I don't do cute!

Well I don't do cute very often anyway. It's not that I don't like cute images - I see loads that I like when I am browsing blogs, but I have very few recipients of my cards that 'cute' is really suitable for, and I don't make cards to sell. But once in a while it nice to have a go, so here is what I made this week.

I bought a few stamps in the LOTV sale last month, and one of them was this cute bunny sailing down in an acorn cup. I coloured the image with copics and cut it out with a sizzix label die. I then routed through my snippets boxes and found the end of a blue/brown striped paper that I really like, and some computer printed blue crackle paper, and used these to create a background. I then found a little piece of pale brown that matched the stripes, and cut round the outside of the die to make a mat for the image. I used a piece of dark green card to cut a leafy corner, (I have forgotten what make this die is), and the last of the blue crackle bits to cut out some flowers using a cottage cutz die. The sentiment is an old Elusive images stamp. Although I have a huge selection of it, I couldn't find any ribbon the right colour, so I used a couple of ink pads to add colour to some white seam binding, and tied a bow for the top corner. Some tiny blue pearls in the centre of the flowers finished it off.

I shall be linking this one up to Pixie's Snippets Playground Week 111.

Welcome Little Man!

We now have two little boys called Isaac in the extended Perry clan. My great-grandson who is two and a half already(!) is called Isaac, and at 3.am today, our niece gave birth to Isaac Flynn. Flynn is his middle name not his family name, and it shows his links to his Irish roots. We managed to find and meet up with family members of both his great-grandparents when we visited Ireland last year. Incidentally, his arrival makes Chris and I great-uncle and aunt, at least 52 times! I have actually lost count but I know that is about right. Aren't families wonderful!

A couple of weeks ago I briefly showed the card I had made in readiness for his arrival on my other blog, but now it is in the post, en route for UK, I will show it properly.

This is my favourite baby image, and it is a Sugar-Nellie digi-stamp called Bambino. I coloured him with copic markers and used water to tear out a small 'blanket' from pale blue mulberry paper. The background is a triple layered paper that I made in photoshop from a digi-scrapbook kit. I printed it several times so I could decoupage the flowers. I used puff-paint for the bobbles on the hat. The sentiment was computer generated and cut with a sizzix die, and I finished it with some pearls for the flower centres, and some new card candy that I had bought that day.

Welcome to the world little man!

Something a little bit different

My youngest son has a birthday coming up this month and while I was thinking what I would put on a card for him, I saw this, and it immediately made me think of him.

Ben is the son who writes and sings his own songs, and he can portray a lot of emotion in them. I have seen adults moved to tears by one or two of his songs. So this was perfect for him. I saw it on a Silhouette Facebook page where a kind lady called Merrie Huntley-Burruss posted the cutting file for us to use. (I can't say for sure whether she designed it but I am assuming she did). So I was going to try cutting it with paper for his card, when in a flash of inspiration I decided to try something a bit different.

I chose a sheet of paper from my stash in bright yellows and oranges with gold highlights, and used this inside a clear clip frame. Next I opened the cutting file in my Silhouette software and resized it to fit the frame. I made a musical border top and bottom from individual note files, and cut it all out in black vinyl.

It cut well and the notes were easy to 'weed'. As you can see, I have some scrap paper ready to put the unwanted sticky bits on. The main image caused me rather more problems as it is very difficult to see the cut lines, and some of the script is very fine. but while I was doing it I suddenly realised that it would be better to stick it to the inside of the glass than to the paper, as I could then move it if I made a mistake. 

To do this I needed to cut a mirror image of everything so I had another go. It was even harder to weed reversed as nothing looked right, but I got there in the end. I used transfer paper to lift the whole cut from the vinyl backing paper, and re-position it on the glass. Then I had to rub it down really hard to make sure it was well stuck all over. Here it is on the glass. It has some kitchen roll under it so I could see what I was doing.

Finally I assembled it all so now it is ready to send. 

I have put it back into the polystyrene base that the frame was in when I bought it, and wrapped it in plenty of bubble wrap, and, fingers crossed', it will arrive in one piece. Ben is on holiday on his actual birthday so I will be posting this to arrive as soon as he gets back. I guess if I had been making this for a girl, I might have put it in a 'proper' frame, and prettied it up with flowers and butterflies, but I think plain and simple is the better approach for Ben.

It's Rudolph Time again.

