Across The Miles

My parents have family in Australia & New Zealand so I was tasked with with makin appropriate cards. One of the Friday Freebies from SJ Lil Musings pretty much meant the card designed itself.

The inside is also a Friday Freebie from some time ago n seemed appropriate as its supposedly their summer.

Ease-l does it!

On good advice from the wonderful Loraine, i decided to stop trying to be clever (never lasts long) and make these calendar presents as an easel card instead of the complicated, time consuming digital project I was planning. The card is from the DCWV Mango Frost stack, the stamp is from Stampin' Up & the calendar tabs are from Design House Digital.

Merriment

I apologise for the appalling quality of these photos! Come back natural light all is forgiven!

Theres not a lot I can say; a fabulous stamp from Hero Arts, inspiration from Kristina Werner (well worth a looksee) and just about every embossing powder I own (except the luminous green one I got free from the NEC!). Am I a stamping convert?

Boys & Girls

Four of my nieces & nephews have just moved into their new house (with my bro & sister-in-law obv) n have finally got their own rooms (the boys in one the girls in another) so I decided a long time ago to make them nameplates for their bedroom doors. The design went through quite an evolution til I saw this frame by Mahlin on the Bubbly Funk blog Vanilla Sugar and knew that was what I wanted to create for the eldest girl Alex. So I bought some plain wooden frames from Ikea and set about trying to emulate it. The other three came from this basic design and the freebie paper from Papercraft Inspirations did the hard work on the boys themes. The sock fairy is from Pollycraft and the lettering was cut out of card by robo-cop n layered on top of each other to mimic chipboard letters - a technique I saw on the Two Peas education section!

Just a note to anybody that regularly reads my blog, the tree was actually cut out by hand, it is a pre-robo cop experiment that I didn't have a home until I worked on these projects

Vintage Melting

I've spoken before about the incredibly talented Cathe Holden , she really does look at the world in a unique way! She mentioned on her blog some time ago that she had discovered you could apply dark t-shirt transfers to leather, which she proceeded to do with a belt among other things. This got me wondering if would work on fake leather (don't they call it pleather?) so I purchased a cheap 2011 diary from Hootys and proceeded to make it look like a vintage book! The important word here is vintage cos I actually made a few boo boos (like accidentally touching the transfer directly with the hot iron shhh! don't tell my mom!!) but as I'd used an image of a damaged book cover, and decided to keep the damaged bits in instead of cropping them off, it actually adds to the effect... I'm really quite chuffed with how the spine turned out too, I cut n pasted a piece of the damaged edge and then copied n flipped it to make both edges of the spine damaged. I also added the recipients name to the design to personalise it & his name and '2011' to the spine.

Pink & Girly (Bleurgh!)

So my brief for this card was pink, princesses, name, age... which is pretty tough when u've never been a pink princesses kind of girl yourself! I toyed with the idea of a fairytale castle but I wanted to create something you wouldn't get anywhere else so I turned to my trusty robo cop (yep still in love with it!) and kept it fairly simple with a die cut crown from a kit my aunt passed on to me and printed the paper designs directly onto the card which then was cut. Betcha can't guess what the recipients name is...?

Tiny Treasures

Most people know the wonderous things to be found at Pink Petticoat, I have browsed their goodies a few times in the past but late one night I decided to take the plunge and purchase 'Tiny Treasures' digi stamps.

 They are just fabulous, n these are just the ones I printed straight out onto paper, I can't wait to start playing about with them a bit more!

Handmade

Geez, so much for turning over a new leaf and keeping this blogging malarkey up to date, how has it been a fortnight since I even thought about posting never mind actually pulled my finger out. Well, I am a victim of a grand imagination, I have spent hours poring over (mostly American, actually) blogs with all these fabulous ideas that make me go "oooh I could do that for so-n-so!" n the list of potentially handcrafted christmas presents grows ever longer... And will they be appreciated as much as I hope - doubtful! Will I even be happy with the finished results? - has Hell frozen over?!

I must make a special mention of Helen at Its All Fiddle Fart who I think is a kindred soul, only much more motivated - she actually knuckles down n does things instead of jus thinking about it! N she manages to find bargains in Hobbycraft too? How? I never can! I always come out (if I can find the way out!) muttering under my breath about something or other, I really dislike how they've laid it out now... Don't get on ur soap box, Jode!

So anyway, I don't have anything in any kind of finished state to share, hence the generic image, but I will... or I'll hide in a cupboard til xmas is over n hope my relatives forget about me (lets face it, theres seven grandchildren now, I won't be missed!)

