A Coffee Break Full of Beans

I hope you're all well? I've been absent from the blogosphere for a couple of weeks because I developed an inner ear infection, no idea why or how it occured, I've never had one in my life before and hope to never get one again. It was nasty, messed with my balance, made me feel dizzy and nauseous, for the first 3 days I stayed in bed because moving around made me feel horrendous. I couldn't craft, I did try once but the dizziness got the better of me so I gave up.

Being poorly means that I haven't been able to get around to making all the projects I wanted to make. So I'm only just getting round to playing with some items I've recently bought and freebies from card mags. I'll catch up but I'll still be a bit behind crafting because I've started decorating now I'm feeling better :) We've finally got all the money together and the supplies to decorate the bathroom 😵

So I'm busily stripping off the old paper and working on getting everything ready for hubby to give me a hand with the papering and some of the painting (my arms aren't long enough to reach the ceiling over the bath lol!) I can't wait for it to be finished, new carpet tiles and I'm going to have a go at dyeing our existing towels from pink to purple and maybe decorate them with some ribbon or something?!

The two cards I'm sharing today were made using the "Coffee Break" freebies that came with Issue 177 of Simply Cards & Papercraft. The set included a stencil, stamps and dies to cut the lid for the coffee cup, a tag, small heart and some steam curls that I haven't got round to using yet.

I used the little coffee bean stamp with 3 different colours of Altenew inks from aptly their 'Coffee Break' ink cube set and stamped them in my stamping platform using the 6" template. I then made a circular mask and used some Scattered Straw Distress Ink to make the background for the cups, giving the inked circle a spritz of water and blotting it off after 30 seconds to lift some of the ink.

The coffee cups I stamped and fussy cut as close to the edge as I could get and if I do say so myself my fussy cutting is getting better 😊 Once cut out I used a blending tool and some Tea Dye Distress Ink to colour the cups and edged around the cup with a black Promarker to finish the edge off. The piece that looks like a corrugated card cup holder is another of the stamps in the set which I cut out after stamping. This time I used versmark ink and some gold embossing powder to stamp the image and when I'd worked the magic with the embossing gun, I coloured between the embossed lines with a Distress Marker in Gathered Twigs, then buffed the embossed area to remove any ink.

I cut some tags and cup lids from scraps of white card using the free dies and a couple of hearts from some scraps of red card. I made a circular card from 2 pieces of brown card and folded one in half to be the base and glue my coffee bean panel to the other then glued that to the base piece. Before I attached the coffee cups to the panel I tied some brown embroidery thread to the tags and used a pokey tool to pierce the top of the cup underneath where the lid would be and pushed the other end of the thread through and used some washing tape to hold it in place on the back of the card.

Next I layered the two finished cups on top of each other on the panel using 3D foam pads, I popped a few small 3D pads under the tags to hold them away from the card and give them some dimension. The final touch for the circular card was to add the red hearts and I gave the a coat of Tonic Crystal Glaze to make them shine.

I was so pleased with the way the first card turned out that I did the same thing for this card, this is just a 4" x 4" texture card blank, I used the leafy stencil that came with the set with some Pine Needles Distress Ink. Again I fussy cut the coffee cup out but this time I didn't use the die cut lid instead I used some Distress Markers to colour the lid.

I colour the cup with Mowed Lawn Distress Ink after masking off the lid with a little washy tape, I did a water spritz again because I love the effect it gives. I used some Memento 'Cottage Ivy' Ink to stamp the leafy folder and added some clear embossing to it to make it shine.

You can see more clearly on this card how I pierced the cup to pop the thread through for the tag. I decided this card was lacking something as it neared completion so I cut a few strips of green glitter card and added them above and below the stencilled area. I see this one more as a Green Tea or Green Smoothie kind of card so I'm going to make some in different colours pinks for a Strawberry Milk Shake, a Blueberry Smoothie and find some fruity sentiments to go with them.  There is most certainly lots of scope for these freebies and they can be used to make cards for the men folk as well! More from me soon I now have a date with my bed, its taken 2 days to write this post, guess my head is still a little fuzzy. Enjoy the weekend, I hope it send you sunshine and crafting time 😀