Loud Music

Before Christmas, I was lucky enough to win a £100 voucher to spend at Create & Craft. It was surprisingly difficult to find things to spend that much money on, even though I never seem to struggle when I don't have a voucher!

One of the things I bought was a brilliant Indigo Blu A5 stamp set called 'Loud Music'. It has a wide range of stamps fitting many different music styles e.g. flowing notes, a guitar, a tape & some fun sentiments. I've already used the set once to make a birthday card for a musical man at work and thought it was about time I did another.

It's a mix between chalkboard & grunge...

I started with a piece of A4 white card which I folded to make an A5 card blank. I cut a piece of black card 2.5cm smaller on each side than the base card and stamped it with the Indigo Blu stamps using white Brilliance Ink. Before the ink had a chance to dry, I rubbed each image gently with some distress ink foam to blur the edges and look like the chalk had rubbed off slightly. When I had finished stamping, I mounted the black card onto some silver mirror board.

I then used 2 off cuts of black stripe paper (left over from my 'pretty grunge' card) in 2 opposite corners of the card and used Black Soot distress ink in the other 2. To finish the card I then used black memento ink and an Inkadinkado star stamp over the top of the distress ink.

I am entering this card into the following challenges:-
Craft Your Passion 'music' 27/1
Crafty Cardmakers 'black & white' 2/2
Crafty Catz 'monochrome' 30/1
Daring Cardmakers 'stripes' 31/1

Pretty Grunge!

Today's card is one that I absolutely love- this normally happens with my newest cards being my favourite, but this one more than ever. It's a mix of old & new stuff and uses some ideas that I've never done before.

Here it is..

I haven't done any colouring for quite a while so I went back to one of my favourite Saturated Canary digi stamps and coloured her using a mix of Promarkers & Spectrum Noirs. I stuck to a pallette of pinks & greys but glittered the boots with some doodlebug glitter (to make them like a pair I'm lucky enough to have!)

I used a Kanban die-cut mat to draw a template for the shape of the topper which I cut out by hand, inked gently with Black Soot distress ink, and then matted it onto a co-ordinating die-cut layer. It was originally black & white so I used my Picked Raspberry distress ink to tie the colour in with the digi image.

I wanted to go for a slightly grungy/distressed look, so for the background, I took a piece of grey & white striped cardstock (new 'Mambi'  (Me & My Big Ideas) cardstock pad- bargain from TK Maxx) and cut it as a mat for the topper. I then took an offcut and attached it to the bottom of the original piece of card with the stripes going in the opposite direction. I then inked around the edges with the same Picked Raspberry distress ink that I used on the topper mat. To add to the 'grunge' look, I used my ScorPal scoreboard to score & fold some lines across different parts of the card.

I then took a piece of A4 pink cardstock and again inked the edges with Black Soot distress ink before adding the cardstock & topper. I folded some of the lines I had scored on the striped cardstock so that they stood out and only put the double sided tape in the centre. I used 2 layers of 3d foam to attach the topper so that it didn't squash the edges of the cardstock.

Here's a photo to show how it stands out...

I'm really pleased with how the grungy/pretty look has worked and I think that I'll try the folded distressed background thing again!

I am entering this card into the following challenges:-

Crafting Musketeers 'grunge' 29/1

Graph' It 'anything goes' 12/1

Cards Galore 'anything goes' 28/1

Polkadoodles 'anything goes' 12/1

Crafty Catz 'pretty in pink' 16/1

Polkadoodles 'girly, girly, girly' 19/1
Penny's Paper-Crafty Challenges 'anything goes' 14/1

Crafters Cafe 'anything goes' 14/1

Papertake weekly 'anything goes' 14/1

Challenges 4 Everybody 'anything goes' 31/1