Happy Halloween!

All Hallows Eve - U gotta love it! Yeah its a silly tradition that the Americans go all out on n us stiff upper Brits r above it all... but its great! Look at the size of my pumpkin! And combined with Sams we got three massive bowls of guts out of em! Sam was entering a competition so he carved a wasp n mine was inspired by the haunted house I bought from TK Maxx (hopefully more details to follow). So I made my mom follow Shimelle's recipe and we made cupcakes with cream cheese frosting (neither of us can pipe, so we went for a blob) and they're yummy, I highly recommend them!

5, 4, 3, 2, 1...

Hmm, chocolate on the brain!

The October Funky Hand challenge is 'Take 5'  - to use five papers in one project and extra points for using a Funky Hand paper... so do I get extra, extra brownie points? Cos my five papers are all from the Funky Hand Funky Christmas Time range!

If u've read my blog before (or spent more than five mins in my company) u'll know I've recently acquired a Craft Robo (or Robo Cop as its now known in our house) so this wasnt as hard as it looks cos he did all the work, lol! I have some other variations on this theme that wouldn't have been possible without him (I'm way too impatient and cheap to use punches!)

Ok I'll 'fess up, the fifth paper is slightly hidden as its printed on the back of the bow and the punched flowers and also it was one of those happy accidents by my printer cos it was meant to be the red dots n it somehow came out mustard! Do you forgive me?

Update: Hurrah! I got Top 5! Go me!

WOYWW 73 - Robo Cop

'Fraid I've tidied up my desk again, ladies so I wont even bother taking a dodgy photo of it (where did all the daylight go?!) instead I'll move straight on to singing the praises of my lovely Robo Cop - my new best friend(sorry Stace!) Doone asked last time what was wrong with a pair of scissors and I did leave a comment on her blog explaining that I am actually lethal with any kind of cutting implement. I stabbed my actual best friend, Stace, in the head with a pair when we were kids - I was mortified n she thought it hilarious so it obv didn't hurt!

The first thing I made was the poinsetta wreath, from a design in Papercraft Inspirations, the material I used was probly a lil too thick n it was a complete cow to glue down so the card has got all warped but for a first attempt its not so bad! The inspiration from the other one came from a bout of blog surfing (theres gotta b a hip word for that?!) where I saw a wreath made from autumn leaves n the thought popped into my head "That'd work with snowflakes too" so I played about with snowflake designs in the ROBO master software (the 'get outline' feature is fantastic, better than equivalent features I've used in the past), cut a ton out and had my first experience with getting glossy accents all over my hands! Serious stuff int it?! I had to colour the buttons with a promarker cos I knew I wanted red so I coloured the peel off too!

Has anybody put double sided self adhesive sheets through a die cutter like mine? I'm a little nervous that it might gunge up the blade?

To bow and scrape at the feet of our illustrious leader, click on the WOYWW on the sidebar! Enjoy!

Sticky Situation

I'd like to thank all the many blogs I've read extolling the virtues of stickers cos I finally took the plunge and bought two packs of squidgy stickers from Hootys (the other wasnt Christmas themed so I'll show them at some point) for 89p and got six super fast cards out of them n theres still three left on the sheet yet to use!

The backing paper on the two tall ones and the santa on the left is from the freebies on Design House Digital and the card 'blank' in the top left has been hanging around since last year, so goodness knows where that paper is from! 60 sleeps to go!

Wooly Wonders

Is that how u spell wooly?! I was trying to come up with a design encompassing mittens and the sentiment Let it Snow so I went searching for clip art and put it into the Craft Robo software - I think I'm getting better with this - and cut them out of Grannies Wallpaper and backed it onto Snowflakes both from Pink Petticoat.

This was a success so I tried it again out of plain card ( I was actually aiming for an aperture card but the less said about that the better) and then had the crazy idea of adding fringing to the ends with Liquorice twine from The Ribbon Girl and then I thought "maybe I could wrap it all in twine..." a million years later, the finished article looks like this

And if in case this wasnt genius enough, I also came up with a way to 'engrave' a sentiment onto foil card to finish it off, cool huh?

