Less is More meets St Luke's .....

... good morning fellow LIMettes - have you seen this week's challenge?  No, that was a daft question - of course you've seen it.  This week Chrissie and Mandi from Less is More would like us to make a one layer card that features "something with legs".  My first thought was a table!  Don't have anything with a table stamp - so off to think again.  And I've made a card for my darling son, Ben.  And my card has lots of legs!!!  Oh yes, it is also suitable for our challenge at St Luke's Charity Card challenge where we want you to make a card using "Black, White and one other colour" - do check it out - it's for a great cause.  What do you think?

This set of patterned animals is just fantastic.  I made a couple of cards with this set in May for the OLW challenge - see here and here.  All the animals are a bit unusual - they feature funky designs, and I've been dying to play with the lizard stamp.  I also wanted to play with my new Papermania typography stamps.  They're large size sentiments in great fonts and can be coloured, paper pieced or left plain.  The frame is from the Frame-It set by my favourite rodent!!  I was going to colour the sentiment but decided to keep it simple in black and white, and added colour to the lizard - sparkly green!!

Stamps:  Inkadinkadoo - Patterned Animals; Papermania - Son (PMA907413); Waltzingmouse - Frame-It, Free Spirit - Words
Inks:  Memento - Tuxedo Black
Accessories:  Card from stash; Stardust pen and Promarker

I've done a close up photo of the lizard so that you can see the design easier - it's such a cute lizard!!

I know I'm not going to be the first to post my card to the challenge blog - but it's way earlier than usual!  And now that I've made this card, I'm going to have a busy day helping Kathryn to tidy her bedroom.  It looks rather like a bomb site!!  I suspect I'll be doing more tidying than supervising :)  Still, it will also give us the chance to have a move around - which is always fun.  I'm going to try and get back later to post another card - this time for the CAS-ual Friday challenge - a non-traditional shaped card!!  See you later.  Have a great day.

Krafty-men .....

..... the challenge at CAS-ual Fridays this week is to create a masculine card using kraft!!  Easy - no!!  Not easy!  Well, that's not entirely true - lots of people have already made stunning cards, but it's taken me quite a while to come up with something.

However, I'm quite pleased with my card - even if it's taken me the whole week to come up with my design.  I've kept to kraft as the main colour with black as my neutral.

I started off by stamping the wonderful wood grain background from Way Out West by Waltzingmouse.  I stamped it in Versamark and then heat embossed with clear powder giving a lovely tone-on-tone effect.  However, I wanted to emphasis the wood grain effect, so I rubbed chalk ink all over the base card and wiped off the excess.  The result - a wood grain panel!  I stamped this lovely lighthouse and ship onto some more kraft paper, again using clear embossing powder.  I added some soft colour to the image with chalk inks and Stardust pens - it's very soft and subtle.  I cut out the image and mat with the funky wonky rectangles from Spellbinders, and mounted them at angles onto the card.  I added a bit of definition around the edge of the stamped image using Soft Suede.  Finally, I added an anchor and birthday sentiment.  Both started off with white backgrounds, but I added colour with my inkpad! 

Stamps:  Kanban - All Occasions
Inks:  Versamark; Stampin' Up! - Crumb Cake, Soft Suede; Colorbox Chalk Pigments - various; Memento - Tuxedo Black
Spellbinders:  Wonky Rectangles (S43-6) die # 5 and 6
Accessories:  Card, sentiment and clear embossing powder from stash

We're off to our local market today to see what goodies they have on offer.  Usually, there's a great selection of fresh produce, as well as some super clothes stalls.  So we'll have a little more girl-time and then stop for coffee!!  See you later!