Gather Love

EE0193 Starburst Daisies large, EE0198 Gather Love, DD023 Hitching a Ride & CLR037
and Fall leaves clear set CLR037

Morning Peeps, the Prickly Pear piece I am sharing this week uses a number of stamps from the new Spring releases which I stamped onto a Dylusions background, did a bit of bleaching some stenciling with grunge paste to add a bit of added texture and a touch of colour to the flowers.

And my Nicecrane DT shares are also new designs, these are called Children and Dogs which I think are so sweet, you will find them here. They will work perfectly for my AHT charity cards where they sell them as quickly as I make them, but it's such a great cause.

Blue is not a colour I use very often but there are shades of blue in most of the five images in this set so I teamed them up with Graphic 45 DP..........just for a change I hear you say.

And just the one more using the new Nicecrane At the Sea designs here, such pretty Vintage images.

Have a good Monday.

A touch Oriental

I was thrilled when Susan chose here theme of Oriental at Allsorts as I have so many stamps from when it was really popular a few years back and have been secretly hoping it will make a comeback. This weeks sponsors are FlonzCraft and QKR Stampede.

I have no idea of the make of stamp here, it's a really old wood mounted one which hubby bought me many years ago and has no identity on it at all. I used my Wink of Stella pens to colour the image and Pan Pasels in the background, decoupaged her fan, used some of the new Graphic 45 Botanical Tea DP's and some cherry blossoms.

Happy weekend all.

Dylusions and grunge

Using Spring Branch, Grunge 2 and Fancy Floral onto a background of Dylusions

I thought I had better share a few of the samples I recently made for Stamp Addicts in readiness for the next TV show, all are available in the Whats New section of the website here.

My apologies for the lack of visits but I am still very much in the grips of the NHS with my operation just around the corner and although I am crafting to try and maintain a degree of sanity finding socialising in blogland rather difficult.

Using Grunge 2 and Roman Clock onto a background of Dylusions

Hope you all have a good Thursday and as always my appreciation for your visits and kind words.

Vintage Parisian and a bit of floral

This is scheduled for Monday morning so fingers crossed that's when it pops up, never 100% certain Blogger will oblige.

My weekly Prickly Pear DT share is rather pink and feminine drawing my inspiration from the pretty vellum that arrived with my last DT pack. The vase and flowers are from the Vases Clear Stamp Set which includes several vases and floral options. The sentiment is the first line of the Gather Love sentiment, I wanted a narrow verse so masked the stamp before inking to use just one line and some roses and Cheery Lynn leaves to embellish.

And here are our lucky Blog Hop winners.................................

KT Fit Kitty

Sharla's Web

Jean BullockApril 

 Well done to you all pop over here to find out how to claim your prizes...............

Now for my Nicecrane DT pieces using some of Ignacios new Paris Exposition designs, it's a real bumper pack offering loads of inspiration and I have done one suitable for a man and one for a lady just to show how versatile they are. Being French I have a feeling my DIL will love these designs. 

Have a good Monday and as always my appreciation for your visit.

Birds and feathers, Nicecrane and Penny Black

It's time for a new challenge at Allsorts and this week Mervi would like to see Birds and Feathers, a perfect one for Spring and Easter cards. We welcome two new sponsors this week Marianne Designs and Buttons for Brains.

For the top creation I used a Tonic box card frame, spritzed with Dylusions and Glimmer Mist and then added texture with some stenciling and Grunge Paste, a Nicecrane image here which I printed out twice and decoupaged the two birds, a butterfly metal embellishment which I coated and embossed with copper and blue powder and a sentiment which I cut down into three pieces.

Also here are my Penny Black and More mid month shares which should have appeared yesterday but for some reason Blogger had other ideas, sorry teamies. The above card using a new Penny Black die called Bashful along with the lovely Helen Keller quote. And the one below, another beautiful Penny Black inspirational quote, hey do these so well, Graphic 45 DP's, roses and butterflies cut out from the reverse of the DP.

And just one more for Allsorts using another Nicecrane image and Marianne large oval die.

Wishing you all a Happy and Peaceful Easter.

A Poppy on Day Three of our Blog Hop

Yet another scheduled post, but with a little added note today to say thank you for all your kind words of support and encouragement, I don't feel able to face things full on yet, hence the lack of visits to you all but really appreciate your kindness and understanding.

So it's day three of our Blog Hop to celebrate the Prickley Pear Spring/Summer 2014 collection!  You will find everything here under new releases.

