January to July 2022... where has the time gone!

 So much has been going on in the last 6-7 months that I haven't found time to create any posts about the cards I've made that I'm actually pretty proud of. Trying to recap on everything is going to be fun!! Luckily enough I can mostly recall what happened as I still posted the pictures on my Instagram. We'll skip Christmas and pop that into a separate post... 

January/February

Stocktake started early, literally the first week of the month and lasted for almost the entire months of January and February - with a two week break in the middle. On top of that, my manager left at the end of January. Typical me fashion I had to raid the craft room to see what kind of card I could make to be given from my office. I came up with a kite card using a Crafters Companion kite die and a stamp - due to the time constraints to get the card made I decided to keep it simple. I was bit cheeky with how I did this. We had a Girlguiding Leaders activity day that we named "Beat The Blues" and each Division provided an activity for leaders to do and mine was making this card... so yeah bit sneaky and cheeky how I made this for an activity day and ended up giving it to my manager for his leaving!

As part of his leaving gift, we got him a decent bottle of whisky (I think it was!) and gift card. Now, I had recently bought a die to make a gift card holder so I got to experiment with that too.

And with that made, January ended and I got a new manager in February and work carried on.

March

The start of the month was pretty quiet, didn't do much in the way of crafting, work kept me busy and I had no real motivation to create any new cards. But at some point during the month I saw a Facebook post asking for crafters/hobbyists to take part in local craft fairs. I reached out to the organiser and she was happy to include me in the fairs she was organising. Now I have so many cards that were already made but were not necessarily at a really high standard shall we say. I did make an effort to make some new cards which I will post photos of in a separate post. As it was near Easter, one lot of cards I did make was some Easter Bunny cards using the technique I used to make my Girlguiding cards - homemade stencil. I enjoyed making the stencils, admittedly it did take a lot of focus to be as accurate as possible. These were better stencils than the ones I previously made as this time I used acetate which can be re-used many times as long as they are cleaned off in between any usage. So I made 5 different bunny templates and then proceeded to stamp out some Easter cards:

 

April

I did two craft fairs this month, one at the beginning and one at the end. Along with the cards I had, I decided to try out making some origami flowers which I had seen Sara Davies giving the instructions for on her Instagram. 

These actually sold best at this first fair so I knew I needed to make some more for the next one!

May

Most important thing that happens in May is my eldest nephews birthday. My boy turned 5! Now I was feeling pretty burnt out so I was planning to just buy his birthday card, poor bairn. I didn't think I could top the epic dinosaur card I made for this 4th birthday. I did not time things right and failed to purchase a card, so what do you know I'm up till 11pm the night before we were going down to my brothers for the birthday party. This one is pretty good, it came out well and reminded me I can do cards suitable for children from the stamp/die sets that I own. While the colours may not be entirely right but that doesn't bother me.

I had a weeks holiday which the birthday party was at the beginning, and during my week off I put my painting skills to the test and decorated my living room. I did another craft fair at the end of May. I had a slightly different set up for this one, I had to take my own tables so I was able to separate out the cards from the other pieces I had for sale. Again the fairs will go into another post.

June

The second round of family birthdays. My parents birthdays are 3 days apart and it was my grandmas birthday on the 2nd. It was a little rough as it was my mams second birthday without having my grandma there and it was emotional for my grandad too. We filled the week with family outings ending on a meal out with the whole family to celebrate that it was actually my mams 60th. But dad was first. I once again was sneaky and used a card I had more or less pre-made in prep for the previous craft fair as a Fathers Day card. I did also make a special gift tag which could double as a bookmark.

Now for my mam. It was her 60th birthday, so any card I made needed to be special. I had also said to my dad that I would make a card for him to give her if he couldn't find one he liked. So, first the card from my dad. This one had to be made first as I needed to get it to him undetected by mam. I used multiple different dies to create a special, different card than anything she had received before.

