Eid Mubarak cards and dinner

On Tuesday evening my husband and I were kindly invited to join our next door neighbours and their family for a dinner to celebrate Eid. So I decided that it would be nice to make them some cards to take with us, although I've never actually made an Eid card before. Altenew and Hero Arts came to the rescue as I found the perfect stamps and dies in my stash and set to work.

For my first card, for our hosts, I chose a large square ivory pearlised card blank. I started with the gorgeous Floral Tile Bold Prints 6" square stamp by Hero Arts and stamped it onto thick white card with Versamark ink before heat embossing with detail gold embossing powder. I then painted it with Zig Real Brush watercolour markers, which took ages but was very therapeutic!

The finished panel was then layered onto shiny gold card, then onto the card blank. I used Versamark ink and WOW metallic gold rich super fine embossing powder to stamp the Eid Mubarak sentiment from Altenew's Eid Al Adha stamp set onto a strip of purple card and added it with foam tape. I used the large Eid Mubarak die from Altenew for the focal point, cutting three from white card and one from shiny gold card and gluing them together for dimension. I must say that I am quite pleased with the finished result!

I needed three more cards for the other guests, that weren't going to be so time consuming to make, so I turned to the lovely Eastern Influences craft papers from Craft Consortium. I trimmed a sheet down to fit onto 6" square white card blanks, leaving a narrow white border showing. The lanterns and buildings from the Altenew Eid Al Adha stamp set were stamped directly onto the patterned paper using VersaFine Clair Nocturne ink, which gave a really good impression. I used my MISTI to position the stamps so that I could stamp them repeatedly in exactly the right place. How did we manage before the MISTI was invented?! 

The Eid Mubarak sentiment was heat embossed in gold onto red card, which was cut out using one of the My Favourite Things Stitched Sentiment Strip dies. Again I used foam tape to mount this to the cards for dimension. 

Nasima our hostess is an excellent cook, but I didn't take any photos of the main course at dinner as all the other guests were hungry, having just finished fasting for the month of Ramadan. There were lots of happy faces afterwards, especially when one of the guests produced an enormous cake, decorated with fresh fruits and chocolate. 

Here is Farhan, cutting the cake into generous slices. It was really delicious! We were made to feel very welcome and were honoured to have been invited to share in the family celebration.  A huge thank you to our hosts Hemayet and Nasima - we had a lovely time.

Although I had never made an Eid card before, they were all well received. It just goes to show that you shouldn't be afraid to try new things and make new friends!

Layered Daffodils

What could be more Spring like than a host of golden daffodils? The recent warmer weather here inspired me to try out the beautiful Altenew layered daffodil die collection, which was a free gift with issue 188 of Simply Cards & Papercraft magazine. There are seven dies in the set, which can be cut out and layered to produce a detailed daffodil flower, stem and leaf. I spent an evening in front of the TV whilst I die cut loads of coloured card and I found it quite addictive, as I managed to make enough flowers to make a total of nine cards!

My first three cards were made on ivory 5" x 7" card bases in a portrait orientation. Each has a layer of subtle patterned paper from Craft Consortium's Watercolours collection, which was topped with a Tailored Expressions Lattice Frame die cut in a co-ordinating colour. 

The birthday sentiment is from Altenew's Build-A-Flower Sakura Blossom stamp set and was heat embossed with WOW embossing powders to match each frame. 

I used "Stick-It" adhesive sheets when die cutting all of the elements, so that it was easy to layer them up and to adhere them to the frames. The flower heads were added with foam tape for dimension. 

The remaining cards were all made with white 5" x 7" card blanks in a landscape orientation. 

The happy birthday sentiment on the first one is from Altenew's Painted Greetings stamp set and was heat embossed with White Super Fine Detail embossing powder by Ranger.

Again the patterned papers used are from Craft Consortium's Watercolours collection.

For my last three cards I changed to using patterned papers from Paper Boutique's Tutti Frutti collection.

I swapped the stamped sentiment for the lovely scripty hello die cut, which is from Altenew's Simply Hello die. I adhered these using Lawn Fawn's glue tube, which has a fine tip that made it really easy to get the glue where it was needed.

Now I have plenty of cards in my stash for all of those Spring birthdays that are coming up!

Thanks so much for looking!