Challenge 160 at Crafty Cardmakers - Easter

Apologies - I thought I had scheduled this for the right date, but apparently not as I have just noticed it is not there and have uploaded manually!

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Our hostess for today's challenge, Mary, would love to see your Easter inspired creations. You can enter anything you fancy, it doesn't have to just be cards, as long as it meets the challenge, and doesn't exceed the 15 total challenges entered rule!

My card base was made using a tattered lace die - Ornamental centre stepper.  I really like these die sets - tattered lace dies are often too fancy for me -  but these are really useful.  You get the score and cut lines done for you and more importantly all the mats and layers can be done quickly and easily.  This set in particular came with lots of embellishments.

To "dress" my stepper card I used a background paper I had from a kit which I cut with the dies and distressed the edges.  My brief for the card was easter, lambs, chicks and daffodils so I used some stock images I had on a cd and imported them into my serif craft artist 2 (LOVE that programme) and created the images to embellish my card.  It's not totally to my taste but the commissioner loved it, and that's what counts!

Challenge 159 at Crafty Cardmakers - Go Green

Pam is hosting our 'Go Green' challenge in honour of St. Patrick's Day on 17th March. So let's see all your Green creations please. You can enter anything you fancy, it doesn't have to just be cards, as long as it meets the challenge, and doesn't exceed the 15 total challenges entered rule!

My card  was a simple design that I made for a friend who had a bereavement.  My cards rarely have many layers on them, and this was no exception.

I used my favourite 6 x 6 base card and  a flowery and a striped and a plain green paper from a Dreamees cd for the background paper - I love this part of using cds, you can pretty much guarantee the papers from the same family will go together!  I started with a square of the striped paper and down the centre I stuck a strip of the floral design.  I used the plain green paper to make the mat for my topper, which was a woodware stamp stamped with a green distress ink.  I used distress ink around the edge of the topper after I had rounded the corners, and coloured the flowers with the same distress ink.  I stamped the sentiment onto the same colour card as the topper, and edged it with a promarker and distressed it with the same distress ink as the topper.

Finally, I added some pearls to either side.