A few cards to share

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you are all well and looking forward to the weekend. Have you got anything crafty planned? I got an order from Every Craft's A Pound yesterday and I'm really looking forward to having a bit of a play with my latest goodies. The main reason I put in an order was to buy some more 300gsm super smooth card stock, they don't sell it all the time so I was really pleased to find they'd got it in again. You can buy a pack of 125 sheets for £7.50 which is really reasonable for a card that is so versatile, I use it for my card blanks and for Promarker colouring. It's also great for distress ink techniques too. ECAP also sells the same brand of paper in 200gsm and 250gsm weights in packs of 250 sheets for £8.99. I find anything less than 250 gsm to be a bit flimsy for card blanks (unless I'm doing a card technique that is backed onto another card blank) but like the 300gsm card, the lighter weights are brilliant for colouring using alcohol markers, however I wouldn't recommend using it for pencils as the surface is a bit slick and I've found that the pencils don't blend very well even using blending solution. I also bought a Santoro Mirabelle 2 A4 Premium paper pack which was £3 - as regular readers will know I love Santoro stamps and the Mirabelle ranges are particularly sweet. I keep hoping that the Willow collection will make it's way to the site because I really like the rather fey images of that range but don't own any yet. Here are some photos of my other purchases included in my order.

Love these bright colours 

Flame embossing folder with free Core'dination card

Victorian Valentine Die cut sentiments

Victorian Valentine paper and diecut A4 stack

It's hard to tell even in real life but these are in olive green

pretty in pink polka dots

an 8 pack of pink striped card

8 sheets of large polka dots card - bargain!

 I also purchased some embossed white card in two designs - tartan and buttons but because it's white I wasn't able to get a good photo of the card, I'm hoping Distress Inks go well on it as I think they'd look amazing on the embossing. I ordered a couple of packs of enamel dots too which I love but refuse to pay the crazy prices some stores sell them for (£3.99 seems to be the average price which is ridiculous when you consider how small they are and how few you get in an average pack) I buy my enamel dots from either ECAP or The Works as they sell them for a pound. Admittedly I may not have a huge colour range but one lot I order are glittery, one is matt and the other is in neutral colours so are perfect for men's cards and although dots are popular now, I'm sure a new trend will come along in a few months and nobody will be using them so it doesn't make a lot of sense to go overboard and buy lots of them if I end up getting tired of using them. (I don't get rid of the things I get bored with though but put them out of sight for a while then view them with fresh eyes at a later date.)

Although I've not blogged for a couple of weeks, I have made a few cards including a New Home card for my friends Adam and Victoria. I've actually made this card twice now but even though I sent the first one a few weeks ago, it's not arrived at their new home yet so I made a second. In a way I'm not unhappy about it going astray as I had lost my camera at the time so couldn't take any photos of it and remaking meant I could take a couple.

New Home Box Card

Close up of the floating (sort of) elements

The houses and tree images were taken from "Get Stamping" stamp sets, unfortunately the magazine no longer exists but as I'm a craft hoarder and subscribed to the magazine, I have all the stamp sets apart from the very first as my subscription didn't kick in until the second issue - most vexing because I seem to recall it was sort of steam punk themed. I coloured the images in using Promarkers and fussy cut around them. I punched out a small square to make the for sale/sold sign then cut a third off a second square to make the sold bit to go on top. The wooden post was made using a bit of scrap kraft card left over from making the packing box card base. The clouds were die cut using a Memory Box Kite and Clouds die. When you fold the card flat for posting, the for sale/sold sign is directly in front of the middle house so I like to pretend that that's the house that my friends have bought lol. I will confess that the middle house had a chimney like the other two houses but I couldn't be bothered to fussy cut around it so just snipped it off.

Here are a couple more of my recent makes.

A Celebratory card for a couple of friends 

A Valentine's card for my husband

One of the many Thank You cards I've been making recently using a Prima stamp set

I have made a few other cards but I can't locate them in my photo file at the moment so I'll have to share them another day. If you have any questions or comments about the cards featured in this post then please leave them in the usual places. I hope you all have a brilliant weekend and until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx