...More Gracie and Cicely...

Good morning, if you are just tuning in I am showing samples made with stamps from two little Halloween stamp sets I am 'leaking' early  - August 1st, this Monday! These were destined for September, but I have no patience, I was so excited to show you - It's a little different for us to have people stamps!!

Today's first card shows off one of the sentiment stamps from Cicely at Halloween,

It's a vintage verse and it reads:

"By pumpkins fat and witches lean
By coal black cats with eyes of green
By all the magic ever seen
I wish you luck this Halloween"

I chose to make it the feature on this card and I set it off with one of the little decorative motif stamps, the moon, also from Cicely at Halloween.

I used the bat and the moon to make the background pattern, stamped on the ginger card. I set the verse on a cream panel, which I then mounted on a black mat. I set all that onto a green panel I made with one of the new Edgeability dies from Spellbinders, the excellent Classic Petal. I simply trimmed out a long rectangle and used the edgeability die on each end. I cut two more 'ends and offset them under my main green panel to get that nice offset point look. Here's a few pics so you can see what I mean. Finished off with a couple of flourishes from the Scallops and Dots set and added the moon, which punches out nicely with a 3/4 inch circle punch, or die.

My second card this morning is a simpler take on the main Cicely stamp - I stamped her in versamark, clear embossed and then did minimal colouring using a water pen and some SU inks, finally added a little extra shading with just a plain graphite pencil, I wanted it to be sort of faded looking. I added the Jolly Japes sentiment from Gracie at Halloween.

Jolly Japes will be a curious phrase for some. Jolly, most folks will understand, but 'Japes' is an old fashioned English word for tricks, or practical jokes, which I think fits perfectly with Halloween. Anyone who has ever read Enid Blyton, may well have come across this word. I thought it was a charming addition to my Halloween sentiment arsenal. Here I cut a slit with a scalpel above and below the sentiment, and pushed two slivers of card through from the back. I took a moment to edge them with my pinking shears first. I like the clean cut graphic edge.

Next up is a little How-To, a sort of picture tutorial for folks wanting to make the toothed aperture from this card.

First I selected two dies, a classic circle and a pinked circle - both Spellbinder dies from sets of that name. I picked a plain circle which fit inside the pinked circle. I die cut a plain circle - you can see it here in the first pic, I have set it inside the pinking circle die so that you can see that it is smaller than the pinked circle die - it's the green circle.

I use the green circle as a template and draw around a portion of it onto a pre-cut rectangle which is exactly the right size for the front of my card. I do this 5 times making sure the arcs for a star shape. You can just see the pencil lines on the orange card.

Next, I trim out the star shape with a scalpel. Then I cut two pinked circles with my pinked die.

Then I sponge the front of the piece of card.

Next, I cut up the pinked circles roughly into sections, just larger than the arcs in the star shape.

 

Then I start adhering them to the back of the  sponged card rectangle so that only the teeth show up in the aperture. Glue was best for this so that I could smooch it around for the best position. One thing tho - if you are stamping a sentiment directly to the front of your card, it's best to do it now, before you adhere the 'teeth'...

See? simple! If it's difficult, I don't do it!! lol

Hope it tickles, and call back later, I have more!!