT), Itty Bitty Holiday (MFT)

Ink: Memento Tuxedo Black, Versafine Clair Nocturne

Paper: Neenah Solar White, Pool Party (SU!)

Dies: Snowfall - Vertical (MFT), Sweet Stacks: Circles (HB), Itty Bitty Strips (MFT)

Other: Copics, white Gelli roll pen, Diamond stickles (RNG), Glossy accents (RNG), 1mm foam square (SP)

Challenges: AAA#288


✿Karen✿

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✿

More thank you cards

I'm really pleased that one of the classes I participated in the weekend the stencil and dies we received were perfect for making more thank you cards. This was probably my favourite class from the event though there is another one that is probably cuter but it's extremely time consuming so Taylored Expressions for the win. Looking at the class albums after the event this class album has twice the number of cards so it was a real winner with the other 3100 people taking part with me worldwide.

Our stencil set we received actually creates 4 card fronts. There are 5 stencils in the set which provides depth and detail and it was all so easy to line up as your stencil is the same size as the card stock and there are little alignment squares on the side which you colour in but trim off at the end.

I didn't take a picture of my stenciling before cutting into 4 card fronts but have "borrowed" one from the album, stenciled by Kristin G beautifully.

If this wasn't enough wow, this is truly where the magic begins and we do all sorts of magical things to the background.

For the card below I have stamped a script stamp on the panel with a white pigment ink . The script really shows up on the inked wings and we have splattered a bit of "blue gold" Gansai Tambi paint as well. Then using 2 rectangle dies cut out a middle panel and then popped up the middle panel with foam tape.

The card below was really fun as we sprayed our backgrounds lightly with Pixie spray and then used a piece of gold foil to stick tiny flecks of gold all over the background. It is really obvious in the 2nd photo below and looks amazing in real life.

Next card is so effective, again the script stamp is stamped on a piece of Kraft card and then we used the die we received with our stencil set and cut out the flower bunch and the wee butterfly from the stenciled panel. Few sparkly gold glitter gems and popped up on foam and all done.

Last card for the moment (until I start playing with different colour combos); we also received with the dies for the set two that cut out the big humming birds. After die cutting them out we then embossed our background panel and added a bit more blue gold paint. The panel was stuck down to the card base and then off set the birds so the dark background could provide a shadow behind the images. The birds are popped up on dimensional foam as well.

This was such an amazing class and stencil set, I would definitely mark it on my wish list when released fully by Taylored Expressions: Create in Quads: Flit & Flutter Layering stencils and dies. And all together:

Taylor was very generous she also provided us with the card stock to make our A2 top folding cards plus four pale blue envelopes, as well as well as a pile of other goodies plus an amazing storage folder which we surely did need as this is such a BIG stencil!

Items I used that were not part of the official class kit as we had to provide "our own": Positive Script Bold Print stamp (HA) and Organic Linen 3D embossing folder (ALT). The glitter drops are all Pinkfresh Studios as are the various sentiments and thanks die apart from the thanks die on the 2 hummingbirds cards is a really old many thanks die (EBE) and I chopped off the many and offset it on some Bermuda Bay (SU!). The sentiment strips Taylor provided to use for the class were lovely but I was on a roll making more thank you cards!

Thanks for popping in.

✿Karen✿

Quick thank you cards

Don't you just love it when you partner says can I grab a dozen thank you cards and you only have 3 in your stash. I managed to whip up half a dozen yesterday and if I realised I could do two as quick as one yesterday I would have created 2 more.

I grabbed out the Build-A-Garden: Pristine Peonies (ALT) and stenciled in different colour palates. This is an interesting set as it contains 2 big bloom stamps, each bloom has 3 stencils. I chose to use the stamp that was a double flower but both  flower stamps are stunning.

Each stencil has elements for petals and leaves on it. I found it really easy to use apart from stencil 3 for one of the leaf clusters but this maybe due to the fact I had decided I was stamping off the panel and I may have got a bit confused with what was the place I was looking for. This was only one element I couldn't really work out and in all honesty I don't think it really matters.

All the images have been stamped and blended with Pinkfresh Studio inks. The base colour is Rocky Slope and I thought about restamping with my Versafine Nocturne ink once I blended but decided I actually liked it with the grey outline and it made the black thank you pop more. 

In case you didn't know Versafine ink is very slow drying and I would have had to wait to blend with the stencils BUT by stamping in a grey or brown ink you can work out where to place your stencil, blend and then just put the panel back in the Misti or your stamp positioning tool and restamp with black afterwards.

The first card was done with Grey inks: Misty Coast, Rocky Slope and Metropolis. Green inks Fresh Pear and Grassy Knoll. Yellow inks: Sweet Mustard and Marigold. I used my Gina K Master layouts to do the wee black mat but didn't really line it up perfectly so decided that was an extra step that we weren't doing again!

Second card Peachy inks: Sunkissed, Mimosa, Mango Sorbet. Yellow inks as above. Green inks also added Olive to the blend as well.

Pink inks: Ballet Slipper, Sparkling Rose, Bubble Gum. Yellow and green inks same.

Aqua inks: Waterfall, Turquoise, Paradise. Yellow inks: Sunshine and Marigold: Green inks: Mint, Meadow and Emerald City.

It was probably a couple of hours to create them all but I feel I'm on my way to create him a dozen by the end of this coming week easily!

I have a real crafty weekend coming up with my friend Sarah so should have something to blog and share real soon. Hope yours is as equally as fun!

✿Karen✿

AAA Card Challenge 286: and it's time to follow Kristin's lead!

Hi everyone and it's time for another challenge at AAA Cards Challenges and our latest challenge is to be inspired by our lead Kristin Sluhan's card below.

I thought that looks pretty easy and have ink blended up a panel with Sweet Mustard and Salvaged Patina distress inks. I decided there wasn't enough green created at the overlap of the two colours and bought my Sweet Mustard down further. When I see how my die cut looks that might have been the wrong decision as I don't have enough blue showing on my die cut or I needed to have placed the die further down.

I had 3 ideas for my die-cut : either a flower OR 3 small butterflies OR a leaf with whirls; I went with the die Whirl Leaves (SSS).

 I'm still really happy how my card turned out and I splashed a bit of re-inker to make my splats with a wee paint brush. The lovely sentiment is from Tulips Treasure (ASD), I just loved its font. I think this is a lovely card and could even be used as a sympathy card if required.

Thanks Kristin for the inspiration! I certainly made a card I wouldn't normally create but love it. What inspires you in Kristin's card. It's really rather cool seeing what everyone takes from the same card and the design team at AAA Cards has some great ideas to inspire you too, so do check them all out! I'm also going to play along with Just Add Ink who have a very cool inspirational photo with lots of tropical leaves. I have to admit their photo has got me dreaming about a tropical holiday.

Thanks for popping in.

EDITED 20/3/25: My card was chosen as an honourable mention at Just Add Ink

✿Karen✿