Vintage flowers and black lace

One of the ladies in my office is going to be 30 tomorrow so I thought I'd better pull my finger out and make a card to suit :-) Normally I tend to make really cute and girly cards in pastel colours for female friends; but last night for some reason I was feeling in a different kind of mood. I have also been getting in late from work so the light isn't so good for stamping and colouring; and last but not least I had a couple of new dies that I hadn't played with yet ... so here is what I did.

This is a bit different for me in several respects. It's not my usual kind of colour scheme at all, but I was aiming to be a bit more sophisticated with this colour palette ... I guess whether or not I succeeded is for you to judge lol! The card also has no stamping, and was my first attempt at making hand made paper roses with the Marianne D die I recently won in a challenge. I didn't quite get the hang of it at first and had a couple of cast offs, but I was reasonably happy with these ones for my first attempt. I was actually surprised by how small the roses turned out ... I don't know why, but for some reason I thought they would be quite a bit bigger! I'm also ashamed to say that I have had the Magnolia flower die for quite a few weeks and just not had time to play with it until now! 

Media: distressing done with TH "Antique Paper" and "Vintage Photo" distress inks;

Paper: Basic Grey "Little Black Dress";

Supplies: pearls from The Hobby House; ribbon and lace from my stash;

Tools: Labels One nestabilities; Magnolia Doohickey "doily flowers" die; Marianne D "English Rose" die set (roses and leaves); Cuttlebug "Hippie Chick" alphabet die set for numbers.

Challenges:

Simon Says Stamp & Show - Layered 

(paper, lace, ribbon, flowers and roses)

Cupcake #200 - Number Cruncher

Oldie But A  Goodie - Flower Power 

(I have had the number dies for years)

Party Time Tuesdays #76 - Let's Get Punchy!

Paper Pretties Wednesday #214 - Try A New Technique

Dutch Dare #173 - Tic-Tac-Toe
(flowers / pearls / distressing)
Crafty Creations #178 - Free For All

Penny's Paper Crafty - Anything Goes

I've recently been selling some of my crafty cast-off's through my local craft shop ... and today I collected £33 from £44-worth of sales (they take a 25% cut which is fair enough).  This was a great surprise as I didn't think there were that many of my goods left on their second hand table! Of course I had to give some of it back straight away as they had received a new delivery of Memory Box dies :-) ... so now I have a little something to try out on a Christmas project - watch this space!

Laughter is the Music of the Soul

I was really inspired by this week's challenge over at Less Is More, which is to CASE their blog header.

So many elements to choose from gave me so many ideas, but so far out of my comfort zone!! What I really liked about this challenge was that initially I thought I couldn't manage it, as I have no musical stamps and very little in the way of swirly stamps ... but I was sure I DID have a tiny scrap of Magnolia vintage-style sheet music paper somewhere .... I hunted it down and then all the rest of my ideas flowed from that.

The elements I consciously CASED were:

1. sentiment as main focus
2. colour scheme
3. use of Baroque script font for main sentiment (computer generated), and focus on a word with a capital "M" to show off the scrolls
4. musical notes to the top left corner
5. small cream coloured element to the bottom right corner.
6. Very teeny bit of bling to balance the card.

Stamps: Crafty individuals swirl;

Paper: Magnolia;

Supplies: teeny pearls from The Hobby House, teeny gems from my stash;

Tools: Cuttlebug Cut 'n' emboss butterfly.

Challenges:

Less Is More #74 - Lucky Dip

Creative Card Crew #14 - Swirls & Pearls

Papertake Weekly - Anything Goes

That's all for today - thanks for looking.