If you had a panic when Christmas came around and you didn't have enough cards ready, why not join us over at Sarn's blog, Stamping for Pleasure, where every Rudolph day (25th of each month), we submit two, or more, Christmas cards for her challenge. That way you will have made a good start on your collection.

For my cards this month I used a new stamp that didn't manage to get inked up in time for Christmas. When I was in Birmingham with my son, back in September, I went into a newly opened haberdashery/ textile shop, looking for some buttons, and discovered a small selection of craft items. Among them was this lovely stamp by Heartfelt Creations. I loved the words on it, and the little 'Bethlehem' nestling inside the 'O' of 'Noel'. 

It turned out to be a bit bigger than I expected, so I custom cut the base cards, making sure they would just fit inside a standard Spanish envelope, which is just a little larger than the British one. And here are the cards I made.

I stamped the image onto white heavy paper, and added some colour with copic markers. I didn't care for the stark white background so I used ink dusters to add a little subtle colour to it. My instinct was to colour the flowers red which I did, and I added gold pearl to their centres. The small white berries are sparkly with gold-ice stickles, but that doesn't show well in the photos. I scanned the image into the computer and made a cutting file for the word NOEL. I cut it out using my Silhouette cameo machine and embossed each letter with a red/gold interference powder. I then had to decide whether to paste it over the green swirl that twines round the 'N', but in the end I used a craft knife to carefully cut along each side of it, and I was just able to slip the letter through the slots I made. I think it was worth it! I rough cut around the stamped image and found a piece of red paper in my snippets box to mount it on, and then layered it onto a white base card.

I thought it might be fun to try a different colour arrangement for the second one, so this time I used shades of yellow and peach on the flowers with yellow stickles for their centre, and I embossed the letters with a powder called Disco Black, which was one of my favourites back when I used to emboss everything! I found some green paper to back this one, and there we have it. A couple of cards that I am quite pleased with, and I think I shall be making a few more of these while the stamps etc are out.

I have never been very keen on the use of the word Noel, or Noelle as it is sometimes spelled, but this time I looked up its meaning online, and apparently it is an ancient word now taken to mean simply Christmas, or a Christmas carol. By a somewhat tortuous route, they traced it's origin through some French words to the Latin one meaning 'Day of birth', so I feel a bit happier about using it now I understand it.

A Blue, Blue Christmas

I am still doing well with the recycling of some of my Christmas cards, and today I used the image of two matching cards I received. With the vast array of cards available these days, it always surprises me when I get two the same, and this year one came from a friend in UK and the other from Spain! But I liked the image and thought it was one I could reuse. So I hunted through my dies to find a suitable one and cut this oval frame in gold mirri-card. I cut the image to fit just under it, and then hand-cut a very narrow navy mat. The base card also had a narrow navy mat and then an off-cut of powder blue card with a white core. I think I did this when I was trying out a new embossalicious folder, and I used a sanding block to reveal the white core. This seemed to fit best onto a white 15cm square card, so I just added a blue bow (rescued from a card some years ago), and gold dazzler to finish it.

For my second card I used a Nellie Snellen die set, cutting the fancy frame again with gold mirri-card, and the image with the matching plain interior die. The backing for this one is a small piece of navy vellum with gold stars on it, that I found at the bottom of my Christmas snippets box. Goodness knows where that came from. Vellum is not my favourite play-thing! (I discovered that the cosmic shimmer clear glue is excellent for sticking vellum, and doesn't really show through at all). I found a suitable strip of navy and gold sticky ribbon and used it to hold a message label at the base of the card. The sentiment is a very old Clarity stamp.

So that is two more cards for my collection, and as I have used several oddments of paper and card, I shall link this to Pixie's Snippets Playground, week 108.

I am also linking it to Crafty Hazelnut's Christmas Challenge 160 which is to use 'Shades of Blue'.

Christmas Cards All year Round ; Where, for January, Anything Goes.

Creating a winter scene

As I am determined to make better use of my received Christmas cards this year, I decided to CASE one that I liked. It was a front step-card, showing a winter scene on the back panel, and a big robin on a post box on the 'step'.

To make my winter scene I used a tiny SeeD's snowman stamp, and a tall fir tree from Stampscapes. Then I masked these off and over-stamped them with the winter village scene which is a very old PSX stamp. I used my copic markers to add some subtle colour. I scanned the completed image and saved it as a jpg.

