Praying or Peeping

I don't do much 'cute' but I have always loved these two little angels called Praying and Peeping, by Judi-Kins. I don't even know whether they exist now. I certainly bought them a good few years ago, after my sister gave me a Christmas card with one of them made on shrink plastic. Now that really was cute!

I probably over used them a bit that year, but they haven't seen ink since, so I decided to get them out and have another go.

I love the way the naughty one's toes are curling and her halo has slipped!

I raided my all-white snippets box (the fullest one of all), and found ten little pieces so I stamped each angel five times. I then went through the Christmas snippets and found several pieces from free magazine booklets I think. I dug out some dreadful pink DL cards with envelopes that have lurked in a cupboard for years. I like mauvy-pink, but these were a shade I would never choose to use, so I thought I'd cover them with paper and just leave a narrow border on each side. Hence my use of mauve, and white papers covered in pink and purple snowflakes. There was also one in deep mauve with pink stars all over, but I forgot to photograph that one before giving it to someone. The two blues pieces are a paper that I really like from my computer library, and I have printed it out in every shade of blue, so I nearly always have odd bits of it in my snippets box. I then coloured one of each angel to match the papers, cut them with a spellbinders label die - I'm not sure what number it is), and quickly assembled five cards. One has already gone, but here are the other four. The words were from a See-D's set.

I shall pop over to Pixie's Snippets Playground with these, and see whether anyone is lurking under the playhouse with some mulled-wine. Perhaps I'll see you there.

A pair of jolly Santas

I am looking for quick and easy designs for my last few cards, and once again my silhouette machine came to my aid. A while ago I downloaded a cutting file for a Santa face from the Silhouette store, so I loaded it into the software and resized it to fit on a 12cm square card. I duplicated it so the two sat nicely on an A4 sheet and cut them from double-sided adhesive. While it was cutting, I used some light-weight white card to make two base cards.

The next task was to weed out the bits I didn't want, which seemed quite easy after some of the detailed vinyl I have done lately.

It was then a case of removing the yellow backing sheet and carefully placing the image, sticky side down onto the base card.

I peeled off the remaining white layer to reveal the sticky image, and covered the whole area with red glitter. I don't use glitter very much since I discovered stickles glitter glue, but I have quite a collection of it from years ago. I rooted around and found some ultra fine, red pearl, which worked very well. I rubbed it in to make sure everything was well covered and it formed an almost velvet cover, with very clean edges and no static problems to clean off. So I decided all they needed to finish them was a simple red peel off greeting. And there we have it: A pair of jolly Santas, and two more cards for my collection.

I Love Red Candles at Christmas.

Wow I'm back. It's not often you see me twice in one day. Thanks to those who have already visited my earlier post. I do appreciate it.

This morning I made my chili and ginger jam as planned, so the house is quite pungent! I shall take some up to the sale this evening. Our village art and craft expo goes on until Sunday lunchtime, but we take it in turns to man it after the first busy evening. I am on duty tomorrow morning.

I have also retrieved all the decorations from the back of the garage so this evening I will be tackling the tree, but first I decided to make one more card. I have nearly reached my total now. Just a few more to go.

This card has made use of one of a pack I acquired around fifteen years ago. It is probably from the time when I lived near Shrewsbury and frequently visited the QVC surplus store. They sold mountains of returned orders, opened packets that had had bits used for demonstrations, damaged packs, odds and ends all bundled together, and they were nearly giving them away. I bought all sorts of bits there, sometimes with no idea of what was in the pack, hence a few oddities now lurking at the bottom of my cupboards! 

The pack of cards all had a Christmas die-cut aperture, sort of like a stencil. They weren't large enough for iris folding, and I wasn't inspired to use them at the time. But I guess my crafting has changed since then, and when I spotted them the other day, I could see that some of them had potential, and could be a good way of using up some more of those snippets. So I chose the candle aperture. The red paper behind it is from a challenge I entered a couple of years ago. I can't remember what colour it was originally, but I had fun at the time with a red and gold mica spray recolouring it. The yellow behind the flames, and for the flower centre was made by modge-podging a serviette onto white card. I don't remember what project that was for! Anyway, they have found a new home now. The red for the flower and green for the leaves were also oddments from my snippets box. Both dies were blue so I think they were Marianne's. I used glitter glue to define some dripping wax on the candle and add some glitter to the flames and flowers. Most of my stickles are pretty old now and they are getting a bit thick, so I had to resort to a fine paint brush to spread them out today. But they still sparkle, so that's the main thing. I might add a small sentiment later. I haven't decided yet.