Twelve Days Of Foil

I have mentioned that I'd bought the hot foiling kit from Papermania some weeks back and once the initial novelty had worn off, I started to dislike how narrow the sheets were, I knew I could get something similar from crafty computer paper so I took advantage of their free p&p weekend and purchased gold, silver & copper. The drawback to these sheets is they are designed to be used with a laser printer or photocopier so I had to print the items I wanted off at work (shh!). I had seen a design using the lyrics from the Twelve Days Of Christmas to form a basic tree and as I absolutely love words, I had to give it a go! Its not easy when you haven't got any decent design software to hand, let me assure you, but I just about fudged these in Word. So the method is pretty straight forward, lay the sheets face up over your image, protect with another sheet of scrap paper and run through the laminator (not sure I've actually laminated anything in this yet, lol). Pull the foil sheet carefully off the original image and hey presto foiled lettering! And just as great, the sheet you pull off gives you a fairly perfect negative of the image so I tried placing it over a brightly coloured sheet of paper (see left) and I think it works pretty well!

I've found yet another website to break the bank (I'm such a liar, its really cheap!) and its all Sarah Stressed Stamper's fault cos I loved the background to her blog n tried to find out where it was from... my search led me to Design House Digital and the 'Happier' collection by Deena Rutter which by this point (n for a bargain price of about £3) I just had to buy! Oddly the pages are sold as 12 x 12, which I spose is intended for digital scrapbooking but sure makes for interesting working-how-to-print-out-ing!

Its a bit hard to tell from the pic but this was an triple aperture card that I covered with the Happier paper, I backed the apertures with a dotted design included in the set n I bought the accompanying PNGs which I promptly converted into something "RoboCop" as my mom calls it could cut out... it did say Happy Bird-Day in the bottom right hand corner but *note to self* rub ons come off when u run a hot iron over them... oh well this crafting lark in a learning curve, yeah?

WOYWW 71 - Shiny New Toy!

Ooh, I am a bad WOYWWer! I've actually lost track of how many weeks its been since I took part! But I do have a shiny new toy so I don't think I care!!

And so the great Christmas production line has begun... I visited a demo day at a craft shop in Ketley (Telford) a few weeks back n purchased the Papermania foiling kit which has featured quite highly in my productions so far... I say productions I've managed six so far and I don't think any of those are even in a finished state! Good job I've got no friends, eh?

So anyway, at the risk of incurring the wrath of the WOYWWer's, before I went on my holibobs I... sold... my... Cuttlebug... Eek! I'm sorry, don't shout! In its place I used my antique Argos vouchers n purchased a Sizzix Texture Boutique (quite a bargain by all accounts cos there was a wodge of coredinations card included) and then on my return (cos it was suggested I would need summat to look fwd to!) I raided my penny jar and bought a Craft Robo! And I love it! I am after all a cheapskate at heart and the fact that I can send almost any shape to cut without having to buy cartridges or dies and pander to someone elses designs is like... David Tennant covered in chocolate!

If you don't know what this is all about visit Queen Julia's place n get in the know, pronto! Happy WOYWW!

Lookin up

I came back from my holibobs last week n wham, bam straight back into the back-to-work blues (not helped by the fact that we flew thru wot felt like 1000 miles of cloud before we landed in the pouring rain) so it was even more pleasing than normal when I came to stick this lil beauty together and I did it all the right way round without having checked first!

I used the poppies image from Birds Cards that I've used before, coloured it with promarker and heat embossed it (not that u can tell in this pic) with red glitter embossing powder so it shines and sparkles!  The background is embossed on my new Sizzix texture boutique which I purchased before I went away and I made this card for my aunt who financed it with the Argos vouchers she gave me.... ahem 7 years ago!

Cheeeeese Gromit!

Man, this blogging lark is hard to keep up! So I'll keep it short! I made this amazing cheese bunting from the free graphics from justsomethingImade.com and it also inspired this card which I was very tempted to put on a circle of tin foil but... um didn't in the end! The camera image is from SJ at Lil Musings

Apologies for the poor quality pics n no sniggering at my CD collection!

A Cause For Celebration!

Not only have I finished some cards, I actually remembered to photograph them AND blog about them!

For my niece, this was made from a pre-printed card blank with a digi stamp called flo that I can't remembe’ where I downloaded from, grass cut from my smacking acetate adventures and some flowers made from my homemade stash. The papers I used on Flo are from Funky Hand Colour Me Happy CD

 For my other niece (one year and two weeks exactly between them, lol!) this was made from a free template download from the do-crafts site, the papers are the same as I used on Flo (see above) and the stickers were part of my win from the Trimcraft forum colour challenge

For my mom to give the younger niece, this was made from new Deena Rutter paper (slightly modified), my lovely new paisley stamp from Penny Black slapstick range and my new free sample of WOW embossing powder! Lots of new there!

