Theme Thursday - colour purple & 4x4

This is my first post here at Theme Thursday. I have to admit that I don't use this colour very much so it really was a challenge. Luckily I remembered I had this stamp in my stash from a Christmas card sent by my brother-in-law & his wife a couple of years ago, they live in Adelaide. Hope is is purple enough!

This is a little card that is a mixture of traditional paper & digital (hybrid). I matted & layered a couple of different texture purple card and papers. I then created the background digitally by altering an image of an Australian stamp that had a koala bear on it and then printed it out. I scanned the original envelope that had the purple angel and air mail stamp on it and printed it out at a smaller size to use behind the main image. The main image of the stamp was printed out at a larger size & printed onto photo paper to add a bit of gloss and matted onto a piece of the shiney purple paper.

The kitchen is not far off being finished so perhaps I'll get a bit of crafting in this weekend. Here's to an Arty one!

Drink Wine Card

Just a quick post that I thought might be interesting. If you saw my earlier post for the Arty Girlz challenge #52 this is the same only as a totally digital image. You can see I swapped the music part around (I now remember it was a bit of 7 Gypsies paper I had left over). Sometimes it is quite easy to make a digital and a hybrid project look alike sometimes not. This was one of the easier ones.

Have an Arty day. :)

Arty Girlz Challenge # 55 Clip Art

This weeks challenge at Arty Girlz is to use clip art in your work and amazingly I found nearly all the parts in my project on the Microsoft website. As soon as I saw the ship bow an idea started to form. Please, please tell me it is a Viking ship and not something else!!

The background was left as is with its lovely scrolls in the corners. I extracted the Viking ship from its blue sky background (cutting paper digitally) and made the quotation follow its outline. I digitally cut the compass image with a knife tool to serrate the edges and knocked back the transparency to about 50% to try to replicate vellum and attached it with a couple of staples. The image of the rope was only altered by adding a slight transparency.

I added a bevel & emboss filter effect to some circles for the brads, brushed a pastel effect in blue to grunge the background a bit and added a couple of tattoo type images from my Serif programme to add a salty seafaring touch! Simple I hear you cry, well yes I suppose except that it has taken me two and a half hours to complete. However, during this time, I have been learning as I went. I think it is essential to "Learn something new every day". It is a motto that I like to live to. Have and Arty week and I hope you learn something new today!

Santander

Here are the photo's of the girls trip to Santander. I could not decide which to use so I made a bit of a montage of my favourites using a template that was a freebie from Designer Digitals I think you might find it under ad or web challenge. I have added more segments to it to accommodate more pictures. Just click on them to enlarge.
We left Plymouth on one of the very few sunny days we had in July and the crossing was really smooth. Very impressed with the ship. There is a cinema on board, live entertainment bar and a piano bar, 2 self serve restaurants and a more formal (and less crowded) restaurant plus a great shop and duty free. It does feel a bit weird though that you are on your way to Spain geared up to speak a bit of Spanish and the ship is French so you have to rethink and speak a bit of that - like Merci, bonjour! All the crew do speak English though and are very nice. There is also a pool. It really is a mini cruise.We arrived in Santander to a bit of a dull day on the Monday but it steadily improved and it could not have been hotter in southern Spain I'm sure! The coach from the ferry to the Hotel Chique was in with the price and El Sardinero beach is a real stunner, although it does shrink a little at high tide. We had a relaxing time just wandering, soaking up the atmosphere, stopping for a drink at a cafe, & long lunches - hey - we had to sit down, it was too hot to walk around all day!! One of the best was in the park on the headland. There is a cafe there and we had the best chorizo concoction ever. Do try it out if you ever get there. However the best meal of the trip for me had to be the Italian (yes Italian in Spain!) it was the most fun night which was helped along by the attentive waiter, the meal itself was pretty good too. The crossing back on the Thursday night was a bit rougher and one of the girls felt ill and had to miss the evening meal. I felt fine but you could tell it must have been rough as during the night I kept being woken up as the rocking of the ship made you feel as if you were going to fall out of bed! Honestly, I did not get my land legs back for nearly a week after we got back!! So, I would go to Santander again it is a great beach resort. In many ways it reminded me of Torbay in Devon as it has the same backdrop of green hills behind the town. Next time it would be nice to have a car and see a bit of the country side around. Hope you enjoy the pictures. :)

Meeting the girls for an evening at Wetherspoons (it's birthday time for Jacqui) and realised I have not posted any photo's of Santander yet. Must try to do over the weekend, my excuse is the past few weekends have not had much in the way of free time, and then I have been too tired to do much, perhaps it's my age!!! Also trying to get our kitchen units fitted and all the rest that that entails. Hubby is doing a fine job during the week and doing as much as he can on his own and as his health allows.

Here's to a productive weekend! (Best go easy on the wine tonight then!)