There's Only One You

God Morning!  I am up very early this morning as I had to take my son to work (he's a lifeguard at our local swimming pool). I was going to nip back into bed as I'm on holiday but the day was too good to waste and so I thought I'd post today's card for the challenge at The Male Room instead. The original theme for the challenge was Man's Best Friend, but we've extended it to include all pets, as long as your card is suitable for a male. I stuck with the MBF idea and made another card with my Paisley Pets stamp set.

 It is a variation of a card I made last week, using the Hardwood background stamp to make a picket fence (I even used the scraps I had left from the previous card, how's that for thrifty?) but I've given it a masculine twist with my dog in the grass card, rather than the flowers I used previously. I thought the sentiment went well with the image.  It's all popped up on dimensionals and my dog has two small gems for his eyes.  Instead of embossing clouds as I did before this time I've sponged them in using a scalloped circle, love creating flffy white clouds in this way. The grass is cut by hand.
Do hope you'll join us in the challenge.

Twisted Love and Joy

How silly of me, I seemed to have used the colours from this weeks challenge at 52 {Christmas} Card Throwdown last week! I wonder if that was subconscious...? Here they are

Here is last week's card

See what I mean?

So, here is my card for this week's challenge, and I chose to make a twisted easel card and enter a couple of  my regular Christmas challenges Completely Christmas, where anything goes and Crafty Hazelnuts Christmas Challenge, for making it square, and a new challenge I have found Christmas Fun Challenge blog, a monthly challenge where the cue is a Christmas card for a man (I think this is quite masculine with it's geometric design).

I stamped the Off The Grid image in River Rock, added the fussy Cut Love and Joy, in Tempting Turquoise and used a grey washi tape for the inside of the card. The second shade of blue I used for the matting.  There are various bits of bling, including pearl centres added to the snowflakes on the washi tape and dimensional sparkly white snowflakes on the grid.
A very contemporary card for a colour scheme which lends itself to modern designs or traditional ones.  Do have a look at the work from the rest of the DT, you'll see w.hat I mean.  I always think you should send these twisted easel cards to a card-maker as they only make sense to them!

Images from Indonesia

CAS Colours and Sketches have a sketch for your challenge today, and it's a good one!

Wondering about the title? A very long time ago, BC (before children) I was lucky enough to have an extended stay in Jakarta, where my husband was working.  We lived in a small house in a garden filled with exotic flowers and, in the evening, these little green gekos would come out and cool down on the white walls. Just like these ones..

You will notice that I forgot to add the corner element to the main panel, so check out below. My little geko has some bling to represent his sparkly scales and he comes from a set called Paisley Pets, stamped using my markers so that I could add touches of colour to his, mostly, green body. The leaf is a stick on. With or without? What do you think?

Snowflake Sketch

24 hours later and I make it... my DT post for 52 {Christmas} card Throwdown that is. All was well until an 'emergency' message from my daughter who's on holiday with a friend in Dubai. All is well again, but as you can imagine getting my post up on the blogs took a back seat. It will teach me to be more organised and schedule my posts, and that's what I'm spending today doing!
It is a sketch week at 52 and this is what we have for you

 I have followed the sketch almost to the letter, just moving the position of the bow, but you can play around with it as much as you like, as long as we can still see the elements in there.

I started with the snowflake DP, one from my stash, used the Memory Box snowflake die that my hubby got me for Christmas and then followed the sketch..easy! True to my heart it's quite CAS. I am entering the Anything Goes challenge once again at Completely Christmas, well, why not!

Along The Fence

I have handed over my hostess hat to Jacqueline for the month of April at CAS Colours and Sketches and she is starting us off with three fab colours

Love this combination. Don't worry if you don't have Stampin' Up colours, just use the nearest shade you do have.  This time, I took my inspiration from a card I saw on FB, it was only possible because I was able to borrow the Hardwood background stamp from the lovely Jacqueline, as I don't own it....yet!

The flowers, which I fussy cut, are from Vintage Vogue and the leaves are from Stippled Blossoms.  I used the cloud embossing folder, also from Stampin' Up. It may be a little to fussy for your taste in CAS, but it will pass for me.

Intergalactic Greetings

OK, OK whose crazy idea was it to have Sci-Fi as the challenge over at The Male Room this week?  Oh, yes, that would be mine. I don't know why I did it, I don't own any alien or monster stamp sets, not into digital stamps and, quite frankly, all out of ideas until just now. I do enjoy some good sci-fi movies and I think a lot of our male family and friends, young and not so young are into this particular genre, so I thought it would be a great idea.  Good job I have some great teamies over at the challenge blog as they have all risen well to the challenge!
Here is my card..

Of course I had to make the sentiment on my computer and you will notice that I have used the very versatile owl punch once again to create my aliens.  The DP I found in my stash, it actually has wine glasses all over it (cleverly hidden here) but I thought it looked a bit space-like.
I do hope you have a go at this one, it is a fun theme, perhaps mostly for cards for the boys, but you lot in blogland are always amazing me with your ideas!

Rev Up and Side Step

I thought I would give the side-step card a bit of a masculine, CAS makeover this morning. A side step card is the latest challenge from Technique Time Tuesday, where there is a fab video tutorial to follow if you've never made this type of card before,  The only tricky bit is getting the measurements right, but if you can use a ruler (!!) no problem!
There are so many gorgeous side step cards around on the internet, and some fantastic ones created by my fellow DT members on the challenge blog, and as I said my idea was to keep it clean and simple.  For me, they work best with a single stamp set, to coordinate the images and that's what I've done here with Rev Up The Fun

The colour choice of black, white and red was very intentional. I stamped the car in Real Red and then stamped off twice to give the impression of movement

I used the tyre tread stamp as a border and then just stamped Off The Grid (oops, guess that counts as a second stamp set!) directly onto my card, using my Stamp-a-ma-jig to get it exactly straight and
central.
Really pleased with the way this turned out. I think I will enter it into the one for the boys challenge at Make My Monday too.