Purple Wedding Card

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook!  The best man from our wedding and Chris's best friend Les married his long term partner Jill yesterday (though as I write it's actually Monday the 21st not Sunday the 27th!) By the time you read this post the wedding will be over though the reception might be ongoing *winks*. Hopefully though I'll actually be tucked up in bed getting some sleep before facing travelling back to Bridlington from Leeds (Otley doesn't have a train station). Obviously as I've been super organised and have written this blog in advance and set a schedule for it to be posted, I've no idea how the wedding has actually gone but I'm sure it went well. Chris is the joint best man and I'm planning on helping him with his speech later this week but he's very nervous about making it bless him. I'll admit to be rather nervous myself, I'm not good at meeting new people and I've only met Les twice (at the wedding and he came to our flat for a few hours last year) and I've only met Jill once very briefly at our wedding five years ago. It'll be challenging being in a room full of strangers while Chris goes about his best man dues but I shall face my fears and enjoy myself. At the very least it's been the perfect excuse to make a wedding card (I don't go to many weddings) and I've treated myself to a couple of new wedding themed goodies to make it too - bonus!

I love this purple that's become very popular for weddings in the last few years and it's the perfect colour for a late autumn/early winter wedding. To be honest I wasn't sure if purple was the wedding theme colour as the invite had purple hearts and pink hearts on the front but I checked with Jill and it turned out to be mainly purple (which I'm glad about as there were a lot of shades of pink on the invite which may have been tricky to match). The purple card for the card blank and the diecut gazebo and sentiment piece are Centura Pearl cardstock from the darks collection. I love the rich colour and shimmery effect when you tilt it to the light. I also used some Centura Pearl white card with a hint of silver shimmer finish to it for the inlaid die cut pieces of the gazebo and the bride and groom die cut piece. The groom was also cut out using a scrap of black card and cut to the right shape for his suit, shoes and hair (the hair looks a bit strange though!) The stitched oval dies and the wedding dies are all new purchases from eBay and came from China. They are so cheap that it's jaw dropping, the wedding set was only £2.11 and the gazebo is 5" by 4"! I'm not sure how much  the nesting stitched ovals were but they were less than £2.50 and there are 5 sizes altogether. The other card came from a mixed pack of larger than A5 card from Tattered Lace. The bow was made with one of the thinner cards using a die that came free with a magazine sometime this year and I added some Papermania gem bling to highlight certain areas of the card because who doesn't like a bit of bling? I used a couple of Flexmarkers to colour the bride and groom. The sentiments are from a Crafter's Companion Sara's Signature Wedding Collection stamp set and the silver printed vellum came from a gold and silver mixed pack of vellum from the same collection. I think how this card was made is pretty self explanatory so I won't go into details apart from saying that the the Gazebo die was die cut twice once in purple and once in white. I added double sided tape to the main parts of the white outline and kept the purple version in the die so I could poke the negative pieces out individually to place in the relative space on the white version until all the spaces were filled. It's a lot easier to do it this way rather than just poking them all out at once and trying to guess what belongs where.

I'm really pleased with how this card turned out, it wasn't at all how I'd imagined when I was in the planning stage but I love the beautiful gazebo and how it looks cut out in Centura Pearl card. Fingers crossed the weather will have improved for the wedding as the venue is set in 45 acres (I think!) of beautiful woodlands and it would be a shame if the couple didn't manage to get some outdoor photos due to either the rain or boggy conditions. Although I won't be able to see much of the area it'll be quite pleasant to go back to Otley as I used to live quite close to it as a young child.

