Crafted by Alison

 Welcome to my blog for those who are coming here for the first time & welcome back to those who've been here before! Well, Melbourne is back in lockdown, again! 4.0 & fingers crossed there's no more to come. The up side of a lockdown is the streets are lovely & quiet & I get lots of time to play around with my stamps & papers. Yay! My cards this week have focussed around the Free as a bird stamp set & Bird Ballad DSP.  I tried to mix things up a little this week with a variety of different card folds & techniques. My first card is an easel fold card using the gorgeous Real Red card stock.   I wanted something simple but still able to be stunning. I started by embossing half of some Basic White card stock with the Bricks & Mortar embossing folder. I then die cut some vines from the beautiful new Big Cats dies (which will be featured in a few weeks time) from Granny Apple green, Pear Pizzazz & Old Olive card stock & placed them to look lik

 Hello again & welcome back to my blog, I've so much fun creating this week! I played around with the brand new Pansy Patch stamp set & matching Pansy Dies. The results are simply stunning, though I don't mean to boast. I hope you love them as much as I do. Here's the pics..... I absolutely love how this first card turned out. I've always loved Pansies but when I got the dies & stamps I thought, how do they go together??? It was actually very easy to do once I had a little play & watched Jo Blackman on Youtube. This card was inspired by a beautiful card she showcased. The base is the new Fresh Freesia with a Gorgeous Grape layer & Basic white top layer. I stamped the pansies using the masking technique & layered them with the leaves & more pansies. The colours are the same as the base & first layer with the centres stamped in Rich Razzleberry & Daffodil Delight. The leaves are the new greens, Soft Succulent & Evening Evergreen. I

 Hello everyone,  Welcome back to my blog. I hope you've had a wonderful week. My week got better as it progressed as I caught a cold & rested up for the first half of the week. I was feeling much better later in the week & able to make some lovely cards for you using the Love of Leaves stamp set & Stitched Leaves dies. These were all made using the same stamp set & two have die cut leaves but they are all quite different. The first card was inspired by a card I saw on Pinterest by Stamp Review Crew & was made using some of the 2019-21 Night of Navy DSP which I cut with the Curvy dies, using half for the front of the card & the remainder on the inside. I die cut some small leaves from Seaside Spray & then mounted them at an angle on the DSP. I stamped a sentiment in Seaside spray on the card base & another on a strip of Seaside Spray using Night of Navy. A simple but effective card. The next card I stamped only with different leaves in Terracotta Til

 Hello everyone & Happy Mother's Day to all the Mums, Grandmums & special ladies today. I was lucky enough to be able to spend time will all my children today & was very spoilt with some yummy food & flowers. It's always nice when we can all be together now that they've grown up & moved on with their lives. This weeks cards are made using a stamp set from the brand new catalogue which launched earlier this week called Etched in Nature. The stamps are very details & as the name suggests, are all about nature. I chose two different styles of card, colourways & stamps.   The first card I used natural, earthy colours & a cute cut out design to highlight the mushrooms & sentiment in the middle of the card. The card base is Crumb Cake with DSP from Forever Greenery which, sadly, is now retired. I stamped the mushrooms in Crumb Cake & hand painted the greenery with an alcohol marker then mounted that on some Shaded Spruce. They are both die

 Hello and welcome back to my blog, Firstly, apologies for the delay in posting this. I never anticipated that getting new floors & my daughter moving back home would delay me posting by 2 whole days! Sorry I couldn't post earlier but I'm back with some gorgeous masculine themed cards using the Beautiful World stamp set & the World Map dies. As I mentioned in my last post, I don't make enough masculine cards so the challenge was to use some retiring products as well as making some much needed male cards for my stash. Here's the cards I came up with for you...... I had a play around with colours, some new techniques & CASED some inspiration from Pinterest. The card on the left used Soft Suede for the base with DSP from the World of Good specialty papers mounted on Basic White. I stamped the sentiments in Early Espresso & Crumb Cake, fussy cutting one & using the die from the Painted Labels dies for the other. I tied in the blue with a scrap of Night o