Panel dies used on the front, with paper piecing to make the rose stand out on the card, and pop up numbers used on the inside, just to remind her of her age!! Now the card from me mam had already made known to me needed to be special and more impressive than any other card I had made for adult family members. 

Needless to say, mam was delighted and only commented that the 60 wasn't glittery. We ended the birthday week with the family meal and mam had asked me to create some gift boxes to go on the tables in lieu of party bags. Said gift boxes only held sweets and I was very please with how these went down with the family. Each box was individual, on one side there was a panel die, and on another was a birthday balloon. No two panel/balloons were the same - a bit of an achievement in itself!

I made 18 boxes in total, using 7 different panels, 1 of which came with the box kit, and the balloon stamp from  Crafters Companion Balloon Sentiment stamp and die kit. Everyone enjoyed the day and loved the boxes. Lucky me managed to pinch a few boxes back to have as examples/reminders of what I made or can make to order if I was to make items to order.

The rest of June ran smoothly, at least for me it did. My parents and auntie all caught covid somewhere and I was avoiding them for almost 3 weeks! Now we're into July and it is my other aunties birthday on Sunday so I need to get cracking and make her birthday card!

This was a lot to get through and plenty of photos to put up but we're at the end of this post now. Next up will be about Christmas followed by the craft fairs. 

If you have read all the way down here, then thanks for sticking this long one out 😊

Christmas craziness

Christmas crafting is in full force right now! If you have arrived here from my Instagram then you will most likely have seen the photos I have been adding for all the Christmas card I am currently making.

This started back in September. I had 2 weeks off work as I was having a new kitchen fitted - couldn't sit upstairs in the craft room while they were working so I took the craft room down into the living room to both keep myself busy and available to answer any questions on the kitchen! I got a number of cards started over these 2 weeks  but not necessarily completed 😬

In October I had another week off work so I started digging into the craft room again to continue making Christmas cards and get some ideas for other cards. I have a bad habit of getting everything out and overwhelming myself with stuff and getting nowhere near the amount of cards that I plan!

I've just had my November weeks holiday and this time, I was actually away on holiday! Of course, I took some of my craft gear with me to give myself something to do on an evening if for example the England match was on TV - I didn't want to watch it (much prefer either the highlights or just hearing the score!) so I sat in the kitchen and put the finishing touches to 20 cards that I had started over the past couple of weeks.

Now you may think I'm going overboard. You're probably right, but there is a reason behind this madness. A few weeks ago my cousin sent me a message asking if I would like to have a stall at a Christmas fair to sell my cards. Silly me said yes I would love too, without even checking what I had made. Now I have a little notebook with the first few pages filled with a brief description of cards, how many I already have made (or almost complete in some cases), and how many I would like to have by the end of my craftathon. The list is slowly going down, I have 17 days left to get everything finished so no pressure!

I will be continuing to post photos of my makes on Instagram and once I have finished all the cards then I will post them in a blog post here 😊

Mothering Sunday

Today is actually the first time since my last blog post that I've made any cards.

It's Mother's Day on Sunday 14th March and I hadn't bought any cards. 'I'll just make them!' I told myself. I was planning to do this last weekend but got distracted by my mam suggesting I make a bunch of flowers to give to my grandma rather than real ones. It took me 2 days to get them done, in a vase and looking relatively pretty and to a standard I'm happy with to hand them over. I've made them before and blogged about them so I won't go back over all of the how I did it (note to self, look back and put here which post it was).

Here is the finished  bouquet:

So that was last weekend. Fast forward to today, I ended up going out with my mam for a couple of hours this morning, came home with more craft stuff ironically enough. Eventually sat down to start making cards for my mam, auntie and grandma. I've been looking forward to using a new die set that I got a couple of weeks ago. After a few practice cuts I was ready to start. So the dies I have used are Patchwork flowers - pansy and periwinkle.

