One Layer Card - Flower - Less is More Challenge Week 293

My challenge entry

Eek! This one was tricky! The idea of a One Layer Card is that you actually do your thing on the actual cardstock. So, if you mess up, you have to start again, (0r keep going to see if you can redeem it or it is binned). Also no sticking up bits, or embellishments and no sticking a piece of other card or paper onto the cardstock after you've worked on it. The Challenge is HERE

365 Cards Day 217 Stamped background

Catch up time again, and working from my brief list again, so when I post this one I might find it's not quite up to challenge! Anyway, what I think I'm supposed to have done in early October for this one is to stamp the background in the same colour as the cardstock. Which I've done. These are the leftover bits from the cardstock I printed up for the Day 245 Inchie challenge, because I started off thinking I wasn't brave enough to use the Inchie by itself. But when I tried the elements altogether, I ripped off the two layers of matting I'd mounted the Inchie on, cut a new blue one inch centre and added another layer underneath, and hey presto - another challenge card done & dusted!

Same materials used as with Day 245 Inchie card.

365 Cards - Day 43 - Scor-It Sunday Gift Card Holder

So, here we are, Scor-It Sunday, now that my fellow bloggers have sorted me out on Gift Cards and pockets: for anyone who's interested, a gift card is a plastic card (about credit card sized) that appears to have replaced the old paper gift vouchers. And now I come to think of it, Argos gave me a free £10 one when I bought that de-humidifier last year, wonder how long it lasts and more importantly, where is it? And the pocket is in the inside not the outside, otherwise it's not a surprise! (Actually anyone getting a gift card from me would be surprised with or without the holder lol) Talking of no surprises, I used the scraps from yesterday's Stampin' Saturday background, which despite the tiny dimensions of the card (3.5"x4" ish) didn't quite fit, hence the judicious use of some orange ribbon to cover the join...

This pic is of the scraps before I started, I've still got a few tiny bits left, but I think I'm going to have to admit defeat on using them on another card by themselves, unless it's for a doll's house... but don't be surprised if they appear on something else later on!

Inside the card holder I have a pocket with a cutout so you can get the gift card out (using the Quilting Ovals I bought yesterday at Hobbycraft as a template), and a 'Happy Birthday' sentiment in Versacolour Peony; sorry forgot to rotate it before I uploaded it!

The cardstock holding everything together is a piece of Canford Orange thin card. I was going to make an envelope out of the rest of the orange card, but after I'd carefully measured the dimensions and worked out 'seam allowances' for the flaps, I really carefully cut out a rectangle for the envelope without the allowances after all that counting and calculating. So, no envelope. Sigh there is no end to the muppetry really. Good black comedy moment though when I realised what I'd done...

Talking of black comedy moments, or in this case, multicoloured ones, those VersaColour inks had STILL not dried on the cat stamping - and i'm now the proud possessor of a cat face imprint on three of my fingers - lucky I'm not back at work until Tuesday, hopefully it'll wear off before I get mocked!

365 Cards - Day 42 - Stampin' Saturday

Today's challenge is to stamp up the background paper yourself. Right up my street I thought, until I realised that I don't really have any stamps that aren't Easter or Christmas, except the flower ones I've already used.

So, I picked this Hampton Art Stamps Sketched Cat one up today in Hobbycraft's clearance for under £1 (see Day 37, I went for Chipboard to decorate, but they didn't have any undecorated, so I bought lots of other stuff instead...) A good bargain I think.

I used the rest of the orange acrylic decorated cartridge paper left over from my Day 37 card, and Versacolour's Magenta, Peony & Brown. I'm an huge fan of their small inkpads, they give a really good colour at a good low price, but they take ages and ages to dry. Pretty much my cardstock is 5"x5" or 5"x7", so I can get two cards plus some scraps out of a single sheet of A4 pre-coloured paper. There's enough scraps for another card, so this colourway/ image may yet appear again...

In the end I waited a couple of hours, then blasted with the hairdrier, but still smudged it a bit when mounting it onto the cardstock. Luckily it's a smudgy kind of stamp; so as long as no-one looks too carefully, I'lll get away with it.

What I want to know though is how long it normally takes these inks to dry and how can you speed it up so that it doesn't smudge?

Maybe the answer is to colour and stamp up a vast range of papers ready for every possible challenge the DT sets us so that they'll be dry in time?

There's a theme to my cards, I'm doing each daily challenge (sometimes a day or so behind) from whatever papers I've got out on my table, which is why you get a run of them all using the same papers/ inks/ images etc. Eventually, I'll end up with a stack of cards and an empty stash... (except today's Hobbycraft extravaganza more or less filled up the spaces I'd made so far sigh)

Now then, next week is going to be a REAL challenge - starting tomorrow it's Scor-It week - which is a board & tool system for making lines in cardstock who are sponsoring the 365 Cards Blog - apart from the chance to win a Scor-It, it'll be very interesting seeing how scoring can be used creatively. We're assured you can do all the challenges with a bone folder, so bone folder at the ready: I'm not convinced it's going to be easy, but it will be interesting, and I suspect we're going to learn a lot!