Fun fold Friday Saint Nicholas

 My final card for this week is a combined card and gift card holder. It's a super easy fold . The fun comes when you decorate it! I used the dies from Saint Nicholas and pattern paper that coordinates with them Traditions of St Nick. 

The card starts life a as a piece of A4 cardstock scored at 14.85cm and then rotated and scored at 10.5cm. ( basically you take the cardstock and score it into quarters) you then, with the cardstock in a landscape orientation,  remove the bottom left quarter. Now fold the bottom right-hand panel up and the left-hand side over to create your card. As I said this fold is super easy and no fuss!

Now the fun part decoration! I want to use the amazing scene building dies to create a fireplace complete with logs and flames. So I decided to cut an appature into the front panel of the card. Top tip if you're going to cover the panel with pattern paper do so before cutting the appature .

I then decorated the panel that showed through the appature.  I decided to create a room scene complete with flooring and wall paper. 

Once that was done I went to work on the inside panels.

 The one that falls down is where I placed a pocket to add the gift card. 

All in all a simple but fun card perfect for gift cards or money.

Well that's all from me for this week . I have a crafty weekend starting with a team chat on Saturday morning 😀. Gill will be sharing her inspiration here next week so please join us.

Have fun

Cary xx

Watercolour Wednesday Saint Nicholas

 I dream of being an artist 🎨 paintbrush in hand creating beautiful scenes with ease.... in reality I can't even paint a wall without leaving streaks! But today I have created a watercolour night sky that I'm super proud of! I was inspired by a fellow crafter from Australia called Alisa Tilsner. She created a night sky with blending brushes and ink for a card featuring the Saint Nicholas stamps and dies. I love her card but wanted to see if I could create a night sky with ink and water.

I decided I'd give it a go and try to achieve a "proper " watercolour look by using watercolour paper and a piece of chipboard. I attatched my piece of paper to the chipboard with low tack tape.  This helps the piece lay flat as you use quite a lot of water...

Next I added drops of reinker to a palette and ink directly from the ink pad onto an acrylic block as I don't have a reinker for every colour ( note to self ..buy reinkers!)

Next I loaded my waterpainter with extra water and dipped the tip in the palest colour and added colour to the bottom of the paper. Working my way up and keeping the colours wet I used the mid and dark colours until I got to the top. I then let it dry ( I used a heat tool too impatience 😉)

Once dry I went back in but this time I added a drop of black reinker into my palette and added a black wash to the top of the panel. I added more of the other colours and blended them down the paper.

I found that by keeping the piece quite wet it was quite easy to get the colours to blend.

Once I was happy and the piece was dry I splattered the panel with white acrylic paint mixed with a little water. I think it looks like it's snowing at night ..

I popped the panel still attatched to the chip board to one side and set about creating the other elements for the card .

I used the dies from the Saint Nicholas set and die cut out of black cardstock the parts to make a chimney,  I cut some more black cardstock to creat a roof shape and added some of the die cut brick shapes to it.

I then used white cardstock to die cut the snow line pieces and added them to the roofline and chimney. 

A simple card base, mat and sentiment and I was ready to assemble....

I dry embossed the mat and blended around the edges with the same colour blue and a little black ink to give the panel definition.

All in all for me a very "artistic" card which I'm very happy with.