Made a few cards for charity.

Good afternoon, it's a nice bright day in East Anglia today, all the cats are out in the garden, most of the neighbourhood dogs are basking in the sunshine in their respective gardens, and when I have finished this blog, I shall be joining them, so it's likely to be a quickie!

Below is a selection of cards that I have made using cannibalised commercial greetings cards that various friends have donated to me.  Even if you can't use the image the cardstock is brilliant for using with the Gelli plate, the reverse side of the image is after all just card. I also discovered (by accident) that if you put a Gelli print onto the shiny side of the card, you sometimes get a ghostly apparition of the original image coming through, it is really cool when that happens!

Obviously because of the commercial nature of the images I have used, I can't sell these cards, so my plan is to have a coffee morning later in the year and offer them for a donation. All the money will go to the MS Society, which for obvious reasons is a charity that is very close to my heart.

So this is the whole selection, and below you will find the individual cards with a brief description of how I made them.

So this one was originally just the image of the two birds on the cherry blossom. It is just matted and layered onto black and two shades of pink card, with an abundance of die cut swirls, twiddly roses, leaves and die cut bird cage and yet more swirls. The tiny flowers in the bird cage are made from paper clay - watch this space for more info on paper clay!

My favourite! The image is cut from the original greetings card, then mounted onto dark brown card which has hearts stamped and clear embossed onto it. The paper flowers are from a kit from Stephanie Weightman (not sure if thats the right spelling - sorry Steph!) The swirls and leaves are cut from the rest of the original card, so they all match. Card candie in the centre of the flowers.

The original card is the background paper on this one. Just added swirls and flowers and a couple of butterflies. The reason for all the peel-offs and corners etc, is that I could not get the damned thing on straight, so I used border p/o's, but they wouldn't stick down on the corners, hence the rather over the top (even for me) corner p/o's.

All I did here was to cut the image down a bit, add a few gems, and mat and layer. Took about five minutes, but I really like this one.

More matting and layering, I did foil the edges of the image, and add the flowers down the left side though.

Matted on to gold and then onto a dark brown card, peel off round the edges (same reason as before - I so need new glasses). Added the sentiment to hide the one that was already there, and added the butterfly on the left and the one on the sentiment.

This one hasn't photographed very well, the colours are much more distinct in reality. Mounted the image onto brown and then pink. The green background was clear embossed with dandylion clocks and then I put a strip of ribbon onto a strip of brown and stuck it down the right hand side.

The original card was the floral poppy image, again I foiled the edges of the image and offset it with the piece of white card. Matted onto bright pink, which in turn went onto the white base card, added swirls (having a bit of swirly day today) and again used paper clay flowers. It looked OK, but needed something else, so I added the butterfly, on the premise that everything looks better if it has a butterfly on it!

Hope you have enjoyed looking at these cards.  I had fun making them, and I used up quite a lot of bits that have been lying around for ages. So don't chuck your old cards out, even if you can't use the images on them, you can use the cardstock with your Gelli.

Thank you for looking, 'til the next time, have fun!