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Saturday 26 August 2017

A few new cards to share...

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you are all having a brilliant weekend, it's an extra long one here in the UK as we've a bank holiday on Monday. I haven't actually done any crafting since my last blog post as it's been quite a busy week, it was my husband's birthday on Monday and we met up with his mum and dad and my mum for a meal in a local pub - I had a cocktail (just the one!) and was a bit tiddly afterwards as I rarely drink - perhaps a Long Island Iced Tea wasn't the best choice for a near teetotaller lol (it tastes so nice though!) even if it has the word tea in it 😉. The following day we went back to the same pub with my lovely friends and my God-Daughter for another meal but I was very good that time and stuck with soft drinks - I even had a salad instead of my usual burger. For some unknown reason the pub had it's heating on and as the seating was built against the radiators, it was extremely hot! I haven't done a lot since Tuesday, I don't make a huge thing about it but I am bordering on being agoraphobic and have only left my flat around a dozen times this year so to actually go out two days in a row is quite debilitating and takes a lot out of me. I'm not even sure if my closest friends realise this about me because I manage to hide the symptoms well in front of people and I don't talk about it.

Here are the cards I want to share with you.






This is the card I made for my lovely God-Daughter who was baptised almost four weeks ago. I did have to look on Pinterest to get a few ideas about what sort of card to make as I was really struggling to come up with my own ideas. I do love this card though, I don't make monochromatic cards very often and I suppose with the small touch of silver this isn't a true one but I felt the added silver layers made the white ones pop plus a white on white sentiment would be quite difficult to read lol. I used a Verity Rose (Starlet) embossing folder to emboss the sun rays behind the cross panel and dies from my stash to cut out the cross shape and the stitched oval.

My second card is the card I made for my lovely husband, he wanted a nautical themed card and I wanted to make him a pop up shadow box.

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Everything on this card started off as white and was coloured with either distress inks, Metallic markers or Promarkers. All the diecutting was done using unbranded dies purchased from eBay with the exception of the smallest anchor die near the sentiment which was from a Xcut scene building die set and the sun which was a Diamond Press stamp and die set. The 44 were scrap die cuts from my stash and all the stamped images were made using unbranded stamp sets from eBay.  Lawn Fawn have a die which cuts out the shadow box shape (you need to cut two for each box) but I don't own it and it would have been too short for my purposes so I just made one from a sheet of A4 card and cut the front part out using a rectangle die. I would have liked to have added a ship to the waves (or a mini mermaid) but all the ones I currently own were too big to fit inside the box. One of the best things about this card design is that it folds flat enough to go into an envelope.

I hope you've enjoyed my latest card share, as always if you have any questions or comments then please leave them in the usual place. Enjoy the rest of the weekend and until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx

Monday 21 August 2017

Hello Strangers......Part Two

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you've all had a brilliant weekend, I spend a lot of mine trying to make a card for my husband who is celebrating his birthday today (Monday). My crafty mojo is on a go-slow at the mo (lol) so it took quite a while to come up with an idea for his card and even longer to make it - I'll be sharing his card in another post (aren't I a card tease lol). As promised I will be sharing my cards for the last blog challenge that started over a month ago. I've not even had the chance to email these cards to Michele (actually the first card I'll be sharing is on it's way to her via snail mail or will be once I've posted it - I'm so behind at the moment!!!) so they'll be a surprise for her too.

Here are some of the scraps I used or drew inspiration from to make my cards.






This is actually only a small fraction of my scraps, I couldn't fit them all on my desk and a lot of my scraps are kept with the full sized or entire pieces for example I have a pack of Centura Pearls card stock in Darks and I keep the open pack in a A4 wallet folder and the scraps in a A5 plastic wallet folder inside the other one so I always know where things are and aren't tempted to break into a fresh A4 sheet if I have a scrap of it in the plastic wallet already. The same applies for most of my other supplies and I even have A5 plastic wallets full of made toppers that I've ended up not using.  Here is the first card I made (and the one that's just an ordinary card because I forgot the second part of the challenge!)





The main piece of torn card stock was already coloured, embossed with a floral embossing folder and distressed before I added it to the A6 card blank. I added Dovecraft red glitter glue to the centre of the flowers and set it to one side to dry while I worked on the sentiment. I stamped the sentiment on a scrap of white cardstock using black ink and then diecut a flower out of holographic foiled card (from my scrap folder) the die came free with Crafts Beautiful a few months ago. I added a gem to the centre and added it to the side of the sentiment strip with a small piece of foam tape. Once the glitter glue was dried I added it to the card as shown. The card looked pretty enough but lacked something so I added a load of sequins from an autumn themed collection and added small red gems to some of the sequins but left the flower ones plain. It's really pretty in real life - really sparkly but it's not easy to pick that up in a photo unfortunately.

