Snippet Sunday Card ... and in my garden today

Hello Everyone

Good morning to you all. I hope you are having a very happy weekend.

As you can see I've given my blog a bit of a makeover. The header, created using Serif Craft Artist, is a collage of some of my favourite things, including a photo of The Boss, and it's in shades of purple ... it's the colour associated with my zodiac sign so seemed a good choice. I see now I've forgotten to create shadows around the butterflies and title so more practice needed there! Do you like it? Do tell me what you think ... even if you hate it!

Today's share is yet another card I made earlier ... this time for a friend, Cass, whose favourite colours are pink and blue. This one gave me the opportunity to play with some recently acquired goodies and still use up a snippet or two ... this time it's the blue pearlescent card used for matting and layering.

The topper was created on white card using the Seed Head stencil, from Clarity Stamp, and Pinflair products that I brought back from the craft show in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago ... you can see a photo on this post here.

To make it I followed Pinflair's Antony's instructions for combining two shades of Buff-it paste, in this case Dark Green and Dark Blue, and sponged the mix through the stencil and then buffed it up - the resulting pattern has a lovely sheen. There's a series of demonstrations on how to use the paste on YouTube - click here for the first.

After applying the Buff-it the next step was to sponge on the Gentle Blends - colours used were Denim and Hot Magenta. Note: the pots of colour look quite a lot richer/darker than the actual soft shades once they are sponged on to card/paper! And they blend beautifully when using the sponge applicators.

That done, I trimmed the card down and matted it on to the pale blue pearlescent card and tied blue organza ribbon round it ready to attach it to the front of the card.

The front of the base card has been sponged with the same two shades of Gentle Blends too.

To finish the front I attached the topper, added a gem swirl cut from Merryweather Swirl Adhesive Gems from K & Company and some purple card candi ... from Craftworks Vintage Berries mix. This mix includes deep shades of blue, red, green, grey and the purple and has to be one of the most useful in my collection of card candi ... I'll be sad when it's done.

The trimmings from the topper were matted on to some strips of blue pearlescent card and used to finish off the inside and back of the card.

As it is Sunday, it's the start of a new week over at Pixie's Snippets Playground where, as usual, Di has posted a fabulous showcase of the snippeteers beautiful projects ... their ingenuity in finding ways of using up snippets and leftover scraps of paper and card never ceases to amaze and delight.

It's a bright and sunny day here with just a bit of a breeze keeping the temperature down and stopping me from doing too much in the garden. However, I recently nipped out with the camera and took this photo.

Not much to see you might think, just a lovely blue sky through bare branches! Not so!! This is one of the two flowering cherry trees (Prunus) that form an arch over our front gate. Ever since we moved in I've been looking forward to seeing them in bloom. So when I spotted the tiny flower buds appearing I just had to take a photo - just for the record.

The EM is very much better today and my shoulder is responding well to the anti-inflammatory medication so all-in-all we're doing just fine. Hope you are too :)

Take care and happy crafting,