Stamps and Pretty Papers!

Hi Everyone,

Well, it's a lovely day here weather wise (not, lol) so a perfect excuse for spending most of it on craft related fun starting with this blog post.

I bet there are a lot of people just like me out there who have bought oodles and oodles of pretty paper pads and scrapping sets just because the papers are so gorgeous (love the smell too ;D) and then left them languishing in the cupboard totally neglected.......  Well, when I had my lovely day at Port Sunlight, Happy Stampers show a few weeks ago I spent some time chatting to and watching Lesley Wharton, owner of Chocolate Baroque, demoing her beautiful stamps.  She was using them in conjunction with some lovely Crafty Individuals papers and it reminded me how effective paper piecing can be.  I don't have the lovely Patchwork Landscape set of stamps that Lesley was using that day (on my Wish List, lol) but I searched through my CB collection for an alternative and decided to use Woodland Dreams instead. 

I also wanted to join in CB Challenge 16 which has just started and these two cards are the result.

My apologies if the colours are a bit dull but even in my conservatory/craft room it's very dull today.

Card #1

I chose two co-ordinating papers from the CI paper pad and stamped the tree tops then cut them out.  On a third design I stamped the images again and then extended the 'ground' to create little hills.  I cut myself a mask following the lines I had drawn and then used a brush to apply Distress Ink shading and then stuck the cut out treetops over the images.

 

I layered up onto black card and then used a Tim Holtz crackle stencil and Distress Inks to create the border on the basecard before layering on the 'topper'.

Card #2

 

This was made in exactly the same way as the first card except I used a different background design which was a bit bright for the treetops and they didn't show up enough so I gave it a wash of watered down white acrylic paint to knock it back a little before creating the little scene.

 

 

I decided to layer this one up twice onto black leaving a plain white border between and I love the way this 'pops' the scene.  I think this is nice enough to frame!

The words Imagine and Dream come from a discontinued CB set I think (sorry).

 

There's lots of wonderful inspiration over on the Chocolate Baroque DT Blog as well as their Challenge Blog which I'm off to link up to shortly.

 

A Tag for Fun

 

Here's a tag I made just for fun the other day.  I found it in my 'bit box' having just blended the Distress Inks and then left it, so I decided to play and finish it off. Really liked how it turned out!

 

   

Have a fun weekend all!

Hugs

Lesley  Xx