Purple Poinsettia - a non traditional Christmas card.

 This month's challenge at Christmas Kickstart is all about a colour palette.

 Of course this palette is right up my alley as I LOVE the colours of Purple.  I was inspired by my bloggy friend - Linda with her gorgeous entry using a poinsettia.  

I used a Hero Art Woodblock stamp - Antique Poinsettia.   I too two sheets of PP from an Anko pack called Marble.  I stamped first onto a grey marble paper and fussy cut it out.  Added some pale purple marker to the leaf portion.  Next stamped was twice onto the purple marble paper.  Each time in the different shades of purple.  I then fussy cut the two layers.  The second layer had dimensional dots between it and the base, and the top layer was added directly to the second. Three little purple gems finished the centre.  I found the soft purple background in a Recollections pack called Northern Lights.  I decided I needed a little something more, so used a Kaisercraft Rectangle Fancy Frames die to cut a frame.  The sentiment is a Scrapbook.com die that was a gift when buying some stuff from them.  Cut it from purple but it didn't look right - so cut from white and layered the two together. 

And because I used a woodblock stamp, this one is going into Amy's Woodblock Wednesday challenge -Here is the stamp with the card, 

Today was a work from home day so once I finished for the day I quickly did the housework and then off to the craft room for the next couple of hours.  A productive afternoon making this one.  

Shades of Purple.

 

This challenge is just me!  Purple is my favourite colour.    Lately I've been struggling with my crafting... ideas galore, but just wanting to get started has been hard.  About a week ago I took some of my purple scraps and an Altenew flower die cut and made a couple of flowers.   They sat there as I really didn't know what I wanted to do to showcase them.  Last evening, I was rummaging around in my WIP pile and found a background I had done some foiling on.  

My foiled panel is an Altenew stamp that I had stamped, then photocopied with a laser printer so that I could foil it with some silver foil.    As you can see I had covered my flowers with Wink of Stella.  The sentiment is from another Altenew set.  I seem to be using my Gina K Master Layouts on just about every card I do... they make it so easy to layer panels.  

And talking about Gina K... do you watch her live Facebook/You Tube posts?  She has some fun techniques and ideas.  This week's earlier live used a technique called Black Magic.  Basically using white pigment ink to stamp on black card and then once it dried, used pencils to colour in the image.    Today I was feeling unwell in the morning so spent time in bed resting.  I got up at lunch time and decided I felt a bit better and wanted to try out the technique. 

I used the same stamp set that Gina used.. one of my few Gina K stamps.  My white pigment ink is very old so had to use my MISTI and stamped each image twice to get a semi-reasonable amount of ink down.  Once it dried, I used Prismacolor pencils and one Jasart pencil to colour the image in.  Added some white gel pen dots on the centre of the flowers.  I used the same purple card as my layer, to die cut the Hero Arts sentiment - 3 times to add dimension.  So pleased with the results.  

I'm entering both of these in the flower challenge.  

Thanks for stopping by... I've been watching the New Zealand sailors racing here in Auckland and today they won the 7th race to win the 36th America's Cup challenge.... a very exciting few days with racing against Luna Rosa Prada Perelli.   We were defending the cup so exciting to keep it here in NZ for the next few years.