Magic March Hares

With apologies to my teamies for being a day late, here is my card for the new challenge in The Male Room. The theme is magic or fantasy, and I did find this hard, particularly with a masculine slant.
Fairies are not really any good, I don't have any fantasy creatures or castles but I did think of something which I hope fits the bill. In past times in Britain I think hates were thought of as magical creatures. March is of course the time they seem to been seen most, "boxing' in the twilight. Here is my take on that, with no small thanks to a friend of mine, the queen of brayering, who made this image in much more detail and with much more skill than my offering as a picture.

I started by brayering the background in Indigo Island. Then I spritzed this while the ink was still a bit wet to get a starry night sky effect.

I die cut a large circle from matt silver card and carefully stamped the hares onto the edge.

They looked a bit as if they were floating in the sky so I grounded them with some grass stamped in the blue ink.I used a black layer and a long tall card blank. Card made in less than 10 minutes, time spent thinking about it 10 days!

 Below is a close up of the starry sky, complete with tiny touched of Sparkles liquid glitter. The stamps I have used are both magazine freebies.

No sentiment on this one. I will stamp something appropriate inside when I send it, as I think it would be good for a few different occasions.

Shaving Foam CAS

It's CAS time again as a new challenge begins at CAS Colours and Sketches and this week it's the turn of the sketch

Super-CAS this one! I've kept strictly to the sketch. I used some of my favourite card stock, Blackberry Bliss for the mat.

The sentiment is die cut out of a piece of card which I coloured using the shaving foam technique. This is one MESSY technique but I just love the results. I only have three reinkers but I had such fun with this I think I might buy some more. 

The card started because I wanted the negative of this sentiment die for another project, but couldn't bring myself to throw away the die cut. Teamed up on the rich purple card and with a single rhinestone to wish upon my card was quickly put together. 

May be its too CAS for some, but it has interest in the sentiment and is quite something in real life. I am really looking forward to seeing what you will make of this sketch.

Thanks, Man!

i have a vintage style thank you card this morning to share. As its for The Male Room Challenge it is, of course, designed for a man with more than a little help from the sketch over at The Paper Players.

This card started life as a technique workshop, where we used dark card stock, embossed and rubbed over with a metallic ink pad, to resemble metal work. Here it is black card and a copper coloured ink on a printing press themed embossing folder ( no idea which brand as I borrowed it on the evening)

I have used this as a top layer, and put some vintage K&Co paper behind it. The banner is stamped with a sentiment from Vintage Verses- I used Chocolate Chip on Kraft card.

I have made a small mat from some DP, from Adventure Bound- these are brilliant papers for masculine cards, and added a small Kraft tag with a stamped vintage car image. I sponged all the edges of the layers with Crumb Cake

The finishing touch is a little clock hand added to point to the sentiment and I've used a small Brad to attach it.

Autumn Retiform

Back to my roots this morning, with some good old-fashioned stamping.

I first saw this technique when a friend posted a card on FB and mentioned that she used the 'retiform' technique. I googled "retiform technique" and there were some excellent tutorials on YouTube. The theme this week at The Male Room is Autumn or fall, so I used my Autumn Days stamp set, which hasn't seen the light of day for quite a while. I added images from Simply Sketched, French Foliage and Lovely As A Tree.

 

I started by masking off areas of the card using More Mustard ink and in this way formed the 'grid'. Then by masking of the individual panels using post-it notes, I stamped the connected images using Tangelo Twist, Chocolate Chip and More Mustard. I made the sentiment attachment using an oval die and the birthday greeting from Simply Sketched. My biggest problem was keeping the ink in the
right place, stamping cleanly and selecting the images moor each panel. Other than that it was a breeze!
Going to link up with the challenge at Make My Monday, haven't played over there in such a long time and I see that they have an Autumn colours challenge.