A Bit of Monster Fun over at CMC

Happy Saturday!  I hope you’re having a great day.  I’ve been studying and I’m just sitting down to watch some recorded episodes of Downton Abbey with the family.  I’m not sure they enjoy it as much as I do though.

Over at Color Me Creative we have a new challenge that is all about using bright colours.  I made this card a few weeks ago so I’m hoping I can remember all the details now.   The DT girls are all using monster stamps for this challenge. Here’s my little fella.

My card design was inspired by a fabulous card by Lindsey Amrhein in the Papercrafts Magazine Card Design Handbook (pg 72 if you have it).

We are being sponsored by SCACD this week and we’ve all used monster stamps for our projects. I love it when people add paint to their cards so using a tube of white paint I thought it would be fun to make my little monster look like he was covered in paint having ‘one of those days’.  The paper is by Basic Grey Konnichiwa.

My Copic colours were very simple, YR09, YR07, YR04 and then I used a white gel Sakura pen to whiten his teeth and eyes.

I’m entering my card into the following challenges;

Inspire Me Fridays… Anything Goes
Simply Create…Always Anything Goes
Paper Issues…Fall’n for Flair (I thought my little monster was fall colours, plus he fell over, hope that counts Cassie lol)

Hope you join in on our colourful fun challenge.

**Bright, Fun Colours **
(the brighter the better..fun stuff)

Color Me Creative–Fall Colours

Happy Saturday!  What have you been up to this week?  I’ve been doing a spot of colouring for our latest challenge over at Color Me Creative.  This time our challenge is all about fall colours.


I used this sketch from Deconstructed Sketches…

Our sponsors are Bugaboo Digi Stamps and I chose this adorable little Pumpkin Trio.  I always love stamps that have characters with their hair all wavy like that, they are so fun.


I used the colours above and MME The Sweetest Thing ‘Tangerine’, Paper Smooches Halloweenies and SU! Have you signed up for Suzanne’s hair colouring class yet?  It’s fabulous!  Check out the deets here..

I’m entering this into the following challenges;

Inspire Me Fridays … Anything Goes
Copic Marker Europe … Halloween Card (challenge #9)
Belli Challenge – Fall/Autumn

Pop on over to the main CMC blog and see the delights the DT have in store for you and find out the prize up for grabs!

Have fun!

CMC and an Elegant Card for a Change!

It’s time for another challenge over at Color Me Creative. This time the challenge is to use lots of yellow with an optional twist of kraft if you’d like to use it.


I don’t know why but I’ve not really been in the mood for doing elegant cards lately, I’ve been preferring the cute/fun style images instead so it was a really pleasant change to create this card.

The birdhouse image is from our lovely sponsors, Pattie’s Creations. It’s called Three Birdhouses and is another lovely image to colour, the main challenge was trying to colour in the lines for the little flower buds.  Glasses to the rescue lol.  I used MME Lost & Found Sunshine papers, some Stamping Up wide grosgrain ribbon (my absolute fave ribbon EVER!)  The banner behind the focal point was just one I cut by hand.

The panel I cut out in brown Bazzill cardstock behind the image is another Nesties.  I think they were called Scalloped Borders but I’m not sure.  Nesties are the next organising job on my list.  They are all hung beautifully in my studio but I can never remember their names!  Once the image was coloured I used some Scattered Straw Distress Ink to age the edges slightly.

I made this card for my dear friend, Sue Lelli.  She has just moved and the little birdhouses are just perfect for a new home card.  I generated the sentiment on my computer and then just die cut it using my nestie.  She’s also just sadly lost her Mum, so I just wanted to tell you my thoughts are with you Sue.  Cards are winging their way over to you soon x

For my card I thought I would take on the extra twist of kraft because it’s not one of my regular go-to Copic colours.  I unfortunately didn’t write down the Copic colour combo I used before putting them away but if I recall it correctly I used Y19, Y17, Y15, Y13, Y11 for the yellow, E35, E34, E33 and E31 for the browns plus E49 and then BG10 for the outlining and the white daisy.  A few pearls were added to finish the card.

I hope you have fun visiting all of the DT girls’ blogs, they have some delights in store for you.  Visit the CMC Challenge section of the blog to see a slideshow and also to learn all the details of prizes up for grabs.

I’m entering this card into the following challenges…

Moxie Fab World – Focal Point Challenge
Inspire Me Fridays – Anything Goes
Mojo Mondays – Round or Square (I used their sketch as inspiration)


Happy Saturday!

Colouring Blacks…eeek!

Hi there, today’s new challenge over at Color Me Creative is to colour your image using blacks or dark greys.

We are being sponsored by the lovely Milk & Coffee.

My little image is called ‘Cutie Button Girl’.  She looks so cute with her little bunny, doesn’t she!  Thank you Milk & Coffee for such a cute image!

I chose to colour a few elements of the image in black, as you can see.  I always thought the blacks would be harder to do.  You just use a range of greys, not black itself and that way you can get the appearance of black and also achieve some dimension.  If you just use black it looks very flat.  (I sound like I know what I’m talking about, don’t I?!  It’s all what I learnt on Suzanne’s fab Copic classes.. she is the best at breaking it all down and making it a lot easier than you think).  If you didn’t see my post the other day about her new hair colouring class click here for the details.