I was delighted to find there was a Poppy in the new releases, in fact two as it comes in two sizes so needless to say I have one or two made with this which I will be sharing in the coming weeks. I stamped the larger of the two GG0194 Poppy Bud onto the largest Flourish Oval die and my favorite Versafine Frost and Glimmer Mist technique to create lots of lovely dimension to the flower head........if you want to give this a go you will find my tutorial on Monday's post here or via the tutorial tab at the top. 

We are celebrating with a 3 day blog hop event!  Join us each day as our new Design Team showcases the new product!  As always, leave comments on each and every blog post along the way since there will be one winner selected for each day's comments!  We will select our winners on April 20 and they will be announced on April 21 in our Monday inspiration post!

If you have arrived from Rene then you are right on track, if not, you can find the beginning of the hop HERE and next you should be Hopping over to Michelle.

Thank you so much for popping in and good luck with the prize draws.

Starburst Daisies on day one of our Blog Hop

Continuing my scheduled posts today sees the day when we can reveal the Prickley Pear Spring/Summer 2014 collection!  You will find everything here under new releases. We are celebrating with a three day Blog Hop with a fabulous prize each day so I do hope you will join in, more details further down.

Myself and the DT have been lucky girls and playing with the new releases the last few weeks and here is my very first card using Starburst Daisies FF0174 which comes in two sizes and the sentiment is DD0204. I have gone with yellow and blue which is a colour palette I always enjoy working with and used distress markers to ink the stamp, a daisy embossed panel, Cheery Lynn butterfly, a bow and little cameo embellishment. 

Please feel free to grab the logo to help us spread the word

Join us each day as our new Design Team showcases the new products, as always leave comments on each and every blog post along the way since there will be one winner selected for each day's comments.  We will select our winners on April 20 and they will be announced on April 21 in our Monday inspiration post.

If you arrived here from  Heidi you are right on track, if not you can find the route HERE and next please hop over to Angie.

Happy Hopping everyone, thanks for your visit and keep a look out for my next scheduled Hop post on Thursday, meantime good luck to you all.

Swing card tutorial

Good morning, this is being scheduled so I am hoping it pops up on Monday morning to tie in with the post over at Prickly Pear Stamps blog here.

I had seen a few of these swing concertina style cards around blogland so decided to have a go for myself and thought I would share my version with you all. Note added: Since I created this card using the Cricut and scheduled this post I found that Sizzix have a new swing card die which makes something very similar.

Basic materials – they will depend on what stamps, dies and colours you choose. I used these Prickly Pear stamps and dies: Lovebird on branch, Large Calla Lily, April Showers, Poinsettia stamp and die, Leaf dies and Fall leaves, Flourish oval nesting die

To start you will need five A4 (similar to foolscap in the States) sheets of reasonable weight cardstock, take four of them to create eight identical shapes with an aperture in the middle. I cut these on my Cricut but you could just as easily cut them with dies.

From the fifth sheet of card cut the hanging central pieces, again you will need two for each section so eight in total. Remember it will need to be a little smaller that the aperture to allow room for it to hang and move. I used my offcuts to cut some leaves and flowers to decorate one hanging section. You also need to cut and score three narrow spines from the offcuts according to the size of your main card base, these will be used to hold the four sections together.

Next stamp four of the eight main sections, or you could cover with Design Papers.

I like to add dimension to my flowers so after colouring with the same distress inks I dab with Versamark and spritz with Glimmer Mist pearl, this makes them very pliable, almost like leather and they can be moulded into shape. As the idea of the ink and mist is to make the colours bleed you need to use a medium such as distress ink or watercolour pencils, it’s won’t work with Copics and similar.

Once you have stamped and coloured all four of the inner sections lay out all the pieces ready to join up the elements.

Working on one section at a time take the bottom unstamped pieces of both the outer and inner of the card and fix a piece of flexible but strong cord down the centre top to bottom. At this point also fix the spine into place, followed by the top stamped sections, continue the same with all four pieces and you will have your completed card.

This is a real fun card to make, it’s not quick but well worth the time to create something a little bit different. Any questions please do mail me.

Spring Blossoms

Another schedule post with this weeks challenge at Allsorts where it's my turn to host the theme and I thought Spring Blossoms was an appropriate one, not that it's just because I love all things floral of course. Our prizes this week are from our regular sponsor Crafty Ribbons and Baker Ross.

For my card at the top I have used the lovely First Dance lily stamp from the Penny Black Spring releases, along with some softer stamping in the background and shading with Pan Pastels and my all time favourite sentiment stamp, Penny Black Dance.

Most of the products on my second card are from Baker Ross, they sent me a box of goodies and challenged me to see what I could come up with so I thought I would give the clay a go as I have never worked with it before and am really impressed with the rose, leaves and butterfly using molds and covering with gilding wax when dry. I  like the fresh colours of the pretty Spring paper collection which are good value at £5.99 for a pad of 26 24x34cm sheets. I will share more of my makes with their products soon.

