Triple stamped Wetlands

Today's new challenge at The Male Room Is a fun technique challenge, Triple  Stamping. This was one of the first techniques which I was shown when I first got into stamping and I still love it: it never fails to please.

I've combined two stamp sets, Gorgeous Grunge and Wetlands and I've kept to a fairly restricted colour palette with Lucky Limeade and Chocolate Chip, with some basic grey colouring on the adult goose.

The technique adds to the effect of the perspective, with the goose stamped on the uppermost card layer and the bird silhouettes stamped across the three layers.

I used a Kraft card base and have stamped the birthday greeting and another goose on the inside (should have photographed that as well I suppose). The stamping is done all in one go, after cutting the panels and placing them on top of each other. I have used narrow borders to separate the layers. 

The fun part is seeing them all line up. The edges which do not stamp clearly are somehow lost to give the finished card a clear image.

These cards work well for men as they are 'different' without being too fussy.

Park to National Park

Make it move! Paper engineering I like to think of it, these are some of the cleverest cards around, definitely beating anything you can buy, but they do often take a while to make. So, find some quiet time if you can and sit down and make one for this week's challenge at The Male Room. There re loads of ideas on the Internet, here is one I tried for the first time.

It's kind of like an unfolding present. Here I went for loads of texture and a theme of back to nature from the built up landscape. So, the front of my card uses brick and grass DP and a piece of guilded embossed card to look like metal, with a faux leather cover to the fold out bit. A town park in miniature.

And inside there are rocks and wood. I used a bold sentiment stamp from Delightful Dozen and left one panel bare for writing a message to the recipient.

Too arty? I am often looking for a theme these days to inspire my card making. I did have fun with this one and used up a few scraps, which is always good. If you want to try the challenge here it is

I Think I'm Turning Japanese.....

A little bit of zen going on my blog this morning, well, that was my inspiration for my card for The Male Room, where the new challenge is to create a masculine project inspired by the Orient.

I wanted to create a zen garden on a card

I used Adventure Bound DP to cover the front of the card. I blended various greens and blues to make the water and splodged on some water droplets to create rain drops on water effect. The two fish are from a magazine freebie set, as are the Chinese characters.

I added a touch of gold to the fish and some die cut leaves to overhang the 'pond'

The layers are black and gold and inside I have made a liner and stamped the greeting, with what looks like a Chinese or Japenese translation (it's not really, that would be very impressive!)

I used a sentiment from Wetlands, very appropriate!

Hope you get chance to play along and create something masculine and Oriental....think sushi, karate, samurai, lanterns, anything you like!

Grunge Trees

At The Male Room, a challenge blog for cards for the men in our lives, we have a colour challenge for you this week. Three very traditional male colours too, blue, brown and green. True to my own favourite style I've kept this quite cas and contemporary and I've found yet another use for my Gorgeous Grunge stamp set -earlier in the week I used it for stars, now trees. As you can see, I was having fun with my Stamp-A-Ma-Jig too, when making the fading sentiment (don't know how I lived without this bit of kit!)
I made a couple of these cards, the one with the pale colours was actually my first attempt, but it just wasn't 'man enough' for my liking! The trees are die cut and so add a bit of texture/dimension.  I like the smaller grunge stamp used as fallen leaves or blossom, don't you?

The DT members on this challenge blog all have very different styles, so check them out to see what they did with this colour scheme, I am sure you'll find something you'll like!

I'm going to enter my card in the Anything Goes challenge for Birthday cards at Seize The Birthday too.

No Valentine Here

Although it is Valentine's Day I don't have a romantic card to share with you, but a masculine birthday card. I guess the loving feeling just didn't flow into my crafting today. This is the sketch for the challenge at CAS Colours an Sketches  this week

It's really fab don't you think?  You don't have to use the same shapes, (as you will see from my card) as long as we can still see the basic sketch in your card - rotate it, flip it, whatever.

I was making a card for a 'bookish' friend and started with a very pale patterned paper for the base.  I stamped the birds (Crafty Individuals) first, masked a rectangle and then added the text stamp (Waltzing Mouse) over the top. I coloured one of the birds for impact. Then I used a tab punch to punch out 'divider' tabs so it looked like a page in a file.  I continued the theme in the sentiment, which is from Sweet Cake. Although it's quite 'busy' I still think it is clean and simple -no sponging, distressing or 'frilly' embellishments.