Just Take Fifteen Minutes (by Judith)

Hello everyone, it has always been the aim of Chocolate Baroque to inspire and provide the tools for creativity with beautiful stamps, craft materials, and tutorials along the way. On the Design Team Blog, we have always tried to stretch the imagination with intricate and unusual designs using the stamps, but we have also tried to offer some balance by making clean and simple cards as well. We would like to think that we reach crafters of all abilities with our designs, but know that sometimes, beginners or less advanced stampers can feel a bit put off when they see a project that looks too complicated for them.

We'd like to introduce a new feature on the Design Team blog today; a twice monthly blog post featuring cards that have taken no longer than fifteen minutes to create. These cards may be clean and simple in design, or simply a card that just took a short while to put together. The Design Team, along with the Guest Design Team, have been busy creating some beautiful cards, to show you how simple it can be to use a variety of stamps in different ways in fifteen minutes or less. It may help you to look at some of your old favourite stamps in a new light, and see new ways of using them.

We hope that you enjoy this new feature on the Design Team Blog, and like what we have to share with you.

Anne has created some beautiful tree cards, using Distress Inks to stamp the images. To create the soft watercolour effects, she lightly spritzed the card with water after stamping, then used a damp brush to drag out some of the colour. Glitter glue added some sparkle.

Brenda has created a lovely Poppy card with a section of the focal image coloured separately and using a punch or die, has decoupaged the coloured section over the top of the main black and white image. She has used stencilling in the background. Stamps: Pretty Poppies.

For her trio of cards, she has created watercolour backgrounds using three colours of Distress Inks, using a wet, wide paint brush, picking the colour up from a craft mat, and scribbling it onto watercolour card. The colours should overlap so that they blend.She then stamped her chosen sentiment onto the background, and added a few sequins. Stamps: Words of Inspiration, Pretty Poppies.

Dominike simply used what she had on her craft table to create her cards, a great idea, as it is always good to use up your scrap pieces for your crafting projects. She has used pieces of music paper in the first card, and Brushos in the second card.

Claire has created a very delicate Spring themed card, using Brushos.

I have created a mask using cheap copy paper, and sprayed Dylusions through the aperture. I then stamped the image, and painted the butterflies with neat Dylusions spray. I decoupaged one or two of the butterflies for a bit of dimension. Finally I added a sentiment.

This zingy card from Julie makes use of a stencil in the background, and a stamp from the Punky Flowers stamp set. She has added some glitter to embellish the image.

Lesley has created some fabulous little note cards, which are actually offcuts after she had created some square cards. Again, it is a great idea for using leftover pieces up when crafting. Thanks for the tip Lesley. She has stamped the images using black Archival ink, and coloured them lightly with pencils. She has spritzed some Dylusions spray onto a craft mat, and then using a round sponge, picked up some colour, and dabbed over the flower heads. She has stamped the sentiment onto a strip of card, inked the edges, and raised the strip onto 3D foam pads.

Magda has embossed some butterflies onto a splattered background, and added some cheery tape and a die cut sentiment to match.

Rachel's pretty card uses an embossed musical background to tie in with her lovely main image, and some simple inking around the edges of her layers completes the card.

Vronnie has created a variety of cards, using different techniques for us this time around. Firstly, she has used a mask and Distress Inks, to create some lovely background scenes, before adding the lovely thistle stamp in the foreground.

She has then used brush markers directly onto the stamps to create these very quick butterfly cards.

Finally, Zoe has made two beautiful cards combining die cuts and stamping. The first one uses Distress crayons to create her background:

The second one uses Brushos:

So there you have our first selection of cards. We hope that we have given you some ideas, and inspiration, and that you will want to get your own stamps out to try some of our ideas. Look out for our next post involving fifteen minute cards, coming in a couple of weeks' time.