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Thursday 12 January 2017

Rainbows, Glitter and Unicorns

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you've all had a brilliant week and that you haven't been effected by the bad weather. We've not had any snow yet but there are warnings posted on the sea front warning that flooding is expected and not to walk along the sea front until the weather improves. Hopefully this will stop people playing chicken with the high waves but probably not! We aren't in any danger of sea flooding as we live on the edge of town (and in a first floor flat too) but I'm praying that the flooding isn't as bad as expected.

I forgot to take any photos of the desk tidy I was planning on sharing with you but I have a rather cute card to share with you instead. I was blessed so much last year to win a couple of MFT stamp sets in a Facebook giveaway featuring unicorns (with optional wings) rainbows and a load of sentiments. A lot of the sentiments I probably won't use as they have the American spellings and I prefer to have sentiments spelt correctly (or rather using the English spellings) because I'm rather fond of the 'u's in favours, flavours and favourites (lol all my f words have been underlined in red!) Luckily the sentiment I chose for this card is spelt the same in either country.




I'd like to apologise for the quality of these photos, they don't seem to be as bright as normal (though at least they aren't blurry for a change lol) I didn't have long to take many photos because I needed to get it posted and with impeccable timing my camera had very little charge left and switched itself off just after I took the third photo - still at least you're not having to wade through lots of nearly identical photos ☺.

I've been buying a lot of cheap dies on Ebay that usually come from China - sometimes they take a couple of months to arrive and the packaging they come in are just flimsy cellophane bags but considering how cheap they are (and they cut very well, at least I've not had a bad one yet!) it's worth having to repackage them and wait a while for them to arrive. The stitched sun and rainbow as well as the cloud die came in a recent order, one that actually only took a couple of weeks to arrive and I've totally fallen in love with them. I've been admiring all the stitched dies that have been doing the rounds for the past year or so but apart from the odd one, I've not been able to add any to my stash because to be honest the named brands dies are really expensive and I've chosen to spend my limited funds on other items instead. I'm so happy that I can now use a variety of stitched dies on my projects and I'm particularly pleased with how this one turned out. I teamed the sun, rainbow and clouds with the MFT Birdy Brown Magical Unicorn stamp set and I think they go perfectly together especially as I coloured the unicorns' manes and tails in rainbow colours. I made the glitter background by adding strips of extra wide d/s tape onto a piece of card and after removing the backing paper, I sprinkled the sticky surface with fine glitter and rubbed it into the surface firmly with my finger - it's a rather messy technique but as long as you rub the glitter hard, it shouldn't shed afterwards. I die cut all elements out of plain white card and coloured in as needed. The rainbow die doesn't stay in one piece but that makes it easier to colour separately. The original panel of card was A6 and the sun hung over the corner which looked good but I was worried about it getting damaged on an A6 card blank, my first thought was to add a double wonky stitch line around the edges of a blue card piece to frame the panel but I didn't have a blue that went with the greenish blue glitter on the panel so I ended up folding an A4 sheet of card in two to make an A5 card blank then repeating the glitter background using more d/s tape (FYI - I bought the extra wide d/s tape after seeing Christine Smith AKA CRaFTi PoTeNTiAl using it on some of her YouTube videos, she uses Tonic Studios Nuvo extra fine glitter or micro beads but I just used what I had on hand) and glitter directly onto the front of the card blank. I then added the panel onto the glittered front using a strong wet glue and held it in place with an acrylic block while the glue dried. I stamped the unicorn, stars and sentiment inside and coloured using very basic colours of ProMarkers as I wanted to keep the colouring simple. I added a tiny clear jewel to the tip of the unicorn's horn using some matt adhesive so if it oozed out it couldn't be seen then added some clear Shimmer brush marker to the unicorns' manes and tails and the rainbow. I added gold Shimmer brush marker to the inside unicorn's hooves and silver metallic marker to the outside unicorn's horn, hooves and wing - I went over these parts with a layer of Glossy Accents. I added some clear and blue sequins as shown and adhered a tiny clear gem to the centre of each sequin using more of the matt adhesive.

I really love this card and I just hope the recipient likes it too! I might not do the glitter back ground much until I've had a chance to bulk buy some fine glitter because it did use rather a lot especially as I ended up doing two backgrounds in the end - it was worth all the mess though! I've made an envelope for it using some embossed card stock in red but unfortunately my camera died before I could take a photo.

Weather permitting, my lovely friend Jean and her son are coming to visit on Saturday and I'm going to have a good tidy up session tomorrow so it'll be a few days before I'll have another chance to make anything. As always if you have any questions or comments then please leave them in the usual places. I love to read what people have to say and enjoy it when we get to exchange ideas. Until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx

3 comments:

  1. Great card, really lovely. We've had gale force winds & torrential rain the last couple of days, not much better today. I live on the North West coast (UK) so there's usually some pillocks that must endanger their lives by getting too close to the sea then expect to be rescued!

    Michele

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  2. Thanks Michele. We've had a surge tide here on the east coast so there's been a lot of flooding mainly in Scarborough and Whitby, not sure if we've been affected so much. We had a young woman swept out to sea a few months ago when the we had an unusually high spring tide and I thought she'd been walking along the front but it turned out she'd actually gone down a cobbled boat run and was playing chicken with the waves - she'd even had a friend video it! I sometimes think the air sea rescue and life boats should charge people who endanger themselves like that - maybe then the resources could be used for what they were intended for. *steps down off soapbox*

    Crafty hugs,
    Sarah xxx

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  3. I agree re coastal rescue. I think if the public are caught out because they're doing something stupid then they should have to pay up!!! Same with the Mountain Rescue etc. Soap box going away for today....!!!

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Sarah xxx