Cards for Sad Thoughts

Good Morning! In November, once the foreworks and bonfires are over in the UK we usually turn our thoughts to Remembrance Day, the 11th day of the 11th month. I rather lik the fact that the whole of the country stops at the 11th hour for a two minute silence, even in the busy high school where I work. My husband  and sons also attend the Rembrance service in church on Rembrance Sunday, as members of the local counting group. All that said, I went with a sympathy card for the new challenge at The Male Room.

I love Lovely As A Tree, it's so versatile...here it makes a muted sympathy card. First job was to cut the aperture. After stamping the image in grey, directly on the front of a card blank, I inked up another piece of white card with a selection of sunset colours, just blending and mixing pale pink, oranges and yellows. I cut a similar sized circle from this inked up card.

Using the stamp positioning tool, I lined up the circle underneath the acetate sheet in the correct position and stamped the tree image on top.

Then it was just a matter of popping the circle into place, which I did, through the cut aperture.

 I added a scored border and a generic With Sympathy sentiment. On the photograph below you can see how well the stamped images match up.

After a tip off from fellow DT member,Rocky, I will be entering this card in the challenge at House Of Cards, a new to me challenge blog where the theme for November is a stamped and cut window technique.

Sad, but uplifting was the idea behind this card. I have already had to use it, as a friend of mine lost their Mother in between me making this card and writing the post, it's always useful for me to have one or two of these cards ready to go as I rarely feel like crafting when I get sad news like this.

I made two, the second card using Wetlands and one of those glossy inked up and cling filmed backgrounds

The stamping of the sentiment was not really good enough to use this one as the DT ample but I'll keep it in my stash.

Black Bird

Good morning!  It's my day off but unfortunately I have to go into work this afternoon for some training so just time to create one card, inspired by a few challenges (which is unusual for me, I usually only have enough brain power to focus on one!).
I have cased a sketch from CAS(E) This Sketch and used the theme from Addicted To CAS and made a card which is definitely  Less Is More How's that!

I actually hope that I don't need a Sympathy card right now, but I thought that the bird is uplifting, whilst still being quite somber so I thought it was the most appropriate sentiment, especially with the black frame.  Enough talking, here's my card

 The bird is die cut from DP and then clear heat embossed to accentuate the black.  The frame is actually a peel off, would you believe it, and it took ages to get it in exactly the right place. I have paper pierced around the edges of the frame to add a minimal accent, you can just see it on the photograph.
So that's my crafting done for today, :(

Autumn Sympathy

What I love most about Autumn are the colours of the leaves.  They've only just started to turn where we live, so the beautiful reds, browns, yellow and orange are not yet in full flow and yet, when I saw the challenge on Cas-ual Fridays this week was a clean and simple project inspired by Autumn I knew that it was the colours that I most wanted to feature.

I chose Autumn Days (not very original, I know) and used the leaf and the wheat stems.  I stamped the leaf onto a peachy card blank in several Autumn shades to make a background for the sentiment, which I trimmed with a couple of gold embossed wheat stem images. I think that 'white space' means empty space, rather than 'white', so I hope my card is acceptable as CAS. I thought that this card would be suitable for a With Sympathy sentiment as it is calm and reflective and Autumn, for me is always a little bit sad as the summer has gone and another year will soon be over.