I do hope you will join is this week and look forward to seeing your entries.

Windows 8............arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Morning Peeps, well this really is going to be a short and sweet one, yep I have the new computer and yep I am hating it. Windows 8 seems a nightmare and all it's done for me thus far (despite my very fist job being to install AVG virus protection) is to infect everything including my old machine during file transfer. So I am somewhere in the wilderness and doing this on my tablet which I find very difficult for doing posts and comments because of my dexterity issues.

Using Large Calla Lily

So really quickly my DT pieces for FlonzCraft Vintage Stamping Challengese where our theme for this month is Anything Goes and my Monday shares for Prickly Pear where we welcome our new Design Team members. It's lovely to have the new girls on board and I am so thrilled to have a fellow Brit on the team who is my lovely friend Tracy Mouse.

Afraid I can't do the candy on the tablet so will do that as soon as I have a functioning computer.

Blossoms and Blooms and a little birdie

Today sees the start of our new monthly challenges at Stamping Sensations and Penny Black and More where our themes are Dies and Punches and Blossoms and Blooms.

The new computer is up and running although I think it will take me some time to suss out Windows 8, it's so very different to Vista and so far it won't accept my e.mail account which is also my work one so need to get to grips with that today.

It's something other than a card for my Stamping Sensations piece, a chipboard flower lovingly inked with almost everything I could lay my hands on including gilding wax and crackle medium. I stamped and embossed around the edges with black and gold, I also added some text stamping but that seems to have disappeared, but that on the birdie does still show OK. Dies cut leaves and bird, the larger roses made with a punch, some ribbon and a little cameo which I also glitzed up with some gilding wax.

For my first Penny Black piece I have used several stamps from the new Happy Everything range, Penny Black 3737K Red Tango, 4383K First Dance, 4378K Hollyhocks, 40-282 Twirls and 30-229 Special Wishes. I created the four way card base on the Cricut and spellbinder for the handing elements........I have since found a Sizzix die that does it all for you so between them gives a shape option.

And I had to do an inky one using Dylusions Lemon Zest, Squeezed Orange and Cut Grass. I then used a stencil to create the distressed sun rays, applied distress markers to the Penny Black Daffodils stamping several times, used archival coffee to stamp the Penny Black Wordsworth poem and finally some random stamping with textured background stamps and two butterflies which are also Penny Black.

I do hope you will join in with our challenges this month, as always we have some awesome prizes to be won.

A much happier bunny today

Morning Peeps, well I am pleased to tell you my computer saga is finally sorted thanks to a very helpful lady at John Lewis's head office. We contacted them out of sheer desperation after several days going from pillar to post within their Customer Services department and within just a few hours yesterday it was all sorted and my new computer is sitting on my desk and at the original price, so now it's all ready for me to start the transition of transferring all my files from the external drive where I moved everything for safe keeping when the old computer went on the blink.

Now for our new Allsorts challenge where Helene has decided 'No Flowers' on our work this week. Our sponsors are The Craft Fairy and Digistamp Boutique.

So without flowers it had to be a scene and this one has a mixture JudiKins, Stamp Addicts, Hero Arts and Art Impression stamps, Pan Pastels and distress inks. When I create a scene there always seems very little to say about the making and my post content seem a bit lacking, but somehow the scenes sort of fall into place and I rarely put and advance planning into what goes where. All I can say looking at the scene now is that my lack of forward planning shows here because I have fields of Rape which are bang on season for April, with ripe ears of wheat in the fore !!

Happy weekend to you all, as soon as I get to grips with my new computer I will be round to see you all.

Not a happy camper

Morning Peeps, what a weeks it's been, last Thursday my keyboard broke and we thought it was a simple fix but it turned out my actual computer was very poorly so a new one was ordered from John Lewis but what a mess up that's been and a huge deviation from their normal efficiency. By last teatime it still hadn't been delivered so I rang them only to be told the order had been cancelled but they could offer no explanation how that happened. But that was just the tip of the iceberg as when I tried to re-arrange delivery I was told it had gone up £100 since I placed the order Monday and no way were they prepared to honour the price, to say the air was blue is an understatement.

And this morning I am off to have all my re- tests done and then back next week to get the results and see if the treatment worked or the op is necessary so what with one thing and another it's a really quick share of  a card using Dylusions, Timmy stamps, frantage and a bit of distressing.

Which all means with a very poorly computer my wings are severely clipped and blogging virtually impossible, even doing this post was touch and go so I am so sorry folks that I've not been able to visit.