And finally for my neice and nephew who are due to be christened in a double ceremony at the end of this month, i’m having a bit of a thing with monograms so I created one for each of them and combined them with these sweet lil dresses I got from a card making kit from Home Bargains which I think look like christening gowns and squares of paper i got free with a magazine.

Now if only I can enter just one challenge this week maybe I can do the craft version of "the treble" that footie fans seem so enamoured with, lol!

WOYWW 66 - Good Job Its not New Year!

Well I had every intention of blogging something this week as I've been so lax lately but as you can see that didn't happen till last night when I was preparing this - I even missed WOYWW last week, altho I did make it around to viewing a fair few. This week (altho the pic was taken Tuesday) I have a visitor in my 'studio'! My best buddy Stace is here working on her pregnancy/baby journal - one of the mini books I made couple of weeks back - and she has had her first experience with the cuttlebug but I'm sorry to report that after the initial wow, she gave up on it pretty quick sayin it was time consuming!

 And as you can see, I tidied up before I took the pic again DOH! but I have replaced the falling down shelving with something more desk based - a bathroom trolley from Asda that I put together upside down so the legs wudn't fall down the gaps at the back of the desk! Its already full tho so I might have to look at getting a second one - at £7.50, I think I can just about fit it in the budget!

Just to answer a few q's from weeks gone by, to TraceyR - no my scissors aren't electric as funky as that would be, its the laptop power lead! To Elizabeth, I followed the tutorial here for the smacking acetate & To Morti - the fairy image is a Lili of the Valley die cut if u've not seen them before u must visit, their images are bootiful!!

Bananas & Rosebuds

So theres quite a lot of birthdays coming up so I've been under orders by my customer (aka my mom) to knuckle down. And voila! We have a 30th birthday with DCWV Mango Frost card, & a Pollycraft digi image and my first application of rosebuds that I got from a car boot... I could really do with some help here, I'm not so sure how to use these things n now I have a ton of em!

I've been looking forward to making this one for my niece, I spent an age finding a decent digi stamp of a monkey (n then ended up making it from scratch anyway) n created this rocker card with the sentiment "Do you get banana milkshake from milking monkeys" which I actually pinched from Jo Kill who in turn credits it to Mitchell & Webb!

Got more to post, so watch this space...

WOYWW 65

I'm not sure whether to thank or cuss u lovely WOYWWers for your many comments on my laden shelves cos as I sat at my desk on that Weds evening I thought "Hmm they are a bit wonky!" only to find, on closer inspection that they were coming apart at the seams! So I quickly cleared everything off and had a lil panic... only to end up turning them upside down and re-hanging them but with less stuff on this time... until I can think of a better solution, at least!

I have to confess, I have very much cheated and this photo is not in fact from this week or even a Wednesday but I cudn't go two weeks without playing along with the wonderful WOYWW so I took a pic of my desk in a get-every-thing-out-on-the-desk moment to keep in reserve!

And the result of this atrocity? An attempt at the Lili Of The Valley sketch challenge for which I - all together now - missed the deadline! Must try harder!

Luvver-ly!

Wahey, my first blog award!

The rules for this award are to thank the sender:
THANKYOU KERYN!
List 3 things that I like about myself:
Oh jeez, thats a toughie... my ankles! um... my creativity n my wit when it doesnt let me down!
and forward to 7 other bloggers:
Well I've only got eight followers! Ooh wait its says nine now, have I got a secret admirer?! But I guess they already like me so I oughta try n make some new friends, lol... So:
SJ, Loraine, Julia, Spyder, Mary Anne, Darcy, Alison


Ok, to business! I've finally completed one of the many mini books that were littering my desk a few weeks back. For my sister in laws birthday, I chopped one of them in half and created an handbag friendly sized brag book, a third full with photos of her oldest daughter leaving two thirds for the twins she is expecting at the end of the year...

 And to complement it, a sunflower easel card, my first attempt at a non-square easel card, to go with it:

I have Loraine (two mentions in one post, my dear!) to thank for this for the stampin' up card we made the other week of which I said looked like a sunflower and she claimed the resemblance wasn't intentional so I decided to make one that was!

WOYWW 63 - Mish Mash!

Come on, thats positively bomb site material!!

