Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you are all well and having a great week. It's very cold here in my crafty nook and it will be for nearly another week! I got a phone call today from the gas company to say that they'd got the asbestos report and they'd be coming to put in our new heating system on Monday, it's going to take two days to complete, 1 1/2 to replace the boiler etc then another half day for the electrician to wire the boiler in but hopefully by this time next week we'll have a warm flat and hot water for the first time in two weeks! I am very much looking forward to it, cold is very motivation sapping and I've not done very much apart from huddle under blankets since it turned cold at the weekend. Now that we've finally got a start date, we can get on with moving the rest of the stuff that needs doing. There wasn't much point doing it before because of all the space it's going to take up. We need floors to be as clear as possible for as long as possible because of my husband's sight limitations so I've been putting it off until we'd got a fixed date.
As well as an update, I thought I'd share a couple of cards I've made since the last proper post. The first card is a watercolour sympathy card that I made for someone I know from church (I don't attend now but was a very active member of the Methodist Church before I got married). As a fellow Christian, I considered a faith based sympathy card to be appropriate on this occasion.
All the stamps used came from a Heartfelt Creations set called HCPC 3450 - Cross and Lilies Pre Cut Set which coordinates with the Cross and Lilies Die (which I don't own unfortunately). They are cling mounted red rubber stamps and have some beautiful sentiments included - the two I didn't use on this card were 'With Heartfelt Sympathy' and a very swirly 'Hugs'. I like Heartfelt Creations stamps a lot but the one drawback with them is it's quite hard to line them up straight if you are using them directly on your card because they are not printed on the back like a lot of my stamps are. My images are a bit wonky but I hope that doesn't distract from the message I want to convey. I stamped the cross image and added touches of paint to the lilies using Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolours - the 36 pan set and the starry night set of 6. Once the lilies were dry, I stamped the image onto a post-it note and fussy cut around it on the outline to make a mask for the cross. I added this onto the image and flicked the A6 card with a watered down version of the gold paint used to colour the centre of the lilies then allowed that to dry before repeating the paint splatters with black paint. I removed the mask, allowed the splatters to dry then completed the card as shown. Although it very 'on trend' to use paint splatters on watercoloured cards, this wasn't the reason why I chose to use this technique. The cross looked a bit lost on all the white background, I didn't want to add patterned paper to a fussy cut out cross or to have a solid watercoloured background so adding subtle splatters of paint seemed like a good way to bring the cross into the foreground while adding a bit of extra interest to the background. I think it works.
My second card is the one I made for my niece who celebrated her third birthday last Friday. I hadn't made a card for her in advance though at one point I did make the panda card featured in another post with her in mind but considered it to be a bit menacing in appearance and never got around to making a less scary version. So I ended up making her a card while stripping two rooms and re-arranging the living room to accommodate all the stuff from both rooms. Luckily I sometimes stamp images, colour them and fussy cut around them ready for future projects (I store them in either DL sized plastic wallets or A5 sized plastic wallets - Poundland or The Works are good place to pick them up cheaply) and this is what I used to make a (fairly) quick card for Isobel. The Safari images came from a Freebie from Papercraft Essentials magazine earlier in the year called 'Safari Friends'. I fell in love with this embossing folder and stamp set the moment I saw it but up to now hadn't used it for a card apart from cutting out a couple of sets of each image (there are a boy and girl explorer included as well as lots of sentiments and scene building stamps)
The first few photos are the ones I took before adding the sentiment, I'd die-cut some grass at some point and added it to the folder with the other images so I decided to add it in front of the animals as they peer through the die cut circle of the front panel. I embossed the panel using a star embossing folder by Me to You (Tatty Teddy) but used the debossed side for a different textured look. The stitched frame was made by layering two stitched circle dies together and running them through the die cutting machine at the same time - it was die cut out in white and coloured using the Grass Flexmarker - the 3 was coloured using the same pen. The Zebra print card came from my stash, I think it may have come from The Works or possibly Yorkshire Trading - it's a pack of different coloured and designs of animal prints and is usually to be found in the kids stationery/craft section. I've had it for a few years but I'm sure similar card can be picked up cheaply enough from either the shops mentioned or other places - I seem to recall seeing some animal print card in the kids craft section of Tesco a few years ago too. The sentiment on the front was one from the stamp set and was cut out using a flagged end die from my stash. I ran the green flexmarker around the edge to make it stand out from the background piece. I added the 'Go Bananas!' sentiment to the inside and stamped a banana three times as shown to make a bunch of them next to the sentiment and coloured them in using a couple of Flexmarkers. I really like how the brown adds that hint of realism to them.
