Here are a couple of cards I made last night.  One is a thank you card for a friend.  As well as being a talented quilter, she is also a successful beader, and yesterday she kindly gave me a pair of gorgeous beaded ear-rings. that she had recently made.

For both of them, I used a square lilac base card, then got out my faithful Sizzix and cut some square background pieces of patterned paper.  Next, I took some pieces of cream card that I had previously fed through the Sizzix inside an embossing folder, thus producing a gorgeous texture.  After being embossed, they were also die-cut to make smaller square shapes.  Taking a purple chalk inkpad  I then rubbed the ink gently over the raised pattern - this gives a lovely effect, as the colouring is light but picks out the pattern.  In the centre of the flowers, I used glitter glue to highlight. Then I added the felt butterflies, a row of self adhesive purple flowers along the bottom, and then using my pokey tool, some flowers with brad centres. Finally, I added a little glitter glue to the flower petals and the paler butterfly. 

Two beautiful, but quite simple cards, using a technique that I hope to explore more in the future.  I have just ordered from QVC some more embossing folders, new ones from Tim Holtz so it should be hours of fun experimenting with those.

As mentioned in my other blog, we hosted two of our nephews last week for a couple of days.  I took lots of pictures, as did Andrew, including some he took via his Blackberry, and was able to email back to me while still out on the boat on Cardiff Bay! After the boys had gone back, and I'd emailed a few pics to their parents and grandparents, I uploaded a selection to Photobox and ordered some prints, as well as a couple of enlargements.  One of our nephews gets on particularly well with one of our greyhounds, and we had a lovely picture of him and the hound in question walking together, so I'm going to get a nice frame and send it to him.  The other prints were ordered with a view to a scrapbook, and as usual I was very impressed by Photobox.  Pics were uploaded on Tuesday morning, and by Wednesday lunchtime Keith our lovely postie was knocking on the door with a rather soggy envelope for me (it was pouring with rain). 

I've made up a little scrapbook using 6" x 6" page sizes.  Some time ago, I bought a little box from QVC, of about 20 assorted mini scrapbooks, which has been a real treasure.  Whenever I want to make up a little book I can go to the box, and know I can pull something out easily.  I chose a nice little bright spotty design and got to work.  As the prints were mainly 6" x 4", in some cases all I needed to do was mount them on some suitable background paper, but in other cases I went a bit fancy, and used my diecutter to frame the key elements and layer up some paper and embellishments.  It was fun to choose and edit the pictures and put in a few simple captions, so the boys will always have a nice reminder of their trip.  I am also going to send their parents a duplicate set of prints, as I know they enjoy putting them in photo albums.