Baaaaaaaaad Day!!!

For some unknown reason I woke up in a very bad mood today. Now this is not at all like me as anyone who knows me would tell you. If I drank I could blame it on a hangover but the nearest I ever go to anything alcoholic is a snowball on Christmas Day.........I think the effects of that will have worn off now though. It must have been bad because I love music and have my CD player on constantly but everything I put on today just grated on my nerves............even my beloved REM which was a bit of a shock.

So I remain puzzled and my poor family have escaped up to their rooms away from the monster that has replaced their usually cheerful wife/mother.

Hope it's gone by the time I wake up tomorrow..........I don't like it:0(

I made two cards today which is not good going for me as I usually do four or five new designs a day either for the shop where I sell my cards or for workshops at the shop where I teach. Out of the two one ended up in the bin. The other I used for the Template 17 Challenge over at Crafts by Carolyn.

So I have had to go back to my portfolio of older designs. I did find some though that would be quite fitting for the Metal Challenge for Daring Cardmakers. They use a metallic medium rather than an embellishment.

I have used Perfect Pearls on both of these cards but in two different ways. I love the look of them just brushed in their dry form over Versamark stamped images so that is how I used them on the first card.

The background was stamped and pearled and then allowed to set before overstamping with the phrase stamp and pearling in a different colour. I mounted it onto silver card before attaching to the card blank with foam pads.
The gorgeous face stamp has then been stamped and pearled in three different colours, mounted onto silver card and then arranged along the bottom of the background piece.
I did want to do something as a background on the card but I remember that nothing looked quite right so I just settled for the Perfect Pearls having the spotlight.


The second card has always been one of my most favourite of all the workshop cards I have designed.

I started off by masking off about an inch at the top of the card. The hearts from a set of Non Sequitur stamps was then stamped in black Stazon.

At the bottom I masked off about one and a half inches and stamped a text stamp from the same set.

The red inking was done with the masks in place using cotton wool to pick up the colour from the ink pad. I left the middle uninked to give the card a sort of a glow as on my practice card I inked it completely and it looked rather flat and boring.

The collage stamp from Hampton Art was stamped onto glossy card and ink was rubbed on again using cotton wool.

The embellishments used are a layered Quickutz heart with a peeloff swirl in gold, red tea rose heads and gold thread.

The Valentine message was created on the computer and embellished with a gold paper heart.

For an extra touch of glitz I decanted some pump action hairspray into a spray bottle and added gold Perfect Pearls, shook it up really well to mix and then sprayed over the whole of the card.

I'm not sure the scanner picks it up very well which is something I am finding with most metallic things.

When funds allow I will definitely be getting a Digital Camera...........any hints and tips on the best one to buy on a limited budget would be very welcome.

Well I think I will go and mess up my newly organised stamps and see if I can chase the monster away. A good stamping session should be just the ticket I think and hopefully I will have something new to share with you tomorrow.

Bye for now then

Sheila-x-