Fifteen Minute Cards

Hello everyone, welcome to our second Fifteen Minute Blog post of the month. In these posts, we aim to bring you lots of ideas that are simple and quick to make, but still have lots of style and creativity that will please and impress the recipient. We will give you lots of tips alongside our projects and links to our own blogs where you can see the projects in full. We are joined by members of the Guest Design Team each month, who also share lots of their beautiful designs with us.

Anne has created three pretty floral cards for us this time, using delicate blues and lilacs to enhance the images, creating a soft water-coloured effect:

Dominike has used vibrant yellow tones to create gelli print backgrounds, adding stamped images, and leaving lots of white space for a classic CAS feel to her cards:

Rachel has made two beautiful cards for us using some of our bird stamps. She has used water based markers, stencils and Distress Inks to complete her cards:

I have made a card using stamps from the Butterfly Blush stamp set to create a background, and then added a co-ordinating image from the Just Butterflies stamp set, you can find further details here:

Vronnie has created a fun steampunk card using images from the Steampunk Birds stamp set. The muted background draws the eye to the vibrantly coloured birds:

We have two delightful tags from Magda to share with you. The first is a pretty floral tag, using Dylusions to create the background:

The second is a textured Christmas tag:

Brenda has created some beautiful cards again for us this month. The first was made by creating a background using Brushos. She then stamped a sentiment from the Words of Inspiration stamp set and a focal image from the Butterfly Flourish Swirls stamp set, using gold embossing powder:

She created another Brusho background for her second card, onto which she repeat stamped leaves from the Autumn Poppy stamp set, and heat embossed with copper embossing powder. Using the same ink and powder, she embossed a sentiment from the Words of Inspiration stamp set onto a strip of vellum, and embellished the card with some twine and two leaves die cut from offcuts of the background.

For her third card, she created a background using an acrylic block which had gridlines, inking with different colour Distress Inks, and spritzing with water before stamping and overlapping the colours. She then stamped an image from the Glorious Spring stamp set and added a sentiment from the Words of Inspiration stamp set with Black Archival Ink.

She stamped the Flora Musica image with Versafine Onyx Black Ink, and embossed with clear embossing powder. She coloured the image with sparkly pens and inked the edges with Distress Inks. She matted and layered the image with co-ordinating card and tied some organza ribbon.

Creating a background with Distress Crayons, she then randomly stamped sections of the harlequin stamp from the Decorative Edges stamp set and added a sentiment from the Words of Inspiration stamp set. She stamped and cut out an image from the Tangled Butterfly stamp set and coloured it with the same Distress Crayons.

With the remembrance season drawing near, Breanda has created a lovely Poppy card for us, and we have so many poppy images on the website that could be used for this idea. She masked a circle and a sun, and brushed Distress Inks to create a background. She stamped a poppy image and coloured with sparkly pens and stamped a sentiment from the Words of Inspiration stamp set. After matting onto co-ordinating cardstock, she added black seed beads to the centres of the poppies.

Zoe has created a series of floral cards for us, all using gelli plate backgrounds:

Thank you so much girls for your beautiful projects.

We hope that you have enjoyed our selection of designs, and please do visit the individual Design Team members' blogs for more detailed explanations of their cards and tags. We will be back next month with more short cuts and time saving tips for you.

Thanks for stopping by,

Rainbow Garden (by Judith)

Hello everyone, I have a colourful project for you today, using two of this month's Baroque Ornament stamps.

I created a background spritzing water based sprays onto a damp piece of watercolour paper, and added some more water to blend them. I blotted the paper with a spare piece of card, to help smooth out the colour, and also to create another piece of coloured card for my project. I edged the background with Picked Raspberry Distress Ink, and added some stencilling with Mermaid Lagoon Distress Ink.

I spritzed some blue, pink and yellow spray onto a craft mat, and picking the spray up with some water, created a wash of each colour onto some more watercolour paper. I dried each piece of paper thoroughly with a heat gun. I stamped several of the Dots 'n Stripes Baroque Ornament the Tangled Baroque Ornament, plus the centre of one of the flowers from the Tangled Garden stamp set, and the clear Tangled Butterfly stamp onto the coloured backgrounds using Versafine Onyx Black ink and clear embossing powder. I cut all of the shapes out, and layered them up onto the background. I added a small amount of colour to the butterfly using water based markers.

I drew some stems for the flowers using a fine-tipped pen and added some colour, before adding some doodles to complement the flower designs.

Thanks for stopping by, Judith xx

More Patchwork ideas...... (by Miranda)

Hello there,

Have you seen the new gorgeous stamps at Chocolate Baroque? The 'Patchwork Landscapes' are so much fun to colour and also to add your own 'patchwork' in every way you can imagine.......

I have made this one using the pillow top background.......I thought it would be a good match with these stamps.......I've stamped with black and coloured with the Distress markers. Scored the squares and sponged the areas in between by masking........You can find the technique here.
You can find the large butterfly on the 'Tangled Garden sheet' and the smaller version is a clear stamp.The wings are partially accentuated with the clear Wink of Stella pen but you can't see the lovely shine here. 

Maybe I did inspire you to give it a try?

Thanks for visiting and have a lovely day!

Clear Stamp update - Trees, Poppies, Butterflies, oh my!

I'm very behind here with new stamp updates, so there's a few at once here.  If you are on the Chocolate Baroque email list, you will no doubt have spotted our new clear stamp set, Terrific Treescapes which we launched last Friday.

This was almost named Very Versatile Trees because that's exactly what it is.  They will go with so many of our other stamps and the trees can also be used on their own to create beautiful scenes using brayered backgrounds, masking, PanPastels, etc. 


Click on the image below to find it on the website.

We also have some other new clear stamps - two single stamps and two coordinating mini sets.  These don't come in a wallet, but they do come on a folded polyester sheet so you can still store them neatly.

Today is Remembrance Sunday so what better day to tell you about Remembrance Poppy and Remembrance Words.

  

Then we have a little Tangled Butterfly - a simpler and smaller version of one of the designs on Tangled Garden.  I took this stamp with me on my recent teaching trip to Amsterdam and I included a couple of little greetings in Dutch, so for all our Dutch speaking customers, these are now available to buy.

Again, click on any of the images above to find the stamps on the website.

This card is made with paper masks which I stamped the trees on first so I could cut a hill that matched the line at the base of the trees.  I used distress inks for the sky and splattered it with water before removing the mask.  The tree is stamped in black Versafine and embossed with clear powder which allowed me to stamp the image first and position the masks in the right place.

The backing paper is ordinary photocopy paper, scrumpled and soaked with water, then painted with watered down precious metal paints.  When wet it is very fragile, but once dry, smooth it out and put under a weight to flatten, then you have lovely crinkly shimmery paper.

The die cut snowflake is made with Crealies dies laid onto a spellbinders tag die.

The DT girls have some stunning artwork to show with these trees so do check back soon.