Autumn Leaves

Morning crafters, hope you have weathered out the storm and that you are all well? It was really blowing here, not a good day to have a ton of top soil delivered I can tell you lol! It poured down just after it was delivered! My poor cats did not want to venture out at all and thankfully as I cleared my greenhouse out on Saturday the rabbits were moved in on Sunday so they now have shelter for the winter!

 Patricia you must take a look at the CD, the images on there are beautiful its just choosing one that's the difficult bit. I shall look forward to viewing any future projects. I have loads and loads of odd bits in my waste box, I guess I will have to spend one day going through it all.

Now for todays card I decided to go back to my trees again today, I love trees they look so majestic and the bigger the better!

I started by folding a piece of Brown card from Lidls to form a 5x7 base card, on top of this I matted a piece of Create and Craft Gold Pearlescent card. Using the back of Crafters Companion Centura Pearl Silver card I randomly inked using Tim Holtz Distress Inks Vintage Photo, Fired Brick and Crushed Olive then inked round the edge with Vintage Photo. Using Sheena Douglass Little Bit Magical-The Quest I stamped the Maple Leaf with Versamark Stamp Pad over the background and heat embossed with Papermania Embossing Powder-Copper.

Now I wanted to use the Willow tree from Sheena Douglass Little Bit Oriental-Oriental Silhouette and being as it is in Black Silhouette I though it would look good on a dark background so I inked up a piece of scrap card with Versa Color-Royal Blue, stamped on the Willow Tree with Versamark Stamp Pad and heat embossed with Papermania Embossing Powder-Black Sparkle. On trying several dies to see which would look and fit best I decided on Spellbinders Nestabilities Label 20 to die cut the tree, this did not look right sitting straight onto the background so I embossed some C.C. Gold Pearlescent card with Labels 20 to give that extra ridge, cut it out and matted the tree image onto it and attached this to my card with Pinflare Silicone Glue. 

I felt it needed a sentiment of sorts and I wanted to keep the tree theme so I had the idea of printing an image of a leaf with my sentiment on it along with more leaves but my printer had other ideas, no matter how many time I clean the heads the images still print with lines across so I had to come up with another way of doing it, as the leaf stamps I have are too small I had a go at drawing my own. I made myself a template of a Maple Leaf and cut three out of Crafters Companion Centura Pearl Silver card, with two of the leaves I used the pearlescent side and the other one the plain back of the card, I gave each leaf a wash with Tim Holtz Distress Inks Fired Brick, Crushed Olive and Dried Marmalade three times to make the colour a bit intense, I then mixed some Fired Brick and Crushed Olive together and painted around the edge once more, using Dried Marmalade I painted on the stalks lightly, though I do not think they show up in the pictures. Once dry I stamped my sentiment from Creative Expressions Unmounted Stamps-Treasured Memories using Tim Holtz Distress Ink-Black Soot onto the matte leaf and then gave it a coat of Pinflare Glaze, this really brought out the Autumn colour on the leaf, so much so that I wished I had done all three the same!

There you have the finished card, it may be a bit bright for some of you but I liked the contrast of colours and I know you don't get Maple Leaves off a Willow tree but hey...! Anyhow, I hope you like it.

Thank you for looking, Jacquie xxx