WOYWW 112

Here we are again. It is late on Tuesday night and I have just cleared away my desk so I could do this post before I go to bed. But I took this photo first so you can see I really was doing something!

We have been invited to a friend's 70th birthday on Saturday, and it is also her wedding anniversary so I have two cards to make in a hurry. I want her birthday card to be a bit special so I am just trying out a few ideas before I get started on it. The three big fat folders are full of stamps on foam mount. One folder is Corners, Flourishes and Swirls, one is Floral and the third is Words. On the top of the pile is my magnetic storage for large or long dies, and I've chosen a few that I will probably be working with. Then there are some of my memento ink pads, a rocker-block for the stamps, and some trial runs done on scrap paper. Now I have a fair idea of what I am going to do, so next time I can get stuck in straight away.

A certain little puss-cat, Arwen by name, has suddenly got tired of her throne on the printer - it is probably a bit warm - and she has taken to lying on my desk in direct line with my fan instead, so tonight she is very peeved as she got sent off so I had somewhere to work. She is sitting on the floor glaring at me! Yesterday she went to the vets where she was given an anesthetic so they could shave her, (she is not friendly enough to do it while she is awake). She was very woozy and wobbly for the rest of the day, and hasn't yet forgiven me for depriving her of food! But she is actually much more comfortable in the summer without all that fur, so she will soon get over it and be quite amiable for a while. I always ask them to leave her fluffy on her face, feet and tail so now everyone calls her a 'poodle-cat'. I think she looks rather sweet.

Right now I am off to bed, and in the morning I will link this up to Julia's Stamping Ground. If you would like to see what everyone else has on their workdesk this Wednesday, follow me over there and see for yourself.

Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer....

Yes;  it is Rudolph Day again already. By that I mean it is the 25th of the month, so time to show another Christmas card, and link it to Sarn's blog, Stamping for Pleasure. 

Tomorrow is my oldest son's birthday and I once worked out this is exactly the middle day between one Christmas day and the next! (I bet you really wanted to know that didn't you?)! So folks, we are half way there, and what better incentive that that knowledge, to get some Christmas cards made ahead of the November rush.

So here is mine for this week.

I cut the holly frame with my Silhouette Cameo and once again it decided not to cut very well for me. Fortunately I was using up oddments of paper, but I still wasted a lot. In the end I got out the one sort that I know will always cut. It is bright white, pearlescent paper and it is totally non-fibrous, so there is niothing to catch on the blade. So I was left with a white circle of holly which I then attacked with various ink and mica sprays, and some radient rain paint, and I ended up with quite a nice wreath in green with a hint of gold.  I added some red perfect pearls drops for the berries.

I used plain white card for the base and cut a circular aperture which I backed with an embossed circle cut from another project. I then raided some ancient stash, looking for an image to to go on it and came up with these bells. They are slightly decoupaged in three layers, and the card was finished with some equally ancient Christmas ribbon from my stash and a greetings to match the wreath cut with my new Britannia word dies.

I shall enter this for the Rudolph Day challenge, and also for Crazyhazelnut's Christmas Challenge 130 which is to use some Christmas greenery.

WOYWW 211

A bit of a change for me this week as my workdesk has changed into the kitchen table, because as you can see here, I am all set to have a baking session.

Straight after my usual Wednesday morning sewing group, I have ten or twelve folk coming round. It is my turn to host our Life group, so I thought I'd bake them some cookies.

Now they are all done, so there's the darker Anzac biscuits, the golden Dad's cookies, and the rather oddly shaped lemon jumblies. And because the jumblies only use the zest of the lemons, I have sliced up the fruit ready to open-freeze, then I will box them up and use them in our cold drinks over the next week or two - 'waste not, want not' as my mum used to say!

I haven't done much crafting this week but the cards I have made will be shown in due course when they arrive at their destinations. 

But I have been busy posting on my other blog, so do feel free to pop over there and see what was 'rocking in my world' last week, and then a couple of bits about my sons and what they have been getting up to.

And if that's not up your street, try visiting Julia's blog instead, and see what other crafters are busy with today. I'll be joining you there as soon as I can.

WOYWW 210

Goodness - two posts on one day! But really this one is preparation for tomorrow as I know I won't be around for much of the day. Cantante, the choir Chris and I sing with, have their last concert tomorrow, at lunch time, so I will be out for most of the day.

