A Cause for Celebration

As I have mentioned here previously, I have been working on an album for some friends who married last year. Unfortunately, I have only managed hasty snaps of the pages as they are too large to scan in and I have yet to ask my resident expert to photograph them for me.

This page is quite masculine deliberately because it features the groom's sons. I wanted to lighten it slightly with an injection of my theme colours, so I chose to add texture and colour at the same time with lots of different ribbons. I tied the colours in again with flocking on all of the stamped areas (stamps from Stampin' Up!). The scalloped edge paper is from Papermania. The celebrate wording is printed onto Safmat from Letraset and the paper behind the photograph is from Papermania's capsule collection. It isn't clear on my poor photo, but I have embossed around the image and around the medallion stamp which adds detail without clutter.

I would like to submit this layout as an entry into Crafty Ribbons' challenge this week. They have a great prize of an autumnal tones ribbon bundle, which I would love to win and use of my humble crafting projects.

Alien Adventure

Having been working on cards for men this weekend, I thought I would make a card for a younger member of the male gender. This card is for a friend of my son who will soon be 7. It is made with the Stamp Fairy challenge in mind, which, this fortnight, is based on one of their sketches.

The card base is 8x8, so it is actually made from two card sheets joined together with the seam inside disguised by the insert. The central base panel is iridescent paper from Kanban. It is hard to photograph, so the colours don't look as though they go together - but trust me, they do! It is green with a sheen of purple in the right light. I embossed around the outside of this layer and infilled the area with purple Promarker and Sakura gelly roll pens. It doesn't look like it in the photo, but it makes the central panel really stand out against the white border. The scalloped circle was hand-cut with a pair of fancy scissors borrowed from my 5 year old daughter's craft cupboard! Most of the papers are Cosmo Cricket, with a little Papermania thrown in for good measure! The cute alien stamp is, of course, from Stamp Fairy, coloured with Promarkers and Flex Markers with a little doodling using a Letraset 0.5mm drawing pen. The sentiment was stamped onto white card which I inked up to tone in with the alien background layer. The three circles at the top left were cut from a 6x6 paper sheet, accented with Sakura gelly roll and glaze pens then layered up with foam dots. I love the circular foam dots (from The Range) as they are easy to peel and the 'left over' sticky foam is great for giving dimension to larger areas. They are great value too at just 99p per pack. I added lots of doodle detail all over the card and also used very thin strips of paper along my main stripes just for extra dimension and detail without cluttering the overall look of the project.