What a fabulous start to our Winter Ollyfant Gallery on this Blog. We might not Blog often enough but when we do we do try and go for it! I just love this card! I love the layering using pale blue, cream and silver mirri. Jen Freeman our newest designer has a great sense of colour and she uses background papers so well and of course the Ollyfant stamps are fantastic, not just because the sets are so well put together and you get such lovely little accessory stamps that you could use with any stamps you already have, but they are so 'useable'. By this I mean you can make so many variations out of just one set and I truly believe they are the very best value for money around. I know I keep banging on about this but it is TRUE! They are all intermixable, so by buying a couple of well chosen sets you can have dozens and dozens of combinations. Have a look at some of the other samples, they are all so different and such fun, you really can't go wrong.

Gingham Girl for Autumn

This card uses the Autumn set of Ollyfants. Stamp the little girl out twice, once onto white card and once onto red gingham. To dress her cut out her clothes from the gingham card and once you have coloured her in stick her clothes onto her, as in the picture. For the background you could use spotty card or use a cuttle bug embossing Dots folder and highlight the dots with a red pen and then some glitter. Use one of the new Martha Stewart punches for the trim or nestabilities or a die cut frame shape. Don't make life difficult for yourself take the idea and adpat it with whatever you have to hand! This is a really lovely lively card for Autumn birthdays.

I do like something different

Jen has created a quick easy card created with torn decorative papers. The little details make it special, the tiny little heart buttons tied with a piece of green thread bring this card alive.

Fusible Fibres and Mica

Do you have problems thinking of what to do with fusible fibres, or angel hair. They don't show up well on the screen (so many things don't) but in reality this card shimmers and glows as the background uses fusible fibres behind the Snowman and mica powders dusted all over the background. We have got some lovely new colours of fusible fibre and all you do is make sure you work on a heat proof sheet. Place your heat proof sheet on your ironing board place the paper on top, place your shredded combined fusible fibres together onto the surface, place another piece of paper on top, iron over with a hot iron but please take care using the hot iron etc. The combinations are endless and can be really spectacular. The corners are decorated using the Snowflake rollagraph.

Red Hot Christmas

I love Jen's choice of paper on this card, and it gives you some great ideas for putting papers together on a card. You know when you are sitting there with a big pile of decorative papers in front of you and you think which ones really go together (hopefully before you cut them up!), and which ones will enhance the main image -well Jen is really good at that. She keeps to quite a restricted colour palette (red and green in this case), and by using the lovely new Woodware layering punches (the Scallops here), the matting and layering central effect gives the card its main focal point. You can't really see it on the screen but the darker red inner circle is punched out of red twill fabric card and gives lovely texture to the card

Yes! Its' that time again!

You all seem to love the Ollyant Stamps so just to feed your creativity a little more we are going to feature some more 'Cuties'. You will also be introduced to our newest designer Jen Freeman, who really knows how to put paper and stamps together.
The Winter Snowman set is just the best and you will be able to see just a few samples of how you can get so much out of just one set of stamps. Paper tearing is so in at the moment and Jennifer (our other Jennifer)has used it so effectively to layer up the snowdrifts on this card. Aren't the little reindeer cute, I love their snubby noses as they nestle in the trees. What I also really like about the Ollyfant sets, is that you can intermix all the sets together and at an even better price this month of £5.89 they are even better value than ever before-and they were great value even then!!