Easter Sunday - 24th April 2011

Last week there were so many Birthdays and leaving do's, I must have made about 10 cards. When they got to work, everyone got writers cramp from signing them all. My colleagues are so keen to get a card, people keep reminding me their Birthday's are coming up!

The two cards I'm showing, both have a Wedding theme. The first (8x8) is for a couple who have chosen a teal and ivory theme for their wedding, so I thought I would go with that. How difficult it is to find the matching colours, I found I was drifting back into turquoise a bit.

All of the images were found on the web from various sites on Google. I've matted and layered them to give a bit of dimension to the card. The card insert above, I put it through the Serif Digital Scrapbook Artist 2 software to make the image transparent. I added the text and printed the page, easy.

The next card (A5) is for one of my colleagues from Bangladesh. It's his wedding anniversary next week and I wanted to try something a bit colourful. Not as easy as I thought, but here it is.

The photo doesn't really show the colours, there's gold backing paper and orange on the paisley paper. I printed and cut out the various topper bits, layered them, using Papermania hand-made paper with gold patterned dots. I inked a butterfly and coloured it by pressing it into the various colours of a Big and Juicy hydrangea ink pad, bent the wings a bit and let it dry. Then I covered the surface with Anita's 3-D clear Gloss finish embossing liquid, as it was drying I added the small glass jewels to the body of the butterfly and the blue flower and let them dry thoroughly. I replaced the antennae with fine purple wire and curled the ends to make them safe. All the paper edges were inked with either Tim Holtz rusty hinge or faded denim. I finally put the card together and added pretty coloured threads to the bottom section.

For the insert this time, I had the white paisley paper open on Microsoft Word 2007. I left it in its original colour for the front, but I faded the insert. here's how: Select the image, select format, recolour and then pick the colour you want to fade it to. I chose a pale turquoise to match the front darker colour. To add the text over the images: Select the image, format, arrange, text wrapping and put the image behind the text. Then you can add what you want and get it in the right place before printing.

I'm off the Austria in two weeks for a month, so I've done all the cards I need to for the duration. I won't be taking any card crafting bits, I shall have to find other interesting things to do. I'll take my laptop, so I can add bits to the blog while I'm away. I'll go and hunt out the craft shops, if there are any!