May DoCrafts Samples...

    Well, good morning to you! I hope you're having better weather wherever you are - I'm more than fed up with being rained on every time I go outside - this must be our annual monsoon season come early this year. It usually waits until the kids break up for their summer holidays, so we're a few weeks ahead of that and hopefully that should mean we get our soaking out of the way and will return to beautiful sunshine as soon as possible. Not to worry, rain in summertime means time for guilt free crafting and I had lots of ladies attend my most recent demo because that's the thing to do of a wet Saturday afternoon. So here's some samples I made using the box of products from the previous post...

    This is actually one of my favourites for it's sheer simplicity. The glasses and lemons are cut from an Xcut mini die. They have had the cut away inner part coloured in with Artiste watercolour pens which I gave a coating of Anita's 3d Clear Gloss. I used the gloss to make some droplets too. The sentiment has been stamped  with alphas from the DoCrafts Wedding range and the pinata paper is just some yellow paper chopped into with scissors - a technique I love doing!

Here's a nice close up of the detail!

Lots of touchy feely texture!

    Next up – a few samples of cards using the brand new Metallics range. Here I used the Metallic Elements Capsule A4 Ultimate Paper Pack. As always, this pack is rammed full of papers, vellums, alphabet stickers and die cut elements. The vellum is gorgeous and so unusual - it's quite heavy/thick for a vellum and looks fab when run through an embossing folder like this one here which has been through an Xcut Dogtooth embossing folder. That foiling really catches the light and brings lots of texture to make the most of your backgrounds - I love it!

I've colourised the embossed polka dot paper with a gold inkpad. 

    These papers are really striking with lots of high contrast shine, especially when used alongside some mirri board. The ones with a white background can be coloured up too - they are lovely and smooth and take an ink pad nicely. I tried a gold ink pad which had a subtle effect knocking the contrast back a bit. You could try any colour - I'm not done experimenting yet... 

    Next – more Metallics, this time combined with a new Xcut die... called 1920s Dancers!

A twisted easel card

The simple monotone palette of the Metallics works great with the art deco flavour of this die.

This card is made by die cutting with cream coloured card stock – I used the brand new Xcut Couple in Heart die and gently coloured parts of the diecut with a small ink pad which gives a soft blurry pop of colour and draws your eye to different areas.

Here's Gorjuss!!!!!! 

There's a new range of Gorjuss stamps just been released – here are the two I got to play with...

Gorjuss is off on her hols here and is enjoying wearing here pretty sailor bathing suit. There's a lot more detail on this stamp but as she's in an aperture and stamped on the inside of the card, it's cut that lovely detail off. She is actually sitting on a rock with her feet in a little pool of water and has little fishies swimming round her tootsies!. This is the only sample I had time to make as we got our kits only a week ahead of our demos and I really didn't have a lot of time to experiment. I'm sure I'll revisit her though - she too cute not to!

Here's Gorjuss floating Up and Away combined with a vellum foil background from the Metallics pack. I kept this stamped image simple, using copper embossing powder for the image and colouring with a pale brown watercolour pen adding a pop of yellow on the her dress, the balloon and sentiment. She's adorable!

Finally one last card...  I used the large floral number dies for this one. The "sweet" bit was made from mini alphabet dies released last year. Those little alphabet dies are so useful and a great size for cards!

I hope you enjoy the samples here today and if you have recently purchased any of the products used I hope you find some inspiration here! Thankyou for popping by!

Happy crafting everyone,

Love Jak xxx