For the Love of Pets: Kitties & Bunnies

I'm on day 7 of no spending this month and day 9 if you add the last 2 days of Feb, and I'm loving finding treasure of all kinds in my stash, thank you to all of you who commented on my Miserly March post and were so supportive, it means an awful lot to have the love and support of such a super talented bunch of lovely people. I'd like to give a special shout out to Shabneez of Happy Hijaabi's Papercraft Creations for her kindly nominating me for an Altenew giveaway such a lovely surprise 💖💋.

This morning I completed a couple of cards using some digital images from the 'Lovely Jessica Collection' a free download back in January from Making Cards Magazine, you have to sign up to get the downloads but its so worth it, each month you get a email newsletter with a link to something to download, usually additional backing papers to go with the cover gift but sometimes something different. MCM is now the only magazine I subscribe to monthly, their free papers and downloads are brilliant and I can always find a use for the free gifts.

The backing papers on both my cards are from the collection, and they work fabulously together. I had to play with the images in Corel PaintShop Pro x8, I captured the image I wanted to play with and saved it as a jpg file.

I then took the jpg into the paint program and removed the surrounding images and resized it for my card and then printed it off, finally die-cutting it out with the largest die from my Wonky Nesting Ovals die set from Craft Stash.

I used another die from the set to cut an oval for the sentiment and the sentiments for both todays cards come from the "New Best Friend" stamp set from 'My Favorite Things'. I'll be using the actually images soon from the set, they are soooo cute, I'm going to make some cards for the craft fair in May for people to send when someone they know gets a new furry friend 😸 I used a leaf and the flower dies from a Crafters Companion set from their 'Floral Delight' Collection the die set is called "In Bloom".

I decided to make these cards a little bit special by adding a surprise inside in the form of a bookmark, I've done the same thing before in September 2017 using some cute 'Barry the Book Owl' images from Making Cards Magazine. I detailed how I did it in that post so I won't repeat myself, but you can follow the link if you're curious.

The bookmarks are super quick to make, and these images were just the right size. There's a cool bit of upcycling in these cards as well, I cut the ribbons off tops I buy and save them in a jar and use them for adding to bookmarks and for gift tags.

I think a bookmark card is the perfect accompaniment to a book gift voucher and its something to keep once the event the recipient has been given the card for is over. I've found lots of images for making more for young and old, I'm also going to make some with stamped images and attach the bookmarks to the front of the card like a topper. 

Before I go I thought I'd share a tip and I know this will be old news to most of you, but for anyone that is new to the world of alcohol markers and card making I thought I'd share... You can use  alcohol markers to colour sticky gem stones to match your project. Whilst working on these cards this morning I found the perfect gem for centre of the flowers for the pink version of the card, but I didn't have them in red. So I used one of my red Nuvo Alcohol Marker pens to change the pink to red et voila, the flowers got red gem stone centres!

I have clear gems in my stash just for this purpose, you can also use the markers to colour white ribbon and lace so it matches your project with your pens. I always colour my gems off the card on the acetate backing, that way you won't accidentally catch the card or paper you're working on, this I learnt from experience. Once you've coloured the gems set them aside for 5-10 minutes so that the ink dries totally, then attach the gems to your project as you normally would. Clear gems are better but if you are going for a similar tone pink to red, yellow to orange, light blue to dark blue etc. then any colour works.