I hope you like my latest makes, again I'm probably not going to have much time to do a lot of crafting for the next couple of weeks until we've got the new heating system up and running and I've got all my craft stash back in place (it'll probably be quite traumatised by all the moving about lol!) I have been taking this time to re-evaluate both the extent of my craft stash (huger than I'd realised - it's amazing how much I'd crammed into such a small space!!!) and how I've been storing it. I'm not exactly a hoarder or OCD (getting there though!) but I do like to have things a certain way and part of that up to now is leaving things in the original packaging. Part of that is practical, it keeps things protected and has all the relevant information already there without the need to duplicate it but what I hadn't realised was quite how much room some of the packaging takes up. So while things are out and a little bit more accessible, I've been taking baby steps and I've put a lot of the packaging into recycling. I started with all my Tonic Studio punches (I have a lot of quite bulky ones because Every Craft's A Pound had them for you guessed it a pound each!) Just by taking all but one of them out of the plastic packaging, I managed to reduce a large wicker basket overflowing with punches (I found two punches by the side of where they were stored because there were so many that they'd fallen out and I hadn't noticed) to a medium sized narrow plastic box with a lid and a carry handle which will be easier to transport and store. I had two Tesco bags for life filled with the plastic by the end of it and I kept the cardboard inserts so I could tell what each punch was called for blog posts etc. So encouraged by this that I've started to do the same with my embossing folders - I've kept the ones that are in card and cellophane packaging as they don't take up that much more room and I seem to think I have some Verity Rose embossing folders that may still be in their packaging but all the others are now out of the original packaging and I've written the brand/name/size onto the actual folder so I still have the information for blog posts etc. I cut down some of the plastic packaging for making shaker cards and for floating elements but put the rest for recycling and I kept some of the Crafter's Companion card inserts to use as medium weight chipboard but again the rest went to be recycled. I've reduced two open top storage boxes to just one. I've also gone through an A4 plastic wallet folder that was bursting with scraps of patterned paper and reduced it to 8 items - some of the ones in the folder had been in there over ten years!! These are only small steps and in themselves probably make very little difference but it's a start, not just to having a more usable craft space but a whole new mindset. I know why I have problems letting go of stuff, some of it is sentimental - I'm reluctant to get rid of things that people have bought me even if I don't really like them or use them - another issue is when I started crafting, I had very little money to buy things (my heat gun which until earlier this year was still in it's original packaging cost £19.99 and that was 16 years ago!) and they were quite hard to get hold of. That might sound strange when you consider how accessible craft items are these days what with a plethora of online craft shops and eBay, but when I started physical craft shops weren't really that common especially in medium sized towns like I lived in and I'd never even heard of internet shopping. We did have a craft shop for a while (we had two different ones at different times) but the items were really pricy in the first one and by the time the second one opened I had less spare cash to spend on things. The point I'm trying to make is because at one time I had a hard time getting craft stuff, I'm reluctant to get rid of any of mine just in case I end up 'needing' it at some point in the future even though some of it is either not to my taste anymore or I've outgrown it as I've become more skilled at papercrafts (I rarely use card kits these days for example). I don't want to make any promises I can't keep so I'm not going to promise that my craftroom is going to become a beautifully organised space with considerably less items in then there are at present, but what I am going to say is that change is coming - and change is good!
Well that's been a very long blog post - well done if you've made it to the end.As always if you have any questions or comments then please leave them in the usual places. I'm not sure when I'll have something new to share but hopefully I'll be back crafting (ready for the Christmas run up) in the next week or two so until next time - keep crafting!
Love and crafty hugs,
Sarah xxx
