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!)