One more for the road .....

One more card this week before I head into the month end financial close process. 




The Colour Me! challenge this week included gold, Melon Mambo, Daffodil Delight, black and a neutral.  I made one card already and while cleaning up the leftovers it hit me that I could make a completely different card with all those pieces.  The first card has a black base so instead of loading down this one with a ton of color, I picked one bit from each color and let the frame and sentiment do the rest.

I'm also going to add this card to this weeks Less is More challenge since the theme is anything goes.  With the ton of white space on this card it's a must.  :)

I'm not terribly pleased with the "hello" die cut, it's too cartoonish for the geometric feel of the diamonds.  Too bad it's glued down and not taped, I'd be able to peel it off and use the gum eraser to clean up any stickies, then find a better sentiment.    Oh well.  No bling or sequins on this one but I may revisit this at a later date since I like the layout of the diamonds. 

Have a great week ...
Carole

Shameless CASEing

Two cards in two days .... that has to be a record for me.  LOL

The card below is for the Colour Me!! Challenge which this week I find very challenging.  Color combinations of more than two and a neutral throw me, so recently I have been watching the color challenges and giving it a try.  So far all have been horrible failures but today, with what I would consider the hardest colors to mesh, I finally have a card I like.  Of course I can't take any credit because this card is a shameless CASE of one of Jennifer McGuire's, seen here. 

The key to this type of challenge is the balance of color, which is where I always fail.  In this case I wanted the gold and black to dominate with the Mambo and Daffodil as complements.  The neutral completely threw me, but I finally mixed a bit of Smokey Gray embossing powder in with the white to tone down the sentiment, which at full-on white was too much.  Instead of allowing the entire die to roll across the card, I shifted it so that several of the diamonds fell off the edge.  So that the gold wouldn't completely out do the Mambo and Daffodil, I covered them in a layer of Wink of Stella.  After putting all the pieces down I hightailed it over to Kim Singdahlsen's site to look up the SU!/Copic charts, she has so graciously listed in her sidebar, in order to color in some bling to match.    So the whole thing sparkles with the exception of the black base which IRL really looks nice.   :)  The only issue that I have is that the Wink of Stella changes the color on the card stock just a bit, so the lovely bright Mambo is slightly toned down, but it does sparkle so I guess it's a trade-off. 

Thanks so much for stopping by.
Happy Sunday
Carole

Two Birds, One Card

Over at Less Is More the theme this week is "Anything Goes" in honor of  Chrissie's birthday.  First I'd like to wish Chrissie a Happy Birthday .... but since it's Saturday 9:30pm here and 3:30am Sunday in England, I think maybe it's a belated HB now.  :)

This little card is for LIM and The Card Concept which is a color challenge this week using aqua, white and lime.  I finally broke down and bought some sequins from Lawn Fawn and Verve and the color challenge was a perfect way to finally use them.  I think I went a bit overboard but ehhh ....

I used my current favorite little birds from Mama Elephant with a Memory Box HB die.  The lime is Luscious Lime from SU which retired long, long ago.  I have half a pack left and horde it like crazy; no scrap it too small.  The aqua blue is Bazzil and the birds are colored with Copics.  I put Wink of Stella on the birds and the word "birthday" so this really has a fun shimmer to it. 

Thank you for stopping by ~ Carole


A bit of fun here ....
After deciding what challenges I was going to attempt today and gathering the supplies, I walked over to my craft table and started to shove the last mess to the side so I could start on the card above.  Though I may not always post a card, at least once or twice a week I start a card with the intention of playing along.  Below is the disaster area known as my craft space.  This is my main working area where I keep everything but my cutting machine and dies.  There are easily half a dozen projects in this mess.  Either done, almost done, tossed aside because it was awful or tossed aside because I messed it up. 

The mess in the window seat is overflow from when I couldn't force another square inch of space from the craft table.

So before getting started today I took about an hour (maybe more) to clean my craft room!!!  I put everything away and it felt so nice to work in a clean space without stepping on containers and other junk that had no business being in that area. Ahhhhhhh  .....

 

Singin' in the rain........

....does anyone else have that song playing on repeat in their head?   The ladies at Less Is More challenge this week selected "singin' in the rain" as the theme.  Ever since last Saturday that song has been going round and round in my head and will not go away; even after blasting Katy Perry for hours; as soon as the cd stops this song slips back in.  LOL

This little card started out last Sunday but was set aside.  I was going for the soft colors look then I blew it with the bright green grass.  After several attempts at umbrellas I gave up and decided to just post this little guy.  Bright grass or not, it's a cute kitty and he turned out nicely. 

This is one of the many LOV stamps that has never seen ink until this week.  The sentiment is from a Technique Tuesday set called Weather, a very nice set that I have used many times.  There is small dabs of Wink of Stella on the raindrops and the little puddle to give it a bit sparkle which can be seen in the next picture.  I had to get up close with a flash to get the shot, which apparently washes out the color.  But it shows the nice sparkle that the other picture didn't capture.  :)

PS:  Meant to say I plan to round the top corners of the card as soon as I can figure out where my corner rounder is hiding. 

Thanks for stopping by.  :)
Carole

Earth Tones ... a favorite

Over at Less Is More the challenge today is Earth Tones.  Well those are some of my favorite colors as anyone that has ever been to my home can verify.  :) 

I used Baked Sugar on the sentiment; Peeled Paint, Broken China and Peacock Something on the leaves.  I tried using SU colors but the leaves are very yellow and after testing on one of the smaller leaves I realized I had to move to the Distressed inks in order to retain good color.

The leaves turned out really nice after that.  Laying them out was a bit of a challenge because they were still wet; I was afraid to hit them with the heat gun.  So I am really pleased I don't have any smudges.  Here is a close up:

This little card started out several weeks back for a challenge called NBUS (Never Before Used Schtuff) over at Darnall Knauss' blog; but like most cards these days it was only an idea and a base card until this morning. Yay.

The leaves are from SU and go back to 2002 and I'm fairly certain I saw some lovely card made with them and just had to have it; they've been sitting in the very bottom of my SU supply drawer ever since.  So sad. 

ok ... I'm fishing here, but not for compliments, I need honest feedback.. I struggle with CAS because I'm never able to capture that wow factor. While this card is nice, I look at it and think something is still missing. This is where my creativity lets me down, I can't figure out what is missing. If this was your card, what would have done to complete it, make everyone say "Wow!!"?

Anyway, it was nice to play in my craft room this morning... in my PJs .... drinking my 20oz cup of tea ..... listening to Katy Perry ..... I have to admit, that is a pretty nice way to start the day.  Only 9 more years to retirement and I can do that every morning.  LOL 

Thanks for stopping by. 
Carole


PS:  Darnell I got your message, I'll be reaching out to you sometime today.