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!