I calculated the size of card needed to make the complete card, and drew it out in the software for my Silhouette cameo. I traced the top edge of my scene and welded that to the base card and cut it out. I had a couple of unsuccesful attempts. The first time I forgot to remove the two small lines between the outline, and the edge so it cut where I wanted a fold! I then found I had used too thin card, thinking it would cut better with my machine. But my son Ben brought me over a new cutting mat when he came at Christmas, and perhaps due to the complaints they have had about them losing their 'stickiness too quickly,' they have now  made them much stickier, so when I peeled my card off, it tore at one corner, and just curled up into a roll!

For attempt number three I used a heavier card which took a lot of persuading for my printer to accept to print the image, but I then did a double cut (i.e. I cut it twice before removing it from the machine) and this just about worked!

For the step I used a robin stamp from Chocolate Baroque, again coloured with copic markers, and hand cut it to include the whole front strip which I glued onto the front of the step, and finished off with a red band of thin card top and bottom and a greeting cut with my Britannia die. A little bit of stickles crystal ice added a sparkle to the scene, and the robin and holly.

And here is the finished card! It actually sparkles very well but you can't see it in the photo.

I had more or less achieved what I had set out to do, but it probably didn't justify all the work. I still had my original stamped and coloured scene, so I used this to make a more straightforward card. 

The shadows in the snow are coloured with a purple/grey pen so I chose some snippets of a dull purple paper from a SU set, and cut a frame. I then used a photo-corner punch to make slots to hold the image, though I found it hard to keep it flat so I did use a little glue as well. The tall tree overhung the frame, but I quite liked that, so I didn't trim it down. As part of my 'using up some ancient stash' campaign, I dug out a purple pearlescent base card, from a huge set I purchased from QVC at least twelve years ago. These all had some embossing on them, but I found one that just had some corners embossed, and the size matched my image and frame so I was able to use it. I again added glitter glue for sparkle, and a large snowflake cut with Marianne dies from another purple snippet and some white card.

I am entering this in Crafty Hazelnuts Christmas Challenge 159, where we are asked to show some Winter weather. I doubt I will actually see any snow in our village, though there is some on top of the distant mountains, and it is still what I think of when folk talk about Winter.

I am also linking it to Craft a Scene challenge, where this month we are invited to chose out own theme, so although they did have a challenge for crafting a Winter scene a couple of months ago, I think this still fits the bill.

And the purple snippets used in the second card make it eligible for Pixie's Snippets Playground-Week 107.

The Three Kings Return.

This lovely stained glass window depicting the three kings, came to me on a Christmas card this year, and I thought it deserved to be enjoyed again. So I cut it out and used it to make this card.

I started by printing the Word-art piece from a digital set, to the lower corner of an A4 sheet of cream card, and then used it to make a 15cm square base card. I edged it with gold peel-off borders and corners, mounted the window image on the left side and having used an ink duster to add a little dandelion memento ink patch, I glued on a large star cut from a snippet of gold mirri-card, using a memory box die.

I shall enter this card in Crafty Hazelnut's Christmas Challenge 158, which this week, is to Upcycle or Re-purpose an item, or to use a freebie.

And also to Hazel's extra monthly challenge, which is always Anything  goes as long as it's Christmas.

WOYWW 240

Well it is good to be back after quite an absence. If you are wondering what I am back to, pop over to Julia's blog and read all about it.

You will be pleased to hear that this is a short post today as I have spent the morning at the eye hospital and have had so many drops in my eyes that I can't focus on anything. (I am going back at the end of April for lazer treatment so I am hoping for an improvement in my eyesight after that). Secondly I have very little to show. I have just about got rid of the flu that visited me over Christmas, but haven't felt up to doing much more than the date-sensitive card-making needed so far this year. 

So on my desk is the pile of cards I took down along with all my other decorations, after the Three Kings Fiesta in our village for Epiphany. Arwen is helping me to sort them out into piles - ones to 'salvage' bits from for reuse, some that will inspire me to CASE them later, and a few that will go to my friend who recycles them into new cards to sell for church funds next Christmas.

And that's about it for this time. Having seen horrific scenes of floods, angry seas, and ice plains on TV, I feel almost guilty to say we are enjoying beautiful sunny days, but right now it is too bright for me outside, so I will have stay in and finish sorting my cards for now. Stay safe everyone.