Lucky Charm

Just when you think the worst of the weather has gone, it decides to come back for more!  It's been really cold, with strong winds making it feel even colder but at least the snowfall has been light this time around.

I kind of got a little carried away this week making cards, well the weather was lousy and I wasn't going anywhere.  I had three attempts at making something for this week's  Freshly Made Sketches Challenge

 

The first two attempts were fine but just felt that they were, perhaps, just a wee bit too dark.  I had a couple of sets of stamps which I recently acquired and wanted to have a bit of a play with those, I thought that the Woodware "It's The Little Things" sentiment stamp "Nothing says Happy Birthday like a piece of folded card!" was quite amusing and decided to use that for the first one.  I had some matt copper metalic cardstock and went for a verdigris colour ing using distress inks for the front panels.

 

Still using the verdigris look, slightly darker  this time, I played about with some dies I had bought from "The Works" earlier this year, they have only started selling dies in the last 12 months, some branded names & some of their own.  The ornate & square dies in this card are from their own collection.

and for the third one I dug out an old set of matching stamps & dies.

Over the weekend it was St Patrick's Day with Ireland playing England in the Six-Nations Rugby Championship.  An Irish win on St Patrick's Day would see them with the Triple Crown and the Grand Slam. I didn't have anything with a shamrock on it but I did have the Lawn Fawn set with the lucky four-leaf clover on it so decided to use that.  I was making the card while the game was on in the background, it must have done the trick as they beat England 24-15 and won the Triple Crown (they beat Scotland, Wales & England), the Grand Slam (as the Triple Crown plus France & Italy) and ,of course, the Championship.

Good Luck!

The exam season has started here in Scotland and tomorrow my teenage son sits the first of his Nationals (they replaced Standard Grades/O Grades last year). 

Whilst he doesn't really need  any luck as he's been doing lots of studying I thought I would make him a Good Luck card.

He's really into Manga and Anime art work so when I saw that Lawn Fawn's Good Luck Charm set had the Maneki Neko (Chinese Good Luck Cat/Japanese Beckoning Cat) I decided to get it. On doing some research I found that green is used with the Maneki Neko to denote education and studies so decided to use that colour as a starting point and, eventually, came up with this:

 

I used some gold pearlised cardstock as card blank then added a light green card from a Trimcraft Serenity 6x6 pad to make the card front. I used more of the gold pearlised (coloured with ProMarkers) to mat and layer in order to create embellishments with the Lawn Fawn stamps/dies. A Creative Concepts Script embossing folder was used to create a panel for one of the layers.