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 😊

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.

Flower Power

Tonight I have made a set of 6 cards with no prompting from anything and no peeking at ideas on Pinterest!

So last night as I was waiting for my laptop to do some updates I was looking at some things I have on my pegboard. In one container I have a mass amount of googly eyes, another has Christmas sentiments, another pre-cut paper shapes(butterflies and flowers), and the final one has little paper flowers with a gem centre. Now updates like to take their time so I decided to sort out this container of flowers into little bags for each colour, and while I was doing this an idea of a vase with s few of these flowers coming out would be nice. It only took me until 8pm tonight to actually make a move to do these!

First I needed to make myself a few vase shapes out of paper. Easy enough to do (and google ideas for a nice-ish shape to compare my poor drawing skills to) and I have far too much paper to know what to do with.

Once cut out, I just had to glue it onto a card, attach 4 different coloured flowers and draw on stems for the flowers reaching into the vase. I used 6"x6" cards to give the flowers more room to "grow", and I used a combination of Pritt Stick and Modge-podge to glue everything down. The Pritt Stick was better for the vases but the flowers needed more of a gentle touch to glue them down.

Now, I know my stems are not perfect. I don't expect them to be, but they are part of the little touches that add character and a more personal touch to a card than just sticking something on and saying 'hey, we're done now!'. This is not a completed card yet though. I like to add a stamp to the front of a card, depending on the purpose or decoration on the card. I made 6 cards in total like this so I used 2 different stamps - one saying 'Best Wishes' and one saying 'Friends are like flowers in the garden of life'. I like that last sentiment, it makes me happy to think of life as a pretty garden right now - especially when the sun has been shining and you get to sit outside!

 Each card is individual. One thing I like to do when I know I'm making multiples of the same card, is to make sure that no card is exactly the same. In these cards I have the two different embossed stamps, different coloured vases, different numbers of leaves, and the flowers on all of the cards are different (I only have 8 colours so that was a tad more difficult to do when only using 4 per card). Overall I'm happy and these turned out pretty well for having not made anything properly for a few months!