After looking at the pictures on the packaging I settled for running 3 colours in 2 shades through my machine so I could mix and match between the shades. Pink, purple and blue.

The next part was simple - glue them down onto card. I forgot how messy it can be when you use runny glue  not a glue stick!

 I decided to add a 3rd shade to one set of cards by mounting th pieces onto coloured card rather than them all being on white. I have to say my favourites are the blue on blue card and purple on purple card, possibly because I like the flowers better but that's neither here nor there. Last thing to do to these is stamp them to give them am identity. As I'm planning to give them for Mothers Day, I have managed to find a stamp that says so, and on the card for my mam I have added a Mam stamp. I have not completed a 3rd card in this way as things are a little uncertain right now but once Ive had a call one way or another I'll know what I'm doing.

Anyways, here are the two more-or-less finished cards. I'm disappointed my quality of stamping, I tried out a new stamp mount and unfortunately I caught the edges in the ink and stamped before I noticed. I know my family won't mind but it pains me a bit to hand over marked cards.

Christmas is Coming!!!!!!!!

 Hello!!

 

Okay, Christmas is coming. It's going to be strange, it's going to be different. Christmas is still happening - it has not been cancelled.

Thats been the main thought running through my head for the past two months, hopefully tomorrow we'll find out what the UK plan is for Christmas and we can all chill out a bit!

It's been bust at work and with the second lockdown (I haven't been furloughed this time!) I've had plenty to do to keep me busy - so much so that I cancelled a week off out of paranoia that I'd get furloughed after it 😂 I have however just had a long weekend as I was really starting to feel burnt out from all of the stress and pressure that I apparently never show. So my plan for this long weekend was to get those Christmas cards made.

 I sat down on Friday morning, looked at my craft materials and literally had no idea where I was going to start. I wanted to make use of some of the dies that I had bought and picked up of the Christmas magazines I've picked up over the years so I got out two of them which are very similar snow globe shapes. I just kept running them through the machine until I realised I probably cut too many out. Here are a couple of the snow globes:

 

 

There was so much glue everywhere with these... So while I had the glue out I got out some festive paper and covered the front of several smaller cards and let them dry before attaching 3D stickers to them - simple yet effective. I have a thing for stickers, especially Christmas ones. They might seem a bit like cheating to make cards but combining them in the right way, on the right background then they can look great (I think they do at least...).

So that summed up Friday, I think I came out with around 25 cards. Saturday morning brought another batch. During my Slimming World Zoom meeting I was sat in the craft room so I used that time efficiently and made up some of the decoupage packs that I still have and later attached them to cards. I made a few more before I started to wane a bit with my inspiration when I had to go do a bit of tidying for my parents coming over for dinner (they are still my support bubble so this is allowed). The last three I was quite pleased with. I had taken inspiration from an activity we're planning to do with the Brownies and Guides - make a Christmas tree shape card out of paper. I made the tree: half a large circle of green paper, fold it into 3 and fold back the outer edges so it opens like a door in the middle before cutting out snippets of paper from the side to give it a more tree like effect. I took the tree and on the middle section I stamped "Merry Christmas" and used glittery embossing powder, and on the outside I added different features for baubles to each card - pom-poms, coloured gem stickers, and red/green pearls. To make it more obvious that they were trees and not random bits of green paper stuck to a card I dug out some textured brown card to create tree trunks. 

 

I am posting photos of most of these creations to my Instagram. Really I should post a blog before I post the pictures but it takes seconds to post to Instagram whereas it takes a few minutes more to create a post... I'm so lazy! In theory I'll be making more cards and posting more pics as it draws closer to Christmas when I'll start posting or handing them out to family and friends. 