So what's on my desk this evening. Well  not a lot, but I am sure some of you can identify with this. When new stash arrives, occasionally it sits around for ages waiting to be used, but more often I have to have a quick little play, and that is what I am doing here. A small order arrived today from Joanna Sheen and it included a lower and upper case die plate for a fancy script. I am very pleased with the way it cut, even with quite heavy gold card, and it is a good size for scrapbook titles. There were also three tiny word dies - Happy, Birthday and Christmas. It is so much nicer to add a matching card sentiment than to try to colour a peel off, or spoil a finished card with a smudged stamped one. I am sure I will use these a lot. 

The other items in the package were two stamps, the lovely flower heads from Indigo blu that you can see on the paper, and a plate of stamps all about peaches. This is an old plate and was very reduced in her sale and it will be very useful for me in my Project Life book and on jam labels. This is waiting to be mounted on foam before I try it out.

So that's it for today, but before I go, here are the three ATcs I have received in the WOYWW swap. They are (from left to right) from Annie, Jo and Sara. Thank you all. They are just great. I have one more to come but as I know it is delayed I decided to go ahead and show these ones now.

And the one I sent back is here.  I made the mistake of thinking I could print the bunting over my painted background, but it showed through all the white parts, so I ended up printing it again on white sticky back cotton paper and cutting each flag out individually!

Tomorrow morning I shall be linking this up to Julia's blog, and hopefully by bedtime I will have been back to visit as many of you as I can.

Down on the Farm

A week or two back I mentioned that I had some family birthdays to make cards for, so now another one has passed, I can show the card I made. It was for my brother-in-law who is in his mid-seventies, and while I was trying to think of something suitable, I remembered this digi image that I bought ages ago for something else and then didn't use. It is a Delicious doodles design that I bought from Stitchy Bear.

I started by printing it out and adding some colour with copic markers. There wasn't much colouring to be done, and I felt it needed something to lift it, so I made a white base card and cut a square window just off centre. I placed the image behind the window and added a square of backing paper over the entire inside of the front as my copics had bled through the image paper, and I wanted to hide it. 

Next I took out a selection of very small green, brown and yellow paper snippets. With the green I cut out various leaves using the Tim Holtz Autumn Gatherings die strip, and with the same die I cut a few brown branches. Then I used the Shapeabilities D-lite die, Cattails and cut it using two yellow papers. I cut each one into smaller pieces and layered them up to make the wheatsheaf in the bottom left corner. I then glued the leaves and branches randomly along the side and top of the frame, so they overhung the image .

Finally I found some tiny paper flowers. I bought a little bottle of these long before I left UK and there was hundreds in there. They are a bit like blotting paper so they are easy to colour. I sprayed some with candy-apple red glimmer mist and scrunched them up while they were still wet. When dry I paired them up with a black micro brad centre to make poppies and added them to my wheat sheaf, and used the last one in the lower right corner to balance it up. Then I stamped a greeting on the lower part of the frame.

I shall link this to Pixie's Crafty Snippets Playground - Week 76, because, for once I actually used some of my snippets up!

WOYWW 209

After all the excitement of our fourth anniversary last week, we are back to our normal snooping around one another's crafting spaces, and you can join in too by visiting our hostess Julia at her Stamping Ground.

I have a rather uninteresting table to show this week as much of my crafting has been done on the computer. In January I started a Project life album and I am determined to see it through to the end of the year. It entails making a double-spread digital scrapbook page each week. It is a bit more restricted than normal digital scrapbooking because you start with a template full of 'windows' into which you either slot a photo or a journalling card. I was doing really well with mine, but during May I was too busy, so although I have all the photos chosen and filed away in a folder for each week, I haven't managed to get the pages put together. So this week my challenge is to play "catch up", and get back up to date. I am not doing too bad with just two more weeks to go.

So on my desk you can see a thick folder where I keep a print out of the title page for each of my digi kits. I have over a hundred of them, and some have such way-out names that tell me nothing of their colour scheme or content, so I find a folder of the front pages makes choosing which to use so much easier. And by cross referencing them I then know where to find them on my computer. 

Then there is my pages of templates to chose from. This is the starting point for each page and my choice depends on how many photos I want to include and their orientation. Some weeks I have far too many but on others I don't really have enough for a double-spread so I have to use a lot of journalling and filler cards. This is the page I am working on today.

And finally there are my four latest pages that I have just printed, and these are waiting to be trimmed and added to my album.

And here are a couple of weeks' finished spreads so you can get an idea of what I am talking about.

 

And finally I just want to say a big Thank you to the friends who have sent me ATCs. Two have arrived and I have two more to come, so when I have them all I will post a picture of them. I hope mine are travelling safely to their destinations too.