Celtic Heritage Day 4

This little card uses one of my favourite sentiments "Top O' the Mornin' to you and the rest of the day to yourself." (From the Irish Blessings clear stamp set I'm releasing in a couple of days!!!)This old fashioned Irish greeting is such a quaint way of wishing someone a good day, with the extra bonus of hoping they get some time to themselves - we could all use a little of that!!! Lol.

I paired it with a lucky shamrock, there are 3 different styles in the Celtic Heritage set and here I used the knotwork version.

The background was made by stamping a little square celtic motif (Irish Blessings) in cream ink onto a Ripe avocado cardbase.

That little square motif measures 3/4 inches square and is so easy to use to build backgrounds. Such a useful wee shape.



This next card features a thistle image, handy for Scottish related cards - my card uses the sentiment Slainte (Meaning - Good health to you) which is used in both Irish and Scots Gaelic. Technically, the accent over the 'a' should face the other way for Scots but there simply was not enough room in the stamp sets for both versions.

Living in Northern Ireland I see references to the Scots Irish all the time. The stories of Scotland and Ireland are entwined throughout history and there are many folk here and in America who consider themselves Scots Irish, having ancestry in both lands. this was a good reason for me to include the thistle in my designs.

The thistle is framed by a delicate Celtic style border which is very like a heraldic shield in design. I envisaged this combination of stamps being particularly useful for Scrapbookers. The Heraldic shield frame can also be used to frame the shamrocks and heart images in the set, more on this later.

Not having any suitable tartan paper to put behind my image I made my own using copic markers - a few pics below illustrate how easy this is, you gotta try it!! You can make any colour combo you like but I picked copics to match the Bamboo (green) and Boysenberry (purple) Versacolour inks that I used for the thistle and shield stamped images.


You can build up the pattern colour by colour - I found a clear quilting ruler very handy for this but as long as your spaces are even you should have no problems. I made sure there was 1/2 inch space between each of my thick green lines, then left 1/8 inch between the green and purple lines. I used Vintage cream card as my base card.




The last card this morning is one of my favourites from this release - I love to stamp backgrounds and chose the solid lunette (Celtic Heritage) together with the mini shamrock (Irish Blessings) to make my backgeound. I inked up the lunette with either Raw Sienna ink or Cognac before rolling the edges a little in Pure poppy ink (all Palette inks, PTI). I used this as a background for one of the sentiments from Irish Blessings which I just finished off with a very delicate outline four leaf shamrock (Celtic Heritage).

Hope it tickles.


I'll be back later with more!!!