Swaps from Convention

Hi there

Well, I think I have just about caught up on my lack of sleep over the weekend.  But I cant believe that Convention has been and gone :-(

Whilst I was away, my hubby decided to sort out a problem we had with our shower.  We had noticed a couple of months ago that the cubicle may have been leaking as there were some strange marks developing on the landing wall so he decided to investigate whilst I was in France.

He was right, we had a massive problem which resulted in having to remove the wall between the bathroom and the landing!  He has been so busy sorting it out, but were getting there now and have replaced the shower with a bath (which I prefer anyway) and have a separate bathroom & landing again!!!

Anyway, enough of real life, back to Convention!  Here's a photo of the one I made - thank you Sara! (I had a problem with the photos I took and Sara rescued me last night by taking some for me LOL).

To start, I had a play with a technique that I really don't do enough.  I'm not really sure what its called but I used a non stick craft sheet and swiped ink pads (Riding Hood Red, So Saffron & More Mustard) onto the mat and then spritzed the sheet with water.  Then you put your card onto the sheet (this is quite messy, but you get some great results).  You then use a heat gun to dry the card and repeat the inking if needed.

Now, one thing with Whisper White is that it DOES NOT LIKE GETTING WET!!!  It is designed to be really absorbent to soak up ink and if it gets too wet it goes all bubbly and the fibres can come off.  However, I found out that even thought this happened on a couple of the sheets after getting it too wet, once it dried the texture it left was really nice.

Once all the sheets were dry, I ran them through the Big Shot using the Leaves #2 die.  This gave me leaf shapes in mottled coloured card.  To make the leaf toppers, I ran some Riding Hood Red cardstock through the BS again with the Leaves die to give me the same leaf shapes and glued them, slightly off set, to the mottled leaves, adding some Linen Thread, tied around the stems.  The 'Paris' image was stamped in Riding Hood Red ink onto So Saffron card and then punched out using the 3/4 circle punch.  It was glued onto the leaf and then covered in Crystal Effects.

I made my own backing paper using sheets of Whisper White card and randomly stamped all over the sheet with images from French Foliage using the Baby Wipe technique (inks used were Riding Hood Red, So Saffron & More Mustard).

Then I cut strips of the backing paper and mounted them onto a mat of Riding Hood Red, scoring lines, really close to the edges (not sure if you can see it though).

The card blank was So Saffron and I stamped the En Francais background stamp on one corner (masking off the rest of the card blank) and then used the 'splashes' image from French Foliage to the rest of the card front.

To finish, the strip with the backing paper was adhered to the bottom section of the card blank and the leaf topper added.  I didn't put a sentiment on them as I thought that if the ladies wanted to use them at a later date, they could add their own making them specific to the event.

Thank you for stopping by, I will be posting some photos of the Card Candy swap in the next day or two