Happy Halloween

Hello everyone and Happy Halloween if you celebrate it. Halloween isn't an enormous celebration in England but judging by how the supermarkets have been marketing it this year, they obviously intend it to be! We always celebrated it in some way when my children were little, usually by spooking up the porch and having some creepy food, but trick or treating was not common. These days we get a stream of extremely cute little ones from the neighbourhood calling, so I like to make a few treats for them.

This year I made a Halloween Lumier on my my Silhouette Cam using a cut from the Silhouette store

click to enlarge

I love how each face is a little different

I decided not to put coloured card in the windows, and instead used white vellum and placed a battery tea light inside, which gives that lovely orange glow. I was going to enter it into the current Cameo Spotlight challenge but left it too late.

I also made some chocolate cupcakes and iced them with fondant icing so they will be easy to carry and I stamped some cake toppers to go on them.

These will go with the treat boxes I made from one of the Papertrey Ink Favor it dies,  to make hanging favours to put on a little tree that I usually use at Easter, but  thought looked ghostly enough for Halloween with the help of a few skeletons.

 And now I need only wait for it to go dark and for the doorbell to start ringing!

Thanks for stopping by

Hugs
Carol x

PTI Christmas card

Hello everyone and a very warm welcome to Moz, borgi28 and Carol who are new followers this week. I hope you find something you like amongst my ramblings.

I've signed up for the Online Holiday Card Workshop and on Day 1 we were asked to think about small sized cards. I made a sweet little 4X4 card using the lovely Bells and Boughs stamp set from Papertrey Ink. I  used R24, R29 and R59 Copic markers to shade the bells and added a simple sentiment to the panel before sewing it onto some pretty linen embossed spotty background paper from Andrea Jayne. I added a little glitter to the bells but is doesn't show up very well in the photo.

click to enlarge

I raised the whole panel on some foam dots to give a little dimension but refrained from adding bows and gems etc so that it would be cheap to post. These would be easy to mass produce.

Thanks for stopping by.

Hugs
Carol x

Papertrey Ink Christmas Card

Hi everyone. I'm back with a second card I made for the Blog Hop. This time I chose these colours

and came up with this card

Although these colours are much more in my comfort zone, I think I prefer my first card. Back to the hop

Hugs

Carol x

PTI and Silhouette Cameo Christmas card

Hello everyone and welcome to another post. I'd like to thank Jackie over at the Cameo Spotlight  for giving me a very happy day after choosing my birdcage card as winner of the last challenge. I am looking forward to choosing a lovely stamp set from Avery Elle very soon. That challenge was to use certain colours and by coincidence the Papertrey Bloghop challenge is also to use specific non traditional colours for a Christmas card. I chose these colours

I chose these colours and came up with this card, which is a case of this card that I made in July.

I have to admit that I struggled to achieve all the colours. I did not have soft stone cardstock (or anything similar) so I used my soft stone ink to colour some white card for the tabs which I cut from one of the fillable frames dies

This worked quite well but when I came downstairs the following day, the ink had run so I had obviously stamped it before the ink was fully dry so beware of this problem it you decide to try this.

I managed to remove the spoiled tabs and repeated the exercise, this time drying the card thoroughly with my heat gun before stamping the sentiments. I tried using sweet blush ink to stamp the snowflakes on the scarlet jewel card, but it just disappeared, even when I heat embossed it, so I cut some snowflakes on my Silhouette Cameo out of white cardstock and lightly inked over them with sweet blush ink. You can hardly see the pink effect in this photo, but it is there. Oh well, enough of this concentrating on the problems I had, because I actually quite like the effect of the strong colours and I'm pleased that I persevered. I'm also absolutely delighted with the quality of the fine cut on the snowflakes. I'm loving my Cam!!!

Enjoy the blog hop and thanks for stopping by.

Hugs

Carol x

Silhouette Cameo Birdcage birthday card

Hello everyone,

I hope you had a good weekend and are fortified for the week ahead. The current challenge at the Cameo Spotlight is a colour challenge and we are asked to use

Rich Red • Deep Orange • Harvest Gold

additional neutral colours allowed are: black, white and kraft.

I am still getting to know my Cam and had some fun making this aperture card using a birdcage cut from the Silhouette Store.

click to enlarge

 I cut the aperture in the base card and then used the offset feature to cut the orange frame for the hole (if you get what I mean). I cut a solid cage shape for the interior of the card and glued it on through the aperture to get proper placement. 

 I added a branch in kraft card and cut and stamped a couple of birds from a PTI die to sit on the branch. Next I cut the cage part and coloured it with harvest gold ink. This was raised on foam pads cut very thinly and the cage was placed over the birds. I inked the edges with red ink, added a bow and the sentiment finished it off.

This is how the card looks when it is closed. I would never have thought of using these colours together but I quite like how it turned out.

Thanks for stopping by.

Hugs

Carol x

Merry Christmas card

Hello everyone and a very warm welcome to Oksana, Scottish Crafter, Anne-Marie and Mary who are new followers this week. I'm always thrilled when new people come on board and I hope you will find something here to tickle your interest.

The challenge over at Less is More this week is to use silver, so I decided to make a Christmas card using my new Simple Stripes impression plate from Papertrey Ink. I kept it very simple and let the sentiment be the focal point

The word Christmas (from Stampendous) was stamped before I embossed the card with the impression plate, and the word Merry was cut from textured silver card with a Sizzlits die. I love the little Santa Hat perched on the M. I used the white dotted ribbon again and I can see it coming out a lot this year for my Christmas cards. I'm sorry its red again Mandi!

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you have a wonderful week.

Hugs

Carol x 

Papertrey Ink anniversary card

Hello everyone and a very warm welcome to Deb who is a new follower this week.

Its been a bit quiet on the craft front for me the last week or so because we have had builders in and my craft space along with my computer has been out of action. However the work was finished yesterday and after a morning spent clearing away all the dust, I've found time to make a quick anniversary card for the LIM challenge which this week is to make a card with the theme Love and Marriage.

I used my Silhouette Cameo to cut out a heart stencil and inked the shape onto a card base. I used red ink, the same as I used to stamp on the card, but it looked pink after a light inking. I was undecided about adding further layers of ink but in the end I decided that I quite liked the contrast of the pink and red together. I then cut a smaller heart and stamped rows of hearts on the lower half topped by some ribbon and a bow. I stamped a sentiment from the PTI Signature Greetings set on the top half of the heart, added a few red pearls and mounted the heart onto the card base with foam pads to add some dimension.

I'm off to have a browse round all the blogs I've been missing, but thanks so much for stopping by.

Hugs
Carol x