Tilda-th do us parts...

It was my turn over at Crafty Cardmakers to set the challenge and I didn't have to think about it for very long.  I knew what I was going to set straightaway and I hope you will enjoy it too, it's Cute with a dark twist, just perfect for Halloween!  Much as I like some of the cute stamps you see out there in cardmaking land, I do tend to lean towards the darker side.  So what better stamp to use for my very own challenge than the Magnolia stamp, Tilda with Cherries?  "But that's too cute!" I hear you cry.  "You can't do something dark to a Tilda!"   WATCH ME Bwahahahahaha!  It made quite a refreshing change to abandon my usual skin tone promarkers and reach for the cool grey and light greens, it just felt so wrong!  But it also felt so right for this card.  I think she looks positively zombified with her deathly green pallor don't you?  Yet even in her newly putrified state, she still looked too darn cute... even with her featureless face with the eyes which bore into the depth of your soul...

So I gave her what she has need all along.  Fangs!  They just suit her so much hehe!

I have used some papers from Craft Chaos Design's Creature Feature set.  I have been hoarding these papers for months and been itching to use some of them, but the usual cute and cheerful happy smiley stampy style didn't really fit with them very well, but here, they really come into their own.  I folded the card into a step card as I wanted the zombie girl to have somewhere to sit besides her pumpkin (which was plain until I drew the face on it) and hoped to create a bit of shadow to add to the spooky feel.  The shadow shows great under the room light, right up until I try and take a photograph and then it vanishes.  You can see a bit of it behind her hair - see!  Even now the evil one is taunting me!

The sentiment - and boy is this a sentiment and a half - came from Tiddly Inks.  I have been storing this one up for months too.  I printed it, tore it and inked it up with pepper red adirondack ink and added the finishing touch of some inky/bloody fingerprints - MINE!  So how is that for a unique stamp eh?  Just finishes it off I thought.

Happy Halloween! xx

I would like to enter this for the following challenges:

Addicted to stamps - Halloween

Magnolia Stamp Lovers - Halloween

Totally Tilda Challenge - Halloween Tilda

Tilda, roses and things

Sometimes you just have to face a fear head-on. Regular viewers of my blog may have picked up on the fact that I have a little fear of Tilda, and it's not completely irrational. The featureless children make me a little uneasy if I am honest as the human face as a mouth and a nose as well as eyes... I know I am not alone in this fear too as I saw somewhere on my travels round t'interweb a tutorial for adding features to the faces! A while ago I picked up a couple of Tilda stamps on a sale table and I decided that I was going to be brave and have a go. This is the second one I have done now and they still freak me out a little!

Over at Crafty Cardmakers this week we have a challenge running for Anything Goes!  We've all had a bit of a break over the summer months with one thing and another and this is our first challenge with the newly formed team so it would be lovely if you could pop over and have a look what we have all been doing :)

I have coloured her in red promarkers for the dress etc and used shades of ginger for the hair. I have made all the background papers myself with a combination of repeated stamps and a background stamp I have. The multi-coloured background is made with adirondack inks, dabbed around to make a blended background, then stamped over with clear inks and embossed with clear powder so the colours would show through, then brayered over with red. I really liked this technique and have plans to use it again with snowflakes and the like on xmas cards. At the very back is a piece of Core'dinations black magic paper, embossed with a stripy sizzix plate and then sanded to oblivion to bring out the stripes.  The circles are cut with both plain and scalloped edge nesties. I have layered the card up with red paper to trim and used a scrap to cut a strip of butterflies as a ribbon across the card. The roses are also made using Core'dinations paper roughed up with sandpaper (to match the background) then die-cut using a rose making die. I love the way these form as it just doesn't look like it will work when you are looking at a wiggly spiral of paper but a bit of careful rolling, a good splodge of tacky glue and a hold for a few seconds and hey presto, pretty flowers! The spirally bits form magically when you cut a very thin strip of paper using a blade and a metal ruler.  I discovered this by accident and think they look really pretty and give a bit more dimension to the flowers.

So there it is, a Tilda card, and my second one at that!  As I have been so brave, I am would like to enter this one at Just Magnolia as I have used their sketch for this card's layout.  Papercrafting Journey want to see die-cuts or punches.  Creatalicious Challenges are running one for Anything Goes too :)