After Michele sent me her gorgeous creation (see previous post) I realised I'd forgotten to do half the challenge so decided to make a second card. Again apart from the card base itself which was cut to 8" x 8" from an A4 sheet of card, all the rest of the pieces came from my scrap collection, in this case the Centura pearl darks collection.







I couldn't think what sort of new fancy fold card to make for the second part of the challenge as there's not been a lot of new fancy folds around (at least not ones I've seen anyway), I tried making a central fold stepper card as Michele very kindly sent me some blank ones ages ago but I managed to make a real pig's ear of it and it ended up ironically enough in my scraps folder! I didn't want to risk messing up a second one so flicked through a couple of magazines for inspiration. I saw a Tower Fold card in Papercraft Inspirations magazine but it didn't have any instructions on how to make it and when I checked on YouTube - my usual go to for tutorials - there wasn't anything like it (bet they'll be loads now lol) so I googled it and found the instructions on Pinterest. I can't remember who made either the original card or the one with instructions but I will link the latter if I make another card and share the tutorial - as so often happens this isn't an exact copy as I tweaked it a bit. I'll be totally honest with you, this wasn't the easiest card to make as it involves a lot of cutting with a scalpel and my cutting abilities are poor whether I'm using scissors or a cutting blade so I'm not sure if I will be making a similar card anytime soon. It took a couple of attempts to get it right and I actually discovered that a thinner card works best instead of the thick Sheena's Stamping card that was my first choice. All the panels and stars were made from scraps in my folder and the stars were die cut using a set of nesting star dies, the only non scrap items were the card base itself and two gems from my stash. The card doesn't have a sentiment at the moment but it would be simple enough to stamp one on card, diecut it out in a circle and layer it on the large circle on the bottom right.

I hope you like my scrap raider challenge card with a bonus fancy fold card. We'll be starting another card challenge at the end of the month which will be a lot of fun and involves the free gift with this month's Papercraft Essentials magazine - some super cute gnomes perfect for Christmas!

As always if you have any questions or comments then please leave them in the usual places and until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx

Sunday 20 August 2017

Hello strangers.....

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you are all having a brilliant weekend and a good summer in general. I am very sorry not to have blogged for over a month, I haven't even got the excuse that I've had a lot on though it has been an eventful month, I've just not felt very crafty for a while and even forgo my own blog challenge *hangs head in shame*. Hopefully I'm back on form now and can share a few cards and projects with you. One of the biggest and best things that happened to me since my last blog post was the Baptism of my beautiful God-Daughter Selina Ariadne Flora and I'll be writing more about that event at a future date. I think it's only fair that I concentrate this blog post on the last challenge which was set almost a month ago. My lovely crafty friend Michele made a beautiful card from her scraps and (unlike me - more about it later) actually fulfilled both parts of the challenge and made a gorgeous double Z-fold card. Michele has sent lots of photos as requested so this blog post will be in two parts, the first part will be this one and features Michele's card and the second blog post will feature my cards and will be posted in 24 hours so you can fully appreciate Michele's card on this blog post.







Hasn't Michele done an amazing job? She's used some papers and toppers that came free from Making Cards magazine that she had left after making a Twist and Pop card (it's what inspired me to make my sunflower themed card a month ago).  I haven't been able to add all the photos she sent me as they've saved as PDF files instead of JPEGs and the server won't recognise them, I'm not tech savvy enough to do anything about it but I think the photos I have managed to add do the card justice. I adore the theme of the toppers and this would be a great card for a boy. I really love double Z fold cards because they fold up into a tiny space (depending on what size card you use) but have a lot of 'real estate' for toppers and sentiments. Michele has done a splendid job matching the papers to the toppers (something I struggle with if I'm honest) and even though she's used lots of different designs they look really good together and tie very nicely with the theme.

I hope you've enjoyed Michele's card, I will be back later with my challenge entry - I ended up making two cards in the end because I kind of forgot to make the card a 'fancy fold' and just concentrated on using my scraps lol. You'd think that as it was my idea to add the 'fancy fold' to the challenge that I'd actually remember to do it! *rolls eyes*.

Don't forget to come back later to see my creations and until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx