Charming Nature

Being Sunday, and having actually got ahead of myself with the Crafting Time DT challenge, I thought I would go visit Less is More and see what they are up to...

Week 64 - How Charming

As we are being sponsored by The Ribbon Girl this month, we thought that we would have a challenge whereby you could use some of the products you might find in her store.

She has a mighty array of charms, perfect for that subtle embellishment on a Clean and Simple card, plus all manner of wonderful ribbons and trims.

Just as we don't always make One Layer Cards, we don't always want to make cards completely devoid of embellishment, the key is to keep it minimal... to enhance not overpower.

SO our theme this week is

How Charming!

Make and/or use a charm on your project

To start this off, I took a blank C6 card and embossed just the front with a Crafts-Too embossing folder (Sweet Flowers) just to give some interest to the palin white card.

I then made the charm by stamping a piece of clear shrink plastic in black Archival using a very old botanical stamp found in a stash at school when we were clearing out. They came from a company called Sweet & Maxwell Limited and we think they probably date back to the '50s.

I then carefully dried the ink on a low heat setting, and then shrunk the piece down. I had two attempts at this as the piece is quite large and it got stuck together the first time! I trimmed the shape whilst it was still hot.

Once the piece was cool, I painted the back with FlitterGlu (Indigo Blu), allowed it to dry clear and then dipped it into Crafty Notions Gilding Flakes (Autumn Rose). This really highlights the black stamping and it is interesting to see the lines of the glue coming through.

I attached it to the card with Pinflair Glue Gel.

The final part was to gild a piece of card and over stamp with the sentiment (from stash).

So, the challenges that I am going to enter this into are:

http://simplylessismoore.blogspot.co.uk/ - week 64 - How Charming

http://sentimentalsundays.blogspot.co.uk/ - challenge 99 - Celebrating Earth Day