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.

Whatever turns you on!

One of the nice things about not making cards to sell is that, when a family member has as event that deserves a card, I can really tailor it to the person. So although this card is not my cup of tea at all, as soon as I spotted the digi stamp I knew my son's partner would love it. My card arrived yesterday and she was thrilled with it.

The image is by Rick St.Dennis and he has several in this style in his etsy shop. Having printed it and coloured it with copics, I cut it to fit the centre of a black mat which was then layered onto a textured red mat, both cut with dies from the Sizzix Majestic Elements-Marvellous Squares set. The backing paper was passed through an Embossalicious A4 folder, and the black strip is a newly purchased Memory box die called tesseltina, which is already a firm favourite with me. It is so delicate and fine. 

This close up shows the embossing and the textured red card more clearly. I used a permanent marker to colour a silver peel-off greeting black and put it in the lower right corner, and balanced this with a couple of gems iin the other corners.

I did not expect to find any challenges for this card but I am going to link it to:

 Addicted to Stamps and More Challenge 47: Make your mark (colouring with copics)

Creative Moments Challenge 18: Lots of layers (6)

and Make it Monday 142: Anything goes.

WOYWW 208 - Happy 4th Anniversary!

Yes it is four whole years since Julie invited us to use her blog as a launching pad to visit other folks work-spaces, world-wide. And what a happy family of crafters we have grown into. I try to join in the fun every week, but when other issues get in the way, I really miss it. Now, after a very hectic month, I am finally back and I even have some craft going on, which makes a change.

At the start of April I treated myself to some of the lovely Heartfelt Creations dies and stamps from the Bella Rose range, and I have been waiting for the opportunity to put them through their paces. I have a sister who will be 85 at the end of the month, and I thought they would be ideal for a card for her.

So here on my desk you can see the dies and stamps, all my copic pens with the colour chart I made to help me choose my colours, a couple of my snippets boxes, a selection of memento ink pads - chosen because they work so well with copic markers - and my box of ink dusters, sponges etc.

Swinging round to the left a bit you can see my little green bug, a pot of gesso and my stickles storage tower, my box of white paper offcuts, and, of course, the ever present Arwen keeping her eye on the proceedings.

I was very impressed with the largest collage stamp. I never have much success with stamps of this size, but I used the recently purchased large rocker-block, and I got a perfect print every time. Whether this is due to the rocker-block or the quality of the stamp I don't know, but it was a good result either way. You will have to wait to see the finished card as it is just possible that my sister may see this blog, so I will wait until after her birthday to show it.

Before I go I will just share a few of my holiday photos with those who are interested. I mentioned in an earlier post that I returned from my week in Seville and Cordoba with almost 1,500 photos so I have been trying to sort them out. This little slide show is just some of the wonderful art and craft inspiration that I saw. As an ex-maths teacher, I love pattern and order, so all the tiles were a delight. Many will end up as BP overlays, stencils or embellishment cutting files. So here are a few of the floor patterns I saw, followed by some motifs that I spotted on shop signs, paper place mats etc. Then there are tile patterns from ceilings and walls (many of these could be printed as backing papers just as they are), a lovely piece of wrought-iron scroll work and finally a great piece of 'grafiti'/wall art that we passed each time we went to our hotel. To view them, just click on this link and then on the first photo and the slideshow button above it.

We are, of course, having a little bit of fun to celebrate our anniversary, but you will have to follow me over to Julia's blog, Stamping ground, to find out all about it.

A Rudolph Day Quick Make

Well I  have been AWOL for a long time haven't I? I see my previous post was for Rudolph day in April and here we are at 25th May so it's time to post again. I have had a very busy month with a visitor who came to house/animal sit while we were away, then our holiday, another visitor on the day we got back, the long trip to Alicante for the first visitor to go home, and then on Thursday my grandson flew back, and we are now back to 'normal', whatever that is. Of course I still have the 1,415 photos I took on holiday to sort out, as well as the ones taken with our visitors, three weeks of Project Life to catch up on, some ATCs to make by next Wednesday, and I suppose a bit of housework wouldn't come amiss, but I guess that is fairly normal for me.

However I did manage to make a quick Christmas card last night for Rudolph Day, and here it is. 

The framed bell was cut on my silhouette cameo using an Anna Mironova design file from UK Scrappers, and the corners are a Marianne die. Both are cut from Bronze mirriboard. (I had just loaded a new blade in my silhouette so, for once, it did an excellent cut first time round). They are mounted onto a BP from a 6"x 6" paper pad by Dovecraft - goodness knows how many years I have had that for -  and I cut out the centre to show the die cut better. As the paper is greener than it looks on the photo, I used a pale green base card. A tiny bronze peel-off greeting was all it needed to finish it off.

Now I shall hop over to see Sandra at Stamping for Pleasure, to link this up. Why not follow me and see what it is all about.