On the left we have the result of a messy hour or so trying to follow my cousins smacking acetate tutorial - messy but SOOO much fun! I did a whole load of sheets in all the combinations of the colours I own (all four of em, lol) I also experimented with printing onto tracing paper and white glueing (PVA?) the images onto the ink splodges once they'd dried. My images are along a horticultural theme in line with the Daring Cardmakers challenge (think Julia might know summat bout that...?) and I'm really quite chuffed with how they've come out. I'll show u some closer up images, if/when they ever become cards! Not sure how well u can see but most of the rest of the piles consist of a load of cd-roms my cuz lent me and a load of incredibly funky base cards that her mom/my auntie has sent me! They're such a generous lot up there, lol!

Happy WOYWW everyone; ready, set...get nosey!!

p.s. I've added a gallery page which features some of the cards I didnt think were worthy of their own post, so take a peek...

Choose Your Own Sentiment...

What do you make of this then? A friend of mine is goin in for his driving instructor exam this week and he is convinced that he will fail so driving home from work the other day my creative juices started to flow (lets face it, got nothing else to concentrate on, lol) and I realised there were quite a lot of similarities between the words 'congratulations' and 'commiserations' (had to write them down when I got home to be sure) and lo a spinning card was born!

Its meant to be a steering wheel from a Bugatti (which I'm assured is a posh car!) and I had a right palava with the text - always my downfall, sadly - so the letters ended up being vellum ones left over from Chrimble, with a mixture of freebie Papercraft Inspirations letters cos I was running out of certain letters.

As you can just about see, the circle at the back moves round to reveal your choice of sentiment and the prop on the base says "on the result of your test!" (which it belatedly occured to me sounds slightly medical!)

I'm not that happy with it, but it went thru so many redesigns, its amazing it actually ever got made! I added a bit of comedy to the rear to distract from the awfulness - I just hope he likes it!

WOYWW 62 - Mini Book Madness

                                                             Is this better Keryn? Altho u can still see most of my cutting mat so probably not, lol. Who would've thought my butterfly shaped odds n sods tray would attract such attention?! No, its not crocs and theres nowt growing out of it.. except a pile of crap! Um, this weeks lil obsession is mini books, I've been thinking about making one for ages but that was as far as I got until I went to my boyf's over the weekend armed only with my laptop and scraps box and decided to finally try and follow one of the Create 10 lessons that I signed up for. I faffed about a bit n didnt really get anywhere til I opened lesson 10 and decided to have a go at the mini book. My first attempt was awful as I didnt have a ruler or knife but I got the basics down and got my head round the instructions and when I got back to my desk I made the black and white version - which I'm pretty chuffed with but not a clue what I'm gonna do with it! (the paper is all from Clare Curd's signature range, if you're interested) My best friend wants me to make her a pregnancy journal but she stated no dark colours so I started to make another one with some paper from a scrapbooking kit I bought from Home Bargains (the red thing to the left) but I got so far and decided I don't like the colours and I knew I would make a mess if I tried to take it apart so I kind of abandoned it and started again - the paper stood upright at the back of the mat is what I've started cutting out for third time lucky so we'll see if this one survives! Um, have I missed anything? Oh the shrink plastic butterfly wasn't a success, not sure if I need more practice or I just need to be more precise in my cutting but some of the finer detail split so they curled up and got stuck to themselves when I heated it. Really must get some printable plastic... Head over to Queens Julias palace for more WOYWW

Counting Rainbows

So Lili Of The Valley had a 50p sale on their die cuts and as my colouring in pretty much sucks, I thought I'd take advantage... and yep u guessed it, they aint seen the light of day since I opened the envelope! Oh well! I also bought this lil fella cos he's just so darn cute but they sell their stamps unmounted and I don't own ne U-mount  - or in fact even know how to use it! - so after sitting unopened on my shelf for a while I finally took the plunge and tried to spray mount him to various surfaces! ....It didn't really work but along the way I had the bright idea of stamping him onto another potential I'd nabbed for my advertures in Kraft-land, this time the inside of a 100% recycled decaf t-bag box (does that make it 200% recycled now?) and keeping the image to sepia tones. I tried the whole painting with Distress Inks thing but once it dried u could barely see it so I took all the shades of brown out of my pro-markers and kinda made it up as I went along.

Seein as its a Lili image I thought I'd try n squeeze it in for their challenge... and promptly missed the deadline! Luckily I intended to enter it for the Shabby Tea Room too, hence the inclusion of actual colour as this week is Blue, Cream & Brown (hope it fits!).