Nuts About You Card

Hi everyone,

I have a special guest designer on my blog today. His name is Leo and he is eight (sorry, nearly nine - he told me I had to say that!) years old. Here he is:

We decided to enter the card in the PDE Linky Pary. You can see all the other fab entries and amazing design inspiration by clicking on the picture below:

I'll hand you over to him for the description of his masterpiece, which is pictured below:

"The inspiration for this card was mostly nature and outdoorsiness. I wanted to cut something out with the Cricut Explore and Jennie said "why don't we cut something out, like a rabbit or a fish", so we did a rabbit - which was blue. I loved it so much I wanted to do something much bigger than a little rabbit, so we got some ideas from the free stuff on the Cricut website. There was some writing that said "nuts about U" and it really brightened my day. After that we found a nice little peanut with a top hat so we put that on. Then we took a little while to cut them all out on the Cricut Explore. After, we decided to discuss what colours we could use for the card and it turned out that we would use some patterns. One was spotty and one was a very nice brown wood.

We cut some shapes out with the Cricut Cuttlebug. We decided to do a heart and a banner. The heart had stawberries on and the banner had the outdoors on it. To finish it off we got some string that was gold patterned and made a bow. Next I wrote "love you" on the banner and I gave the card to my mum and my sister, who has just come back from university :-)"

Thanks for stopping by to take a look at Leos card. Please write him a comment - I know he'd love it!

You stand out from the crowd card

Hi Everyone,

So it's been another long break since my last post (I've been busy moving house and jobs so I've not had as much time for crafting as I'd have liked) but I've finally found the time to get back to what I love - and what better way to do it than with the awesome Lawnscaping challenge. This time they're after a black and white card with a splash of colour. Click on the picture below to go to the blog post to see all the amazing entries and inspiration from the design team:

Since the challenge involves using black and white I decided to go with a more masculine design, using this cute rhino image from the Critters on the Savanna stamp set from Lawn Fawn. I started my card with a piece of Neenah Desert Storm cardstock which I cropped to a 4.5inch by 4.5 inch size. I then made the background for my design by stamping the rhino rpeatedly onto Neenah Solar White cardstock with Memento Tuxedo Black ink. I coloured the images with copic markers (three shades of warm grey) and fussy cut them - I had intended to use a masking technique but after several failed attempts I decided I preferred the cut and stick option. I glued the rhinos into a tiled pattern.

For the centre rhino, I added red shorts and a pair of shades and fussy cut him with a white border so that he stood out more against the background. I then layered the background and centre rhino with foam tape to create dimension. I added black liquid enamel from ranger to make the sunglasses shiney.

I completed my card with a sentiment I created using anothy Lawn Fawn stamp set - Smitty's ABCs. I stamped directly onto the craft cardstock with Versafine ink.

So there we are folks - my finished card! I really enjoyed getting out my copics again - I never get tired of the amazing shaded effects you can create with them. Anyway, that's it from me for now. All that's left to say is please leave me a comment if you liked my card - it would make my day :)