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 😊

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.

Butterflies card

I picked up my craft magazines again this afternoon and i decided to check my box of dies to see if I could try it. It's fair to say my collection of dies is quite small but I did find a couple of stencils which game me an idea - no Pinterest required this week!

I started off with a card, scrap paper, an ink blending tool and two different shades of green ink. First I put the card landscape over the scrap paper (to avoid any ink on the table!) and began by putting a layer of light green ink along the bottom, partially going off the edge of the card - I dabbed it on first to get as much ink off the sponge before rubbing along so all white space was covered. Next I took a darker green and repeated the process to layer the two shades together. This gave me a nice edge which had a grassy look to it.

Now for the stencil. I have one with multiple butterfly shapes and sizes on it so I decided to use two of these along with two more colours of ink - pink and purple. I placed the stencil in position and used the blending tool (with a fresh sponge for each colour) to apply first the purple butterflies and then the pink. I added 3 of each colour, spaced all over the card. I even have one flying off the top edge of the card, to do this I put the scrap paper along the fold so that the ink didn't spread and the edge stayed neat. Now as this is the first time I've used a proper stencil and needed to stay within the single space I didn't necessarily do a good job of that.

I was planning to put a sentiment of some kind on the card so I took one of my banner style stamps and on a thicker piece of white card, stamped the banner in black. I had planned to use another stamp for the sentiment but have found again I'm lacking in resources! Thank goodness for scrap paper and fairly neat writing. I added this to the card covering those main blotches of ink using double sided sticky dots to add a different layer to the card. I felt this didn't complete the card so I added a black die cut butterfly, also stick with the stick dots.

I will admit if I had planned this properly rather than taking my usual 'what does that look like' attitiude I would be even happier with the result - like the spacing of the butterflies, my ability to be tidy when using a stencil. As it is, I would still give it to a family member but I know for next time what I should or shouldn't do. Definitely a one I'll make again! 

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!

Creations Pre Blog!

Before I created this blog, I don't know how many cards I've created. I have to say the majority have been Christmas cards (I still have quite a few of those!) but there have been birthday cards and a couple of other special cards thrown in there - some I don't have images of anymore. Since the lockdown began 6 weeks ago in the UK, I had said to myself I've got plenty of craft supplies so I'm going to make a mountain of cards. Flash forward to now and I've only created 2 individual designs but 34 physical cards. One I can't put here yet as its my nephews birthday card but the others I can share.

I am a Brownie leader and in the current situation we are unable to meet with our girls. I decided that I wanted to have some cards ready to send out for when we are able to invite the girls back to the unit or if we want to remind the girls that we are here for them during this time. I decided since we are members of Girlguiding, our logo the trefoil would be appropriate to put on the front. The issue was how to do it - its one thing to print it out and glue it to the front of the card (and look a bit naff) but to do something a bit out the box for me was going to be the challenge. 

I printed out a couple of copies of the trefoil so I had spares in case I messed up, wouldn't be the first time! I cut one out and carefully created a stencil using a craft knife to cut the little bits out. I've never used a stencil before when creating cards so this really was a first for me. I got one of my ink pads and a round blending tool to dab the ink over the stencil. It took a good few minutes to get a good covering of ink over the stencil and when I removed it I was honestly surprised at the effect it had created.As the test stencil was just paper I threw it out and got to work creating two new stencils - this time sticking the paper to card before cutting it and the centre bits out. 

Once everything was cut out, I used a small amount of white tack to hold the stencil in place on the card before I got to work. I used one stencil with gold ink to represent the Brownie colours, and I used blue with the other stencil to represent the Guide colours (I couldn't do one for our Brownies and not our Guides). I've put some pictures below from the different steps.

Overall for the first time using a stencil I've found the effect it created on this project was brilliant and I'm looking forward to what stencils I can find to use next!