Stamping Mad Birthday cards

These are the cards I recieved from my friends on the Stamping Mad forum Birthday list.

This first one from Keren has 4 panels but was difficult to photograph fully open.
Annie gave a pile of pressies, Santtu a coloured backer and Wendy sent flowers. Caz coloured the initial, Ruth sent the cake and Lynn sent flowers.
Trixie used butterflies and the girl in bonnet is from Megan.

Thank you so much for all your cards.

May swaps

I've had my swaps for May back from Lynn today. On the Stamping Mad forum we swap 2 ATCs and 2 Moos each month. I don't post pictures of what i've done until I know these have been received by the other people in the swap. Most people seemed to get theirs yesterday so I think i'm safe in showing now.


The theme for the ATC was Distressed, something i've not tried before and i'm not sure I will again as I think mine look positively miserable. For the background I used my embossed loo roll paper with shimmery watercolour paint. Onto this I layered torn mulberry paper and a scrap of card which I put through the Cuttlebug Distressed Stripes folder. I used card from the Neutrals stack by DCWV and sanded it afterwards to show the white core. A piece of ribbon was held down by a brad which had been sanded.






Now my Moos are a different thing entirely and I love them. The theme was Pink & Purple.
I brushed the background card with a Brilliance inkpad to give a soft look. I then used my Cuttlebug Paisley die and cut paint charts from Dulux. I layered these by swapping the cut out bits for the contrasting colour. The spaces that were too small to fit the pieces back in were filled with glitter glue but it doesn't show up on the pic.

ATC & Moo swaps

Last month the theme on the Stamping Mad forum swap was to make your own background paper.

You've all seen my efforts with the baby wipes which is what I used, now that we have the swaps back I can show what I did with them. I simply wrapped a piece of the fabric around my card and backed it with another card to hide the workings. Then I sewed a thread of seed beads and a sequin flower onto them as an embellishment but decided that's all that was needed. We only swap 2 but I have learned to make a 3rd for myself so that I have a record of them and also because the ATC holders take 3 cards in a row.













Unfortunately the shimmer in the paint doesn't show up too well on this scan.


The theme of the Moo swap was floral.

I used shimmer watercolour paints to cover the
background and then various stamps from See D's morsels to add flowers and the pot with versa colour inkpads. I added a little extra to each one of them - a worm, leaf and butterfly.
Again I did 3 and swapped only 2 of them.

Get Well Card

I heard through the Stamping Mad forum this morning that a friend is not feeling too well so I decided to send this card I made yesterday.

The image is one which was very kindly sent to me a few months ago by Lynn from the forum.

I cut around it and coloured it by taking colour straight from a pencil using a waterbrush. It was layered onto an oval of card from a sample of soft lime paint by Crown paints. I gave the wings a touch of glitter glue applied with a brush.

Down one side I used a strip of Chloe Awning paper in lilac and greens from K & Co onto which I added a couple of fabric flowers held together with small brads.

A simple peel-off greeting finished the card.



I went down to the post box at lunchtime so hopefully with a first class stamp it should arrive tomorrow.

Baby Wipes.

This past few weeks I have trying to make my own backgrounds for the ATC swap on the Stamping Mad forum.

Firstly I used my shimmery watercolour paints on pieces of embossed, patterned loo roll. I did 4 different colour ways. I used a large paintbrush with lots of water and after loading plenty of colour onto the brush just rested my brush on the surface and let the very watery paint spread into the paper. I also let the paint drip from the brush. To finish off I then gave them a blast with the heat gun to help set the colours and dry them out a bit quicker. They were left to dry out completely overnight.

I tried the same effect with various baby wipes but the ones I am most pleased with were on fabric baby wipes as they soaked up the paint better and have an interesting texture.

These have allowed the paint to spread really well and the colours have mingled nicely. Again I used the heat gun to help dry them out but left them to finish drying on their own as they were quite moist still.

There are 2 problems as I see it to using this type of wipe. The first being that they need to be handled quite carefully so as not to stretch the fabric and the second is that the folds that were originally in them are not removed by ironing, therefore they can only be used on small projects.
However in this case as they are intended to be used on ATCs which are only small in size I may be able to work with one section of the wipe and avoid the folds.

As I said I used shimmery watercolour paints which when the brush was rested on the surface of the fabric left a silver sheen, this however does not show up on the scan.

I will post pictures of the finished cards as soon as I have my swaps back. The subject of them was to create our own backgrounds.