Fifteen Minute Cards

Hello everyone, today sees our regular monthly offering of quick and simple projects from the Design Team. These are cards, tags and other designs made in fifteen minutes or less, showing that you can produce fabulous results in just a few minutes. We hope to share lots of tips and ideas with you throughout the blog post, and if you would like a bit more information, you can click on the Design Team members' names to go to their individual blogs. Here you will find their projects in more detail, and lots more of their atwork as well.

We have a selection of cards from Anne this month, the first, a pretty monochrome card, made in shades of blue. She has used Spring Bird Crocus and Breath of Spring stamp sets to create her card, and Chipped Sapphire Distress Ink, which gives the perfect effect of blue and white pottery, the look that she was aiming for. She used fancy edge circle dies to cut the stamping plate and background, and stamped the image with Distress Ink, dragging the colour out with a damp brush. Extra colour was added by picking up colour from a craft mat with a water brush. The corners were stamped directly onto the card front.

Anne has also made some beautiful mandala cards in a selection of colours for us this month. She stamped the images with Versamark, and then embossed them with sticky embossing powder, adding mixed coloured gilding flakes over the top. She coloured the mandalas with both water based media and sparkle pens.

The backgrounds were completed very quickly with a large soft brush and Distress Inks through a large mandala sterncil. The middle section was not inked, as it was covered by the topper. A scalloped die was used to cut out the topper and 3D pads were used for dimension.

Gerrina has created two very different cards for us this month. The first, a clean and simple card, using one of our lovely poppy images, matted onto co-ordinating card. This is such a useful card, suitable for so many occasions.

For her second card, she made a mask for the main flower, and stamped it in red and yellow Distress Ink. She coloured it by pulling colour from the stamped edges, using a water brush. She stamped it again using Memento Inks.
The flower in the background was coloured as before, by pulling colour from the edges with a water brush. She stamped a Thank You sentiment in red ink, and glued the background onto red card stock.

Claire's card was made by a quick swipe with Versamark over a kraft card blank, then adding White Pearl Pan Pastel. She stamped the crocuses and the sentiment, and coloured the image with pencils.

We have another Spring-themed card from Marga. She has stamped the Spring Bird Tulip image twice, colouring one of them, leaving the other black and white. She cut a circle from one, placing it over the other, creating a spotlight effect. The sentiment is from the Words to Dazzle and Sparkle stamp set.

Brenda is back with four delightful cards to share with you this month.  For her first card, she created a background by inking up a mixture of stamps using water based markers. The stamps were from the Silhouette Grasses, Spring Foliage, and Spring Birds multi-buy stamp sets. The sentiment is from the Glorious Spring stamp set, and she stamped more of the foliage around the smaller panel. Foam pads were used to adhere the smaller panel to the background for dimension.

For her second card, she masked a panel and inked it with three colours of Distress Ink. She added a spritz of pearl mica spray to give some sheen. She stamped the rabbit image from the Glorious Spring stamp set and a sentiment from the Words of Inspiration stamp set, using Black Archival Ink.

Using the largest daffodil stamp from the Spring Birds multi-buy stamp set, she stamped the image with Sepia Archival Ink, and coloured it in with glitter pens. She added a sentiment from the Glorious Spring stamp set using the same ink.

For her final card, she masked a side panel an created a soft background using Pan Pastels. She then stamped both tulips from the Spring Birds multi-buy stamp set using Black Archival Ink and coloured them in using watercolour pencils. She also stamped a few flowers along the base using images from the Silhouette Grasses stamp set and added a sentiment from the Words of Love stamp set.

Julie has combined a stencil with her stamped images to make her Spring scene. The lovely image is a reminder of sunny days ahead, hopefully!

Magda has created two very pretty floral cards to finish our offerings this month. Her first, is a romantic Art Nouveau style card, utilising one of the Rennie Mackintosh inspired images. The layered background is a great idea, especially if you have lots of small leftover pieces of background in your stash.

Her second card is a pretty Pan Pastel card, with a harlequin design in the background, and added glossy accents for texture.

We hope that you will find lots of inspiring ideas in our post this month, and will try some of the designs out for yourselves. We will be back next month with another bumper post, but in the meantime, do keep visiting the Design Team blog for a daily dose of inspiration.

Thanks for stopping by,