A Bellariffic Friday card

More rain! Where was it this summer when the crops needed it. Now the farmers are trying to get the corn, sugar beets and soybeans off the fields and it's raining. Can't win if you are a farmer. I grew up on a farm so I know how quickly a good crop can turn into a failure, which means not as much money coming in. Hope the farmers get everything off and have a good year. They just started growing sugar beets again around here a few years ago but hubby tells me when he was a kid the very house that we live in was part of the sugar beet property and in the fall there would be wagon after wagon bringing in sugar beets and they would be piled up right where we live until they were processed. The old sugar beet factory is long gone and the property itself is now a survey. Now the beets are being grown here but shipped to Michigan to be processed. Just a little history lesson for you!

Today's card was based on a challenge from Stamping Bella's blog. If you have one of her stamps (which are great) you can play along - and may win Bella bucks. This week's challenge was to make a card using 3 papers and 3 embellishments. Here's mine.

I chose three papers from a paper pack - the polka dot and the strip were left over from another card and were about the right size for what I wanted to do. I stamped the image on water colour paper and coloured it up with water colour pencils, blended with water, of course. The three embellishments are the flower die (Memory Box), the bow and the butterfly. The butterfly was a plain wooden one and I just scribbled on some blue water colour pencil over it and blended it with finger and then added blue Stickles and moved them around with my finger - yes, I always have inky, sticky fingers. I'm a very messy crafter and my crafting clothes will confirm that!

Here's a helpful hint - some dies, especially Memory Box dies it seems, are very intricate and lots of little pieces to punch out and they also get stuck in the die and you have to pry them out - tedious and time consuming. So, I read somewhere about putting wax paper between the die and the cardstock before running it thru the Cuttlebug, or whatever die cutting machine you use, to avoid this. I tried it and it worked like a charm! The die had no pieces in it to pry out and the wax paper just peeled off the cut image. Love it! I now have a large piece of wax paper by my craft desk and I'll use it every time I cut something intricate.