Right. So that is one more to link to Pixie's Snippets Playground, (I have managed three this week Di), and then I'm off to find the lights for that tree. Once they are on, I love doing the rest of it.

Merry Christmas!

I am sure I am not the only one who does this, but when I am 'up to my eyes' with so many things I need to do that I don't know where to start, I often go off and spend half a day doing something completely non-urgent and irrelevant. So this week, as I checked through my Facebook page I saw a photo of a Christmas sign, painted on wood and hung amongst some greenery. The lady who posted it wanted to know what font was used so she could make a similar sign with her Silhouette machine. The general consent was that it was hand painted but I thought it should be possible to make something like it with a bit of messing around. I can't resist a challenge. So I used a combination of Corel Photoshop, my scanner, my ancient light-box, good old Windows paintbox, and a bit of imagination, and finally the trace function of my silhouette software, and I did it! I now have a cutting file for the words Merry Christmas, that while not being identical to the original sign, is a very close approximation. I had 'wasted' many hours, but had great satisfaction from doing it, and I was then able to get into gear and tackle the things I really needed to do!

So last night, I decided that the least I could do was to use it, so I off-set the file to make two layer mats and cut them all out of bits from my snippets box, using my Silhouette of course. (I think the middle layer is a rather confused design, but the plain white on top does show enough to read what it says. A rather larger snippet was used to cover the front of a DL card, having first matted it onto olive green card, also from my snippets box.

And here is the card I made. It really is white and green, though it looks more like pink in the photo. It was a little bit plain for me, so I finished it off with a line of glitter glue along the writing and some on the snowflakes in the background. It is amazing what a difference a bit of sparkle makes!

I don't like that photo at all so I have tried doing another one. This shows the colour and sparkle much beter, but I cut the end off! take your pick!

When is a snippet not a snippet? To me, once I have cut into a sheet of paper or card, if the piece left is smaller than A6 size, it goes in my snippets box. But in each box(I have four colour coded boxes!) I also have a clear pocket full of the real tiny pieces. But when I find a piece in my box that is large enough to cover a card, I think, 'that wasn't really a snippet at all'! What do you think?

Anyway, I used up several pieces from my snippets box for this, so I am off to link it up to the Playground again. Then I have to go and make some chili and ginger jam. I ran out of it at my sale last night and took some orders, so I had better not procrastinate any longer.

Using up the bits.

Craft magazines are a rarity here, partly due to the cost of P&P and the fact that shops have to buy a minimum quantity with no returns for any unsold copies. But there is one shop over in Albox, a half hour drive from here, that I visit occasionally, and they do have one on sale each month. It is not the one I would chose so I only buy it when I like the free papers in it! I usually do use these, which means that I am left with lots of little off cuts, and a load of toppers to match them.

I have only made a tri-shutter card using kits from Hunkadory, which I wasn't keen on, because they use such good quality card, that the end result was very heavy, and not suitable to post to UK from here. So when I saw a tutorial for making one recently, and I'm sorry I have forgotten whose blog I saw it on, I decided to have a go at making one from scratch. This meant that I had lots of small areas to cover, and it was a perfect way to use up my snippets of red and pale green papers, and one with little characters all over it, as well as several of the toppers that went with them.

So here is the card I made, which I will be linking in to the Snippets Playground where there is a two-week long party to celebrate their 100th (and 101 st) week under the management of Di. Well done Di!

Christmas cards for two special little boys

I fully intended to post these in Crafty Hazels challenge last week which was to make a card for a child, but I didn't manage to find the time, so I am entering them in her monthly extra challenge instead, which is always anything goes (as long as it's Christmas).

Whenever possible I make individual Christmas cards for my grandchildren, so these are for two little brothers, aged 7 and 9.

The images are both from the Paper Shelter. When you buy a digi image from them, usually you get a ready coloured image as well as an outline one for colouring, plus a printed background, and the same background complete with the coloured image. So there is plenty of choice as to how you use them. In most cases I like the backgrounds so I do use them, but I then decoupage the outline image (having first coloured it of course!). I find this more satisfying, and I enjoy using my copic markers. So that is what I did with both of these cards. I coloured them first, using the printed coloured images as a guide, so that mine would tone with the backgrounds. They were quite fiddly to cut out, but they made a nice pair of cards, so it was worth the effort. I added some glitter glue to the backgrounds and some white 'snow' to Santa's hat and jackets for added dimension.

I shall go and link them to Hazel's challenge for December now.