A Trio of Horses

Finished!!!

When I made my challenge card blogged the day before yesterday, I had also stamped and coloured (differently) two other horses. Today, I finished them up. Luckily, I had a nice stack of free papers from magazines with which to cover my card blanks. I used some spare cardstock that wasn't matched up with any patterned paper for the scalloped mats, cut on the Craft Robo. The white ovals were cut on the Robo too, to ensure they matched up nicely with the scalloped ovals. I was considering using my cutting system to make the plain ovals but it's not wise to use two cutting devices for ovals as ovals can have many different ratios of vertical/horizontal diameter. When that goes wrong, it's blindingly obvious.

Half of my box of spare Floral Punch Craft flowers went on this project. I'm glad because I can now make more!! :)

FPC Friday - Gerbera Card

This card took a looonnng time to make but it was worth it in the end. I really love it and I will be making it again! This one has already been sent to a friend for her birthday. It got there quite late, but I only see her once a month and I just wasn't organised enough to get a card to her before the day.

I made one alteration to the card that isn't pictured: I punched a border down the right-hand side on the front, and put a white insert into it. It added a little contrast down the side.

Scrapology Card Challenge for April!

For those of you who don't know, Scrapology is now doing card challenges too. I thought, "Why not?" The requirement is to use a charm.

My butterfly charm came from some earrings from Primark. I have been putting off dismantling them but I finally took one butterfly off and used it.

Also appearing, the Carousel horse I got at Ally Pally!

The flowers are... wait for it... yeah, Floral Punch Craft. These are from book 2, flower number 11, called "Spring is here." But it's done in autumn colours.

I'm pleased with this card, so I have prepared two more horses in different colour schemes. I just need to cut another two scalloped ovals and find some nice background paper for the cards that tone with the other horses, which might be a bit of a task in itself!

Art of Crochet Square 61

What's this? A new pattern! Shortcut bobbles, by alternating taller and shorter stitches. It's a thick, textured square. Very heavy, and taking up a lot of yarn. Great for winter blankets.

FPC Friday - Flowering Cherry Plum

It's that time of the week again, and here's your Friday Flower Fix!

This is the Flowering Cherry Plum. The cherry blossoms are in the process of falling off the trees as I write this, and until I made these flowers I wasn't aware of just how many cherry trees we have around here. They really are lovely.

They're not on a card yet. I keep picking twigs off of cherry trees to use but then I lose them. If I can make my twigs stay put, these will end up on a card, finally!!! perhaps with a lovely oriental theme.

Art of Crochet Square 60

...And we're half way!!! We are over the hump. What you're looking at is the sixtieth square in a 120-square throw. Hooray!!!

I know I've done this pattern before, but have I done this colourway? I feel like I have, but I can't for the life of me find the photo of the square. Odd!

Scrapology Challenge for April

Three months in a row, that's probably a new record!!!

I so rarely do challenges, but I've become attached to the scraplift challenges on Scrapology. This one is B is for Bunting. I've never used bunting before, so I thought I'd give it a go. Another thing I never used before was tickets, or ticket-shaped strips of cardstock, so this was great fun for me.

I used Bloom and Grow paper from My Mind's Eye and some Bazzill cardstock in Java. The border is a Martha Stewart Punch-Around-The-Page set. The triangles are all hand-cut and strung onto a thin ribbon. the tickets were done by folding a strip of paper accordion-style and then using a reverse corner rounder on the stack. The title was stamped directly onto the layout. Flowers in the corner were hand-cut and layered up using foam squares.