Laura Rumble - Crafter

 I don't know about you but playing with colour and shape is incredibly therapeutic for me. These pieces are cut with a few geometric die sets from Simon Says Stamp, all on scraps of brightly coloured cardstock. I have some circular, some triangular and some square pieces but the key is that they are all the same scale.  It's the scale/size of the pieces that makes them fit together so nicely into an imaginary 3x3 grid.  Some pieces are double stacked and triple stacked to give a little more interest to what is a very simple concept of pieceing shapes together. I assembled my piece leaving lots of white space to give a light uncluttered feel to the design.  I felt a narrow black border was needed to set a boundary between the collage and the card base which is also white.

 Happy Tuesday!  It's time for a new colour swatch at CC&S ... It's a beautiful colour palette and one I tend to be drawn to often as a lover of all things green and being partial to a bit of peach, specifically Nectar from C9.   I've added a touch of stencilling in the background and layered up three butterflies on top.  A simple stamped sentiment (W Plus 9) underneath finishes it off nicely. You know I love a chance to play with my extensive thread collection and it's not a surprise that I had a perfect match to my inks.  The thread is simply wrapped around the middle of the butterfly with the loose ends acting as antennas. I hope you'll join us at CAS Colours and Sketches for this beautiful colour combo!

    I was rather taken with this month's Altenew colour challenge - greens and yellows are my favourite and the pink was tolerable as an accent!  (Haha, if you're new here, I'm not a fan of pink to the point that it's become a bit of a joke now!)       I pulled out my Altenew leafy die set that really doesn't see enough use and decided to make a piece of mixed media card to die cut.  I've been asked for a tutorial and I thought this was the perfect opportunity...   As with so many ideas this one looked better in my head.  The texture on the mixed media piece got lost as the dies had all the fabulous apperture detail built in.  Any way, it's a great card, just not what it looked like in my head and not the tutorial I was after!  It will follow at some point... I popped the leaves up on a couple of layers of dragonfruit cardstock and placed them on top of a touch of ink blending.  I finished up with a small sentiment in the matching pink.  I'm off to make

 It's new sketch day at CAS Colours and Sketches ... I had a lot of ideas for this one!  Up first is my official dt card... This is a Time For Tea coverplate, Concord and 9th cardstock and a Simon Says Stamp thanks die. My original idea was to use this Time For Tea coverplate and highlight just the centre motifs with inlaid pieces... Again I've used Concord and 9th colours.  I cut the whole plate in grapefruit and half each of nectar and sorbet.  Of course this produced more than one cards worth of die cuts so... I made a couple more with the leftovers. These alpha dies are from Trinity Stamps and have a beautiful embossed line detail too. There where quite a lot of the tiny hearts so the obvious thing to do was to make a shaker card.  This is a flat shaker made with recycled packaging.  The panel is an embossed coverplate (from Alex Syberia Designs) and I've also used the leftover larger hearts from the first card. Hope to see you over at CAS Colours and Sketches!

I'm back again with my favourite type of challenge - a three colour swatch. This was an absolute pleasure to play with.  I made a 7x5 card featuring paper pieced shapes. I'm not sure what to call this shape... it is a die from an old Pinkfresh Studio set of snowflakes... clearly not your average snowflake!  I cut it from each of my selected patterned papers and mixed them up piecing back into white outlines so each of the three shapes had all of the colours. I added them to a panel with a touch of subtle inking around the edge and placed them on my card base.  I die cut the sentiment from matching patterned paper and added that below. A quick note on the 'patterned paper' - the bright blue piece is actually a piece I stamped and ink blended using a Concord and 9th Turnabout stamp.  I was following a Jennifer McGuire video tutorial on the iron off embossing technique.  The piece has sat in my stash unused for a few years now.  I may have used less than an inch and a half

It's the third Tuesday of the month which of course means there's a sketch up at CAS Colours and Sketches .  Take a look... I've gone for three shades (ombre-ish) of Concord and 9th cardstock to create my stripes.  They are layered up so there is a small amount of dimension too. The 'happy' is from Concord and 9th and the birthday is from Create A Smile.  I've layered them up too. Such a simple design but I kinda want to make it over and over in different colourways. This is for the CC&S challenge which runs until the 4th of March - we'd love you to join us!