Christmas is the time for giving, caring and sharing with everyone. It isn't about the presents, it isn't about what you got off people or the physical value. It is about coming together, it's about family, and most importantly sharing love and kindness to all. It's been a hard year, I've been lucky in that I haven't lost anyone but at the same time so many have lost loved ones and can't spend time with the ones they love. Loneliness is hard, its worse at Christmas time and it has affected so many more people this year. So I decided that I was going to send Christmas cards to any of my contacts who wanted to receive one. Some of them are going to get one just because I have their address. I don't expect to get anything back but this is my way of saying to people - I see you, I'm thinking about you, I care about you.

 

C x

Sympathy card

 A couple of weeks ago I found out that a lady (G) I had worked with for 6 years had passed away. She was one of the best, an absolutely wonderful, kindhearted and caring woman, and she had been fighting cancer for over a year. It was devastating to hear that she was ill, and even more heartbreaking to find out that it was incurable. Due to the pandemic I didn't go to her funeral. I wanted to but when you are only allowed 30 people inside the Church and knowing there would be so many people outside I felt it unwise to attend. That didn't mean I wasn't thinking about her or the family she left behind.

My work colleague was going - she had known this lady longer than me and had been told she could go in for the service. I made a card which she took with her.

Now, we found out that G had requested people to wear yellow, so that was where I started with the card. I cut a rectangle of yellow paper slightly smaller than the size of the card to act as a backing. I then cut a smaller piece of white card and blended green ink across the bottom to resemble grass. I didn't want this to be an overtly sad card as G was such a bright spark in my office, I didn't use any dark colours except for the words.

While I was waiting for the green to dry, I took out two butterfly cut-outs and stuck them together down the centre to give it a 3D effect. I used Dovecrafts 3D Pearl Effects pastel colours (blue, cream, green and pink) to give the top layer butterfly some colour and pattern. Unfortunately the two that I attempted did not come out very well, luckily I had one I made several weeks ago that did not look like I had just attacked it with massive blobs of colour thinking it was pretty... I grabbed a small square of orange paper and stamped the traditional "With Sympathy" message on and used black glittery embossing powder to melp it stand out. I also grabbed my small butterfly craft punch and cut a butterfly out from beneath the words.

When the ink had dried on the card, I glued it down and began to arrange my big butterfly, message, and I pulled out some small butterflies I had cut out one day to save paper waste in pink, purple and cream. Once in position I stuck them all down and left the card blank for me to write in when I was at work and had a bit of inspiration of what to write.

I didn't take any photos during the make of this card, I did a time-lapse video which I posted on my Instagram stories. I couldn't help a little laugh when the 40 minutes it took me to make this card was shrunk down into 26 seconds! I did however take a photo of the finished product.

Break

 Went a bit MIA again... work got busy and so did my weekends!

I've just had a week off work (back tomorrow - booo!), spent a few days away with the fam, came home and did something I haven't done since I moved in to my house - tidied and organised (sort of) the craft room!! 

I have been doing a couple of little things -

• more face masks for me, my mam and one for a work colleague. I haven't finished them yet so no photos at this moment in time
• sorted out some of my pinterest boards and looked for a few more things to try (https://www.pinterest.co.uk/skittleshideaway/)
  
• made two rough designs for new Christmas cards
• started an Instagram to post photos of my craft works, with hashtags and everything 😲 (https://www.instagram.com/skittleshideaway/)

Normally I'm pretty private about what I do but then I started this blog during lockdown and after my work colleague told my she made an Instagram for her house it occurred to me that posting photos of what I've made on Instagram is not a bad thing to do - it will literally help me to remember designs I've created previously in case I want to do them again if I thought they were great. It also gives me a little bit of feedback when people hit the 'like' button. So I started that on Friday, and aside from myself, I have 6 followers. I was surprised to have any! So if you are reading this and wonder what I have made that isn't already on this blog, then please do take a look at my Instagram. It actually surprised me how much I had made (and still had record of or still have to be able to photograph) before this blog.

So as my week off has now drawn to a close, I just have to wait five more days before I get another break. I'm looking forward to that one as I don't think I really made the most of this week off...

Ta-ta for now!