WOYWW 180

Once again I am writing this on Tuesday evening ready for tomorrow's world wide tour around other crafting folks' work spaces. You can find out why we do this on our lovely host, Julia's, Stamping Ground. 

This week there is not a great deal on my desk, but I am busy all the same. On the left side there is a pile a papers. I sing in a choir called Cantante (Spanish for singer) and we have our first winter concert in my local bar, because we are raising money for our village charity that helps the disadvantaged children in our area. I am looking forward to it as we are based at Huercal-Overa, some half hours drive from here, so it is nice to have one concert nearer to home, which my friends will be able to come to. So I took it upon myself to make the posters for the village. I showed them to our choir leader for approval at the practice this morning, and this afternoon I set about translating them so I could also display them in Spanish. I then had to seek out a friend from the village to check that  my Spanish was accurate and now I have printed out a few copies in each language, plus a lot of smaller ones to hand out to friends. So tonight I am having a guillotine session, so I can start handing them out at my sewing  group tomorrow.

When that is done I shall move to the other end of my desk where I have a few Christmas cards all waiting for inserts. I did a count up of my cards this week and found I still needed a couple of dozen or so, so I looked around for some fairly straight forward ones and got ten done yesterday. First of all I printed out four copies of a nice little Silent night sheet that I bought  from craftuprint. It has three layers of decoupage on the angels and crib, which was fairly easy to do, and then I used some ready made white base cards and some off cuts of patterned paper to mount them up.

I am pleaded with the 'Merry Christmas' ones. These used a cutting file for my Silhouette cameo machine by Tina Fitch, also purchased from craftuprint. As you can see, the inner layer is very fine and delicate, and when it is behaving, the machine can cut these very well. Yesterday it was temperamental, and I ruined a couple of sheets of paper before I got the settings right. It was then a game and a half to stick them onto the second layer. In the end I used diluted PVA glue and a very fine paint brush, and had kitchen roll ready to mop up any over flow! The third layer is mirri-card and I was impressed at how easily the machine cut this. Once the three layers were assembled and set under a press to dry, (My huge Spanish dictionary is just perfect for weighting down glued cards while they are drying!), I quickly put together a simple base. Because I was happy with the end results - the red/gold set, I then made another set using blue card and paper and silver mirri-card. It made sense to make three of each as I could fit three of each layer on an A4 sheet of paper.

Now I had better get on with that cutting up, or my cards still won't have inserts in them. I usually print my inserts but I need a new ink cartridge so I will have to stamp them tonight!

I will do my best to visit at least my regular group of friends tomorrow, and a few extras too I hope.