It's a choose two challenge this week at Just Add Ink and the options we're giving you are I chose flowers and leaves for a clean and simple watercoloured card.  I embossed my stamped image, which gives a nice border when I'm watercolouring, and used my Zig real brush markers. I absolutely love these markers but you do have to be choosy with paper as they don't blend well on all brands. Here I used Ranger's distress watercolour card, stamping on the smooth side.  Materials used: stamps - Caring Thoughts/Dear Friend (Simon Says Stamp) card - distress watercolour (Ranger), gor ..read more

The Color Throwdown people have given us another gorgeous combo to play with, nice and bright and cheerful.  Rather than a birdie, I went for another creature that flies - and dances! I've done some ink blending on the dragon, stencilled clouds behind and stamped on my background piece. In case you're not familiar with this die, the head and body are attached separately and the body swings from side to side in a dance. I did take a short video to show you but Blogger is being uncooperative. It worked on my instagram, so click here and scroll to the second image. Materials ..read more

Thanks for joining me for another challenge with The Card Concept. Hopefully our options will inspire you to create, whether it's for a birthday, wedding/anniversary, friendship, Mother's Day or perhaps just a 'thinking of you'.  My clean and layered card was inspired by the gorgeous pink flowers. My process was perhaps slightly different: I stamped the flower image first so I could then hold the background stencil over it and find what I considered the best layout to suit the stamp. With the stencil in place I coloured my pale blue background with dye ink, not worrying too much if I ..read more

This week's Inspired by...challenge caught my eye.  Umbrellas immediately made me think of Mary Poppins. Anyone else or is it just me? ? No? Ok then, lol. Showing my age I guess. Well anyway, once I had the thought, of course it wouldn't leave me alone, so eventually I sat at my craft desk and made a card. The sentiment was done on the computer (if you know of a stamp set that says this, please let me know!) and I tried to match the font styles from the movie as well as I could, lol. I cut a number of Mary Poppins' in different colour card and cut and layered them, setting them on ..read more

It was my elder daughter's birthday yesterday and she always asks for handmade things from me - you may remember the Harry Potter piece I made her a while back. This time around it's a general reading theme, a passion I have in common with both my girls, I'm thankful to say. It's a shadow box and I've used a number of items from Stamperia's Vintage Library collection. The main focus is the book pages. I used modeling clay and a mold to make the 'books', which I then painted and swiped with gold wax. I toyed with adding more to the sentiment - the words I've used for my header, in fact: no ma ..read more

Welcome back to another Just Add Ink challenge where this week we're offering an inspiration picture to help rev up your creativity. And a mouthwatering pic it is too - take a look: How delicious does that look? Mmmmmmmm... As my daughter has a wedding to attend in a couple of months, I picked that for the theme of my card. Materials used: card - basic white, retired designer paper (Stampin' Up) dies - Celebrate colorize, Crochet (Tim Holtz), Curio Spring Findings (The Greetery), Congrats (stash) Copic markers - BV00, BV11, V09, BG11, BG34, C2, C4 other - pearls, Dimensionals, craft fo ..read more

It may not be my week to create for Just Add Ink but there was no way in the known universe I would miss the opportunity to ... I mean, come on! ?? CHOC. O. LATE.!!!  A number of years ago (we're talking more than 10 years, ohmygosh) Just Add Ink had a challenge to be inspired by the wrapper colours of our favourite chocolate bar (yep, they seriously expected us to pick just one, lol). I was lucky enough to win that challenge, so the bar is set high to best that mouthwatering winner, lol! As luck would have it, I not-so-long-ago scooped up a number of items from Stamperia's Coffee a ..read more

I'm sure you've probably met the very dapper Mr Rabbit already if you haunt blogs, Pinterest or social media like I do. He joined me a week or so ago but I have been saving him for closer to Easter and now it's almost here I happily sat and became acquainted with the gentleman. Here's how our first meeting went: I began by stamping him on two pieces of Tim Holtz's specialty stamping paper so I could get the crispest, clearest image. One of those pieces became my background, which I sponged over with distress ink and did some stamping with other stamps from the set. The second piece I col ..read more

I'm back again with another entry for The Color Throwdown challenge - just kept getting ideas for these gorgeous colours - and this time I'm incorporating it with a second challenge, Inspired By. And here's my card: The flowers and leaves are watercoloured and I set them on some distressed woodgrain card for subtle, organic texture.  Materials used: stamps - Do What You Love (Pinkfresh Studios) dies - Wildflower Stems 1 and 3 (Tim Holtz) other - woodgrain cardstock (Tim Holtz), Zig Clean Color real brush markers, water brush, distressing tool, Dimensionals, craft foam, Big Shot, o ..read more

Who loves colour? Meeeeeeeeeee!!!! Woo hoo, it's time for a colour combo challenge with Just Add Ink and here's what we have for you this week: I gotta say, this particular combo was a true challenge for me because in a month of Sundays I would not have thought to put these three colours together. Peacock and Cajun, sure, both bold beautiful autumnal tones from the same colour family - but to add fresh freesia? Nikki sure wanted to test us all when she picked these! That being said, however, once I (finally!) settled on a design idea and began colouring, I came to like this unusual pairing ..read more