I paper pieced her umbrella and then added some glossy accents to give the appearance of rain drops.  I also added glossy accents to her little buttons but sadly neither are showing up on my photo.  I left the card blank so that I can put a message in at a later date. Her little pink coat looks red on here, but it is a perfect match for the pink on the patterned paper, weird how it shows differently here, grrrr.

I used the following colours…


For the pink I used RV19 and RV17 with the blender, using the tip-2-tip technique.  the R29 was just used for the little bunny’s tongue! I was trying to be all artsy with my background by using my Orla Kiely book but I couldn’t get the right angle lol.  Hope you can make out the numbers, let me know if you need any more info.

Don’t forget to visit the rest of the CMC team to see what they’ve cooked up for you, lots of different ideas to get your creative juices flowing and you’ll also find all of the challenge info there too.

I’m entering my card into the following challenges..

4 Crafty Chicks – Circles, circles and more circles
In the Pink – Use pink
Paper Pretties – Square cards

Have fun!

Some Gradient Fun

As I write this post I am falling asleep over my computer keyboard so you will have to forgive me that it’s shorter than my usual posts.  It’s time for another fun challenge over at Color Me Creative, this time it’s all about backgrounds so check out the main  CMC Copic Challenge Group for all of the fun details.

I have to be honest I struggled with this one, I’m not great with Copic backgrounds, that must be a video I haven’t seen yet!  I came up with a technique that I’d seen over on Nichole Heady’s blog where you use your pens to create a gradient of colour by blending each ‘striped’ section with the next.  I used this technique on the circle behind my little cupcake, hope you can make it out.  I will definitely try it again another time, it would be fun to do in different colours, especially rainbow colours.


Here’s what Nicole did with hers …

My gorgeous little cupcake image is from Squigglefly, our sponsors this week.  This image is called Cherry Cupcake Cutie!  I love her little smiley face (because obviously she's a girl with all that pink around her lol)!  Thank you Squigglefly, I had fun colouring her in and I'm sure she will be used again and again!

For my card I used the following colours;

Cake case: BG15, BG13, BG11
Cupcake: E31, E33, E34
Cherry: R59, R37 and used tip to tip method to blend the two colours
Background: RV29, RV25, RV23

I hope you give this technique a try, it’s really fun to do!

Check out the rest of the DT girls’ projects, they pulled this challenge off a whole lot better than I did!
I’m entering this card into the following challenges..

Crafty Cats Weekly Challenge – to use pink
Inspire Me Fridays – anything goes
Pause Dream Enjoy – Cupcakes or baby

I hope you join along with us for our fun challenge.

Have fun!

Color Me Creative & Kraftin’ Kimmie

Hi there!  It’s time for some fun over at Color Me Creative.  This time our challenge is ‘Anything Goes’. 

Kraftin' Kimmie Stamps are our sponsors for this challenge and I was sent this fun image from a set called ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ by artist Emilie Goulet.  It was only released last month, so it was nice to be able to play with one of the new range.


I used SO many colours on this one, but she was crying out for lots of fun colour; look at all of those fab shopping bags, they just had to be colourful, don’t ya think?! This is my friend’s little basket, isn’t it divine, I want need one!

I need to move my colouring up a notch now I think.  I feel more confident with picking up my pens now but I’m not improving so  I’ve set aside some time each week now to get in a bit of colouring using Suzanne’s Copic Classes, otherwise I won’t achieve my goal of completing all 5 classes by the end of this year.  They are so much fun, I just tend to procrastinate on the things I love to do, replacing them with boring things like housework!  I’ve decided life is toooooo short now, colouring here I come!

I picked out some older Cosmo Cricket Pixie-licious papers and then coloured in my image to co-ordinate with them.  The panel the image is on was die cut using Spellbinders dies and then attached to the turquoise panel before adding pop dots for dimension.
Pop over to CMC to find out all of the details of our challenge and to see the DT slideshow.  They cooked up some fun projects for you!

Have a great weekend!

Color Me Creative meets CAS-ual Fridays!

Hi there everyone!

I hope you won't be too sick of me this week! I have another post scheduled for tomorrow and possibly Saturday too!

Today's card is all about clean and simple. I saw a fun challenge over at CAS-ual Fridays where the sponsor is Lawn Fawn. Well you all know I'm a HUGE fan of Lawn Fawn so I just had to play along.  The challenge is to create a card 4 x 9 leaving as much white space as possible, ooh la la, that's a toughie!

When I first started colouring I thought of Copics just for bigger projects like large coloured images etc, but they work just as well for these little ones too. I coloured my flowers using the 'rule of three' technique, which is just a dark, a medium and a light colour. I varied the little flowers, then added some dots with my white uniball pen and added some enamel accents to the centre. That enamel accents takes a bit of practice doesn't it! I had the pot in one hand, a pin in the other, and a piece of card to scrape off mistakes next to me. I learnt that the secret is to push the 'nib' into the centre of the circle and then lift, that seemed to make a better 'pearl', for me anyway!

I've been wanting to try the hand drawn frame shown by Nichole Heady over at Papertrey Ink, so gave it a go. It still looked a bit too much white space for me so I added a few bits of faux hand stitching and some pearls to finish off. I know who this card is going to, a friend of mine who is always really generous. She's been owed a little thank you for a while.

We still have a fun challenge running over at  Color Me Creative's beautiful colours, aqua, red and white/cream, they look so fresh.  So grab those Copics and join in the fun, even if it's only to colour in tiny little flowers like me!