Majestic Unicorn

My creativity has been on hiatus.  There is a reason for this - my attention has been elsewhere.  You see, it all began with Black Panther, which led me to find out who Danai Gurira was, which led me to the Walking Dead where I boarded the Good Ship Richonne and sailed to Binge Watch Island.  I followed a trail that led me to the rabbit hole that is fan fiction which I promptly fell so deep into that I'm surprised I can still see daylight!

Anyway, I'm determined to claw my way back out and regain some sort of balance in my life and get back to making and creating in some capacity.  After catching up with my blog reading list I decided to join in with last week's Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge - Animal Magic.  I cut several star garlands from gold mirror card to create the backdrop and then overlaid nesting stitched edge oval die cuts in white and gold.  Finally I used the Tattered Lace Majestic Unicorn die for the focal point.  

Woodland Christmas

I've seen a few cards on Pinterest featuring a silver birch style background which I really liked.  So I bought myself a birch tree background cutting die and made my own version. I really like how it turned out.

I started with an A6 plain white card blank.

For the background I used Distress Stains in blocks of colour (from top to bottom: Chipped Sapphire, Wilted Violet+Broken China and Broken China).  I simply swiped the stain across the card in stripes, overlapping the colours in each block for a smoother transition.  Wilted Violet on its own was too purple, so went over the top of it with Broken China to get more of a blue hue.  I also dotted Chipped Sapphire across all three colour blocks in several places, which also helps to blend the colours.

I die cut the birch tree trunks from white card and lined the die cut up with the top and sides of the card over the coloured background.  The die cut did not reach all the way to the bottom so I cut a couple of snow mounds from white card and placed them at the bottom of the card, then went over them with a Spectrum Noir clear sparkle pen for a glistening snow effect.

The deer are from the Tattered Lace Family Outing die set.  I cut them from white card and coloured them using Spectrum Noir markers, going over the spots on their backs with a white gel pen.  I stuck the doe straight on to the card and used foam pads for the fawn.

At this point I decided to add some snowfall to the scene by dotting snowflakes onto the background using a white gel pen.

Finally, I stamped the sentiment into the corner.  The stamp I used is from a set that came with issue 35 of Creative Stamping magazine.

The Paper Players #281 - Cats and Dogs

This week on The Paper Players the theme is "Raining Cats & Dogs" - use a cat or dog on your card.

I've put together another digital creation:

I love CraftArtist.  It's such a powerful program considering that it was designed for hobby crafters and scrapbookers.  I didn't have any actual images of cats or dogs, but there are some animal punches that come with the program so I punched out the cats and dogs from various patterned papers and added a black outline to help lift them off the background.  I did the same for the bench.  I really couldn't think of an appropriate sentiment, but it looks like all the animals are hanging out so in the end I went with "Let's Get Together".