Halloween roundup

I’ve been a bit absent lately, mostly due to focussing on getting the house ready to sell, which also means I didn’t have much time for crafting.

So now is a good time to catch up on my backlog of unposted projects!

I’ll start with 2 more hallloween ones, these were also made for the Country View Challenge Blog Guest Designer post, but in the end, I liked the  cat the most. The 4 halloween card I made are portraied here. More information about the unicorn and cat card are in my previous 2 posts.

I actually started with the card with the portrait. I thought spooky portraits, with holes where the eyes should be and a big black void behind it, being watched (If you look closely you can see little red pupils). Somehow chess fits the evil overlord or haunted castle too, so I added the chesspiece with the checkmate words. I loved making the background and almost didn’t want to cover it.

Some steps when making that card:

splattering the cardstock

All dried up.

Start of the grame and original stamped inmage

Black eyes

Almost finished – unfortunately I don’t have pictures of the in between steps of adding the background celar embossed stamp or the other stamps on the background.

The final touches were ofcourse some white highlights and matting the card.

I really liked the fallen over chesspiece, so I went and made another card. It’s from the Chocolate Baroque Chess stamp set.

You can see the light through the card because the background is the border of one of the other cards, which I cut out carefully. I enhanced the back by a little strip of cardstock, and then added another layer (after taking the picture). But I like this effect, I should have left it uncovered.

The shoe-stamps are from VivaLasvegastamps, and I thought they looked kind of spooky here, empty shoes on a dancefloor. The fairytale of the little red shoes, but a bit spookier. (Do you hear footsteps echo through the empty hallway, hear dancing in the ballroom while no one is there?) The branches on the side are coral stamps from Chocolate Baroque and a coral stencil, I embossed alternating in red, black, red, moving the stencil just a lottile so the colours wouldn’t blend too much. I further embossed the edge of the purple card with black. (And I had embossed the chesscastle stamp, shoes, chesspiece, just lots of embossing!)

Last, a card which I didn’t finish, I thought something ancient could be spooky too. I combined two stamps from a Chocolate Baroque stamp set, (after making the background with the very light script).  I made the scratched lines with something that was lying nearby.

Just using the tools at hand.

That’s as far as I got with this, I didn’t know where to go from there. I often don’t make a plan (which probably shows in my cards sometimes), but I go with the moment. But no moment came 😛 Maybe later, another time, I’ll know just the occasion and the way to finish this card or cut it up.

Materials used:

• Chocolate Baroque stamp sets:
  UA5SP0366 The Art of Chess A5 (chess related stamps on first two cards)
  UA5SP0401 Steampunk Butterfly A5 (the bat and the lacey corner on the first card)
  UA4GW0145 Antiquities (Card with the car)
  UA5SP0326 Underwater Kingdom (coral branch on 2nd card)
• Chocolate Baroque: Lady (portrait) – unknown series (was in a grabbag).
• VivaLastvegastamps: shoes
• Christina Renee / Prima Marketing 850029 (frame of the portrait)
• Crafters Workshop Stencil: TCW360s 6×6 Coral.