Faux Pinwheel card

Look out for the new challenge this morning at CAS Colours& Sketches. It's a sketch and it's a really great one, where there are so many different ways of using it.

I had all sorts of stamp sets out on my table for this one, but in the end I saw something on the internet that I wanted to try. It's called a faux pinwheel.

The other change I made is that I decided not to go with the square cards I usually do but to go tall and thin. I moved the panel up to the top of the card, as you can see.

  The sentiment is from Sweet Cake, one of the sets I was originally going to use, stamped in Daffodil Yellow

The card panels I used for the faux pinwheel, the closest match for Coastal Cabana, I embossed, using a Patchwork embossing folder. By carefully positioning the squares of card on the folder I could get a different effect on each square with just one pass through the Big Shot. The red, coral  and yellow DPs are all from my Stampin' Up stash, as is the giant brad. The pinwheel does actually turn as I only attached it using the brad.

If you are wondering about the colours, I had a little help from

The ColourQ Challenge with these gorgeous summery shades

Underwater

Today's theme at The Male Room really had me stumped. Underwater..... um, what could I do with that? My first thought went to the stamps that feature shells, fish, lobsters... But I don't own any of those , then I thought of swimming, coming from a household of competitive swimmers, although it may not be your first thought! Nope, nothing there either. Boats...yes, boats I thought, I have boat stamps, but they are not really under the water, more on top, you would hope. Back to square one, fish. I then had a brainwave. I remembered a piece of DP featuring fish, I'd never used it before because the fish were quite large, may be I could make a card where the paper became the feature. So here it is...

I cut out the paper carefully to ensure the part of the image that I wanted was in the right place. I then 

stamped the sentiment, from Sassy Salutations in Versamark and heat embossed with silver 

embossing powder

Something was needed, so I decided to 'Drop anchor' and I stamped this one. I fussy cut it out, sponged the edge carefully with blue ink so that it blended more smoothly into the paper. Final touch was to cut out a slit and 'hang' the anchor off the sentiment.

After all that I am quite happy with my attempt at an underwater card. Sometimes it feels like cheating to just use a DP on your card but then some papers are amazing, so much so you hoard them and never want to cut them up. If you use them like this I don't think you will be disappointed.