Hopefully I'll have a few more cards to share with you when I get back (may need a day or two to recover though!) so I hope you'll keep an eye out for a new blog post soon. As always if you have any questions or comments then please leave them in the usual places and I'll try to respond within a few days if required. I hope you all have a brilliant Sunday and until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx

Passion for ProMarkers Blog Challenge week 279 - Teddy Bears

Hello crafty peeps - welcome to my crafty nook! I can't believe it's nearly the weekend again - where has this week gone? I hope you've all had a good week and have lots of crafty plans for the weekend. My "crudy" still leaves a lot to be desired but one good thing has come from all this chaos - I've finally found the star dies that the craft gremlins had stolen inside a Amazon cardboard wrapper of all places (I save them in case I can think of a way to re-use them!), fingers crossed they'll put the water colour pencils in a place I'm going to look very soon too lol. Please excuse any typos that I may miss, my fur baby Jinx is being 'challenging' and keeps standing on the keyboard, in front of the screen or on my head! Not sure how he quite manages the last one as he is quite a big cat - I can only conclude that I have a giant head!!!

Anyway back to the main reason for this blog post - this week's challenge is Teddy Bears and one that I again found challenging (but not as challenging as Jinx!) not because I don't have the right supplies but because I have too many (what a lovely complaint to have, right?) and it was extremely difficult to chose which bear stamp to use. In the end I chose a Fizzy Moon stamp called Wedding Bells which I bought at the beginning of last year from my local craft shop. TBH I usually rigorously follow the coloured image on the packaging which is fine when it's something like "Tatty Teddy" or the "Forever Friends" bear where the images are well known but I think a little experimentation is good for images that don't have that brand recognition (saying that I haven't been in a card shop for about 10 years so I've no idea if Fizzy Moon is as popular as the two brands already mentioned - people may be horrified with the way I've coloured the two bears!) One of the reasons I've started to take part in the challenges on Passion for ProMarkers is to push myself out of my crafting comfort zone and not following the packaging of this stamp really did do that (babysteps still) saying that though the colouring isn't that different to the original. I've also tried a new way of colouring fur (new to me anyway) and instead of using pens in the same colour wave (yellows with yellows etc) I've actually blended mustard yellow with either caramel (Bride) or cinnamon (Groom) AND if that wasn't Avant Garde enough I scribbled the brown colours all over the images (obviously keeping inside the lines - I'm not that much of a rebel!) before going over it with the mustard! - Yes you did read that right, I SCRIBBLED!!! lol As usual my camera lets me down so you can't see how much texture this method gives the bears, they look all nubbly and worn in real life, just like the ted does that I've had since I was born. My husband and I married relatively late in life (we'll probably be pensioners when we celebrate our silver wedding anniversary) so I find the thought of middle aged bears getting married oddly comforting and I think other late bloomers would like it on their wedding card too.

Fizzy Moon Wedding Bells 8" x 8" card

I stamped the card blank all over using a heart stamp from the Clearly Besotted range called "Love Chemistry" (I think) * I've checked and the Clearly Besotted Stamp set used is actually called "Scientifically Speaking", sorry about any confusion caused, the hearts are meant to bubble out of a test tube or beaker but I thought they'd be perfect to reduce the starkness of the white card blank. I layered the main image on red card, black card and then holographic paper from Paper Cellar. I originally made red paper roses to stick on the top right and bottom left corners of the card but couldn't bring myself to clutter the card up (now that would truly be a hard challenge for me - use lots of embellishments!) so I made a couple of red felt coiled roses which I still couldn't face using lol. Instead I off centred the stamped image and added two lengths of suede cord tied in a knot in the centre which I added to the left hand side of the card. I've just realised I've forgotten to add a sentiment - please pretend it's there.

Here are some close ups.

I couldn't resist adding some clear Wink of Stella to the roses, hearts and belly buttons on the bears.

I hope you like my new card, as always if you have any questions or comments please leave them below or in the comments form in the side bar if you want to say something not for public viewing.

A Few Sites You Might Like To Visit

promarkerchallenge.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/week-279teddy-bears.html

click to enter teddy bear challenge

everycraftsapound.co.uk

Every Crafts A Pound has got some FABULOUS new stock in including Papermania's Chronology metal embellishments and stamps - very steampunk and similar to Tim Holtz clock faces, cogs and spinners but only £1!!!!

Please let me know if you like having sites to visit on my blog and if you do I'll continue to link sites as appropriate on my posts. Until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx