Floral Harmony

Hello lovely peeps

Nick Roberts has been a busy chap. Hot on the heels of his very successful Craftascope One Day Special at Hochanda he is bringing us some gorgeous new floral stamps tomorrow.

Retro Leaves

Hello lovely peeps

A completely different card from yesterday but still using the new Retro collection from Nick Roberts at Craftascope, which is today's One Day Special on Hochanda.

The collection contains a set of 8 completely fabulous dies called Retro Leaves which are now one of my all time favourite crafty items. You can get them individually here on the Hochanda site while the stock lasts (though I'm guessing this will be the first item to sell out).

Groovy Birthday

Hello lovely peeps

It's a very exciting day today for us all on the Craftascope Team - Nick is launching his first One Day Special at 6pm (BST) tonight on Hochanda TV.

Nifty at Fifty

Hello lovely peeps, long time no see!
Sorry for my absence, I've been on holiday and ran out of time to schedule posts before I went.

I had a Nifty at Fifty theme in my head for this card - a milestone birthday for a female cyclist.

Happy Birthday Pots

Hello lovely peeps

A sneak peek for you today of stamps being released at Lili of the Valley later this month.
These are the Happy Birthday Pots - you also get pots that spell out Happy, a little mouse with a watering can  as well as a plain pot to customise yourself.

Distressing Curly

Hello lovely peeps

The theme this month at Crafty Calendar Challenge is 'Distress It' and we're sponsored by 

Sheepski Designs

I've had the gorgeous image 'Curly' to play with. 

First I pulled the image into CraftArtist as I wanted to add a background paper behind him but leave the image white for colouring in. Normally I would just use the Cutout Studio tool to remove everything outside the image outline. However in this case you'll notice that the image is all open at the bottom

which would mean that the Cutout Studio tool would remove a lot of Curly's body too.

Essentially what you need is to have an unbroken line all the way around the image, so I used the pencil drawing tool to draw a line from the back of Curly to the front (I've used a much thicker line in the picture below so you can see what I mean).

All you need to do then is select both the image and the extra line together and choose 'Convert to Picture' from the Tools dropdown menu (just press OK when it comes up with a settings window).

This time when you remove the outside white space with Cutout Studio you get a more solid looking Curly.

The background I chose for him was a paper from the Beautiful Dreamer digi paper kit by Glitz Designs which is a lovely newspaper print. The edges look as if they've been coloured with black soot distress ink.

I sized it to 15cm square and then put Curly in the bottom left corner so my scrappy 'pencil' line was mostly off the edge.

After printing off onto 240gsm super smooth white card I coloured him in with Copic markers
Coat: E53, E25, E35, E23, E59
Horns: E70, E71 and E74 followed by C1 over the top.
Ears: E53 and RV11  
Nose: E70, E71 and E74 followed by RV11 over the top.

For the distressing I used a Core'dinations sanding block around the edges of the card to remove the top layer of paper, revealing the white underneath.

I finished off with a sentiment stamped using 'Say It How it is' set by Dyan Reavley and added a bit more distressing by colouring the edges of each word box with Pumice Stone distress ink.

I would like to enter this in the following challenges:-

C.R.A.F.T. #511 distress your project
Copic UK Official FB Group  Anything Goes option of Avatar
Colour Crazy Challenge #17 Anything Goes 
Southern Girls Anything Goes

Thanks for stopping by,

Katrina x

Odd Dog Party Time

Hello lovely peeps

For today's card I've used an Odd Dog image from the Lili of the Valley Etsy shop called Party Time.