A whole bunch of Daring Cardmakers cards!

I've not updated here in a while so I've got quite a few cards to add! 

I'll start with newest first and work down. This one is for this week's Daring Cardmakers,  http://daringcardmakers.blogspot.co.uk/ which is Jo's challenge to create a card with elastic bands. Jo's suggested using loom bands but I didn't have any of those to use so went around to see if I could scrounge together some regular elastic bands. I ended up with a couple of different widths, mainly the chunky red ones you get on the post. On Pinterest there are a few ideas for stamping with elastic bands and so I decided to use them that way rather than using it directly on a card. I fixed the bands around a clear block in various different patterns and tried it out first on scrap paper. One of the patterns looked like candles so that triggered the idea to just make them into candles. I inked each band on the block in different colour inks, (chalk inks worked the best) and then stamped on the card twice to make the line of 'candles'. The top flame part I used a home made eraser stamp, just carving a bit of an eraser into a flame shape and then stamping it. The greeting stamp is a Lawn Fawn called 'Grand Greetings'. 

This one is from the week before and Kathy's Beach hut dare. I've got a brand new Quirky Kit bundle to use and these are all beachy papers so I went right to those to create a simple beach hut design all made with my paper trimmer. This could easily be translated to a new home or Christmas card, (gingerbread houses?) too.

This one was the colour combo dare for August which you can see here was all blues and purples.

Going through all my scraps purple is not a colour that I could find a lot of. I did find a little bit of cardstock so decided to make kind of double layer greeting. It's just a word die cut, (Memory Box) then that was cut with a circle die, (Xcut) and then another circle of the same size in the turquoise cardstock was cut out. These were then layered together with foam pads. The background is all stamped with two different stamps I found out in mys clear stamp stash. They're from different sets but I mixed the lead and the flower/swirly bit together. I don't know what they are because they're not in the original packets.

This last one was from Lythan's dare which was to create a 'Kathy style' card, http://daringcardmakers.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/creating-kathy-style.html

I went with a 'classic Kathy' flower. It's a die which is my first purchased Sizzix Bigz die, (Camellia). I did see a YouTube of someone using one in a Cuttlebug who made it look easy but it's not you need a bit of muscle power! I used the middle bit of the die to make a kind of pom pom flower and different combination of the sizes to create the other two. I love how Kathy write to 'just scrunch up the paper' to make the 'Kathy' flowers and when I did that mine just looked screwed up!

The background was stamped, clear embossed then watercoloured over the top with an extra swirly bit, (like Kathy's die cut swirls!) handpainted and cut out.

x Leo