Friday, March 30, 2012

Material Girl

All week I've been meaning to blog this one - it's another of the cards I've made with the latest Funky Hand download "Spring Has Sprung". 
  The designs and colours are so perfectly pretty for this time of year and I know that these papers are going to come in really useful in the future too - the sort of collection you come back to again and again.
They would also be absolutely brilliant for the current Get Funky challenge; "Spring Celebration"......
Here's a little collaged of what you get for the bargain price of £3.19
 
 Next stop is the new challenge from The Daring Cardmakers and this week it's Keilly's turn to do the honours:
Material Girl"
We want to see you using some fabric on your creations - not just a bit of ribbon or lace though - that would be too easy! 
You can add those too, of course, but we'd really like you to be a little more adventurous and try using some fabric as a background, or use it to make your embellishments from.
We have the most wonderful Design Team - it doesn't matter how tough the challenge seems (and being wonderful doesn't stop us moaning when they are tricky), so please visit the DCM BLOG and see the fab creations on show there this week!
I had a couple of goes with this challenge - Number 1 went in the bin so you won't be seeing that!  The idea was ok, but the execution was pants!  The idea was to make my card just as I usually do, but to substitute fabric for paper wherever possible.  What I didn't think through properly was how difficult it is to make nice straight, even edges with fabric, so it all ended up looking a bit of a dog's breakfast.
On to Plan B then!
Instead of the gingham fabric I'd unearthed from my (large) fabric stash I resorted to paper this time.  My material elements are the flower and the decorative border. 
Does iron-on Vilene go "off"?  The stuff I have is a good few years old and certainly didn't want to stick to the fabric so instead I used some Bondaweb to give the fabric more stability.  It's a beautiful lawn fabric that I've had stashed away for ages (too pretty to cut)
Using dies to cut the petals for the flowers was successful so I thought I'd see if a border die would also work on the fabric - it's a really quite intricate pattern and I was pretty pleased at how well it worked.
Materials:
Papers: MME 6x6 "Howdy Doody" pad from Miss Caroline collection
Fine lawn flowery fabric backed with Bondaweb
Paper flowers and pearl strings from Creative Treasures (I made the pearls into loops for a change)
Jewel brad for flower centre, stick on pale pink pearls
Tools:
Decorative border and corner element both from Spellbinders Moroccan Accents set
Spellbinders Labels 18
Tim Holtz Bigz Flowers die
Craft Robo to cut sentiment
I forgot to add dots to the letter i's so need to do that before I send this one off - it just doesn't look right to me without!
That's it for this time, thanks for visiting.  Hope your weekend is sunny and bright!

5 comments:

Angelnorth said...

Fab cards, love the fresh look of the gingham with the flowery border!

Lythan said...

those flowers are amazing Kathy and I do love the fresh colours in the Funky Hand download

tracy said...

those are lovely cards kathy-nice and spring like :)

Gez Butterworth said...

Beautiful, beautiful cards Kathy. I LOVE your style.xx

Janice said...

Very pretty Kathy.