Bright Floral 18th Birthday Easel Card

Hi again, I hope everyone is still enjoying the weather.  It has been a bit mixed here this weekend, baking hot then heavy rain.  My son has gone camping with his girlfriend, so I hope the weather is sunny in Barmouth!

This card was made for my friends daughter who was 18 a little while ago who both me and my son are godparents to (or should that be 'my son and I')?  I liked the dimension of the flowers on this card and the fact that both the flowers and card colour are cheerful and bright.  I thought I would show it as quite a lot of my cards now have die cuts of one kind or another and this is one of the few that doesn't have a die cut in sight!

I started out with 6x6 card and folded the front in half to make the base of the easel.

Then from the Klever Konstruction CD by My Craft Studio I printed off a topper that I had added my own sentiment to in the MCS software, and also a backing paper, an extra strip to use as a stopper and finally a back plate for the message (you can just about see the back plate on the photo above).

Next I cut out some of the Klever Konstruction flowers that matched the colours (if not the shape) of the flowers on the topper and backing paper.  Then you heat them and mould them ... now this did take me a long time to get them how I liked them.  The good news is, if you mess it up you can just reheat them and start again.  The bad news is my fingers were sore from the pointy flowers by the time I had finished.  This might be because I over worked the flowers a bit as I hadn't used them before, but I thought the sore fingers were worth it when I'd finished.  I added some glue and large glitter to the centre of the flowers and then glued some leaves on to give a bit of contrast.

All that was left to do to the card was add the stopper bar (that I had already added some flowers to) and the card was finished.

As the flowers on the card were quite dimensional, I also made a box using my Ultimate Pro from Crafters Companion and printing another topper from the CD, changing the sentiment for the name.

I outlined the flowers in with a Quickie Glue pen and crystal glitter rather than adding more flowers as I thought they might get knocked off the box.  I did a close up picture of the glitter below as you can hardly see it on the photo above that shows the card and the box together.

I enjoyed making this card as it combines playing around on the computer and then getting crafty with what you have printed off.

Hope everyone has a great week and thanks for stopping by.

Feminine Sympathy Card

Another absolutely lovely week. I know this probably makes me a big old moaner but it's a bit too hot for me ... I can cope with the heat, but the humidity makes me feel like a limp lettuce leaf!

Anyway this is a card that I made for my aunt who sadly passed away after a short illness last year.  I didn't want to do a very dark or fussy sympathy card as this lady was always so full of the joys, could organise anything at the drop of a hat and was always on the go, so I kept it fairly plain but used pink rather than grey or black ink.

More apologies here for my photography, I made this card round at my mums house rather than in my usual crafting spot so the photos aren't that great and I just propped it up on one of my mums chairs!

I started off with an 8x8 card and did a plain mat of centura pearl white card.  Next up I embossed a plain white piece of super smooth card using my Regal Mbossability embossing folder.  I usually use MCS super smooth when doing matt white or centura pearl when I want a bit of sheen to the card.

I had already printed the sentiment off in Word, which I printed off several time on the sheet in slightly different colours, matching it as closely to the Jenny Bowlin Chewing Gum pink ink pad I used on the die cuts as I could.   The dies I used are Moroccan Accents for the long borders and the piece behind the sentiment and Spellbinders Crosses 2 for the centre.

All that was left to do was to ink the cross and the edges of everything else with my Ink Dusters and I was finished.  I was quite glad that I did this at mums, as I would probably have carried on adding pearls and things if I was in my usual crafty spot - knowing when to stop with cards is definitely one of my failings!

Anyway that's it for this week, let me know what you think and thanks for stopping by.

Wordbook for 18th Birthday

Hello.  I hope everyone has had a great and crafty week.

Today I 've got an 18th Birthday Card that I made a little while ago, I have covered up the actual photos of Josie as I didn't know if she would want them on show.  I loved doing this card and it was one of my first Wordbook Cards.  I used Funky Hand's Funky Word Book CD for the letters which is one of their older CDs but I still use the Papercraft Factory CDs for background papers.  Seeing this again makes me want to do another one!

Big apologies for the photography, this was before my 'put everything in front of a white card' stage, so I have tried to crop out as much of my messy desk as possible.

There is not really much to these cards apart from lots of cutting out, levelling off and then punching two holes in the end, and then you can embellish to your hearts content. I have got a Bind it All, but find when doing Wordbooks that mostly I prefer the look I get by just using my Cropadile II and just punching two holes and threading ribbon through it.

As you can see from the (not very good) photos, I didn't skimp on the glitter or gems!  Although you can't see it very well on the photo above I dotted a Quickie Glue Pen into the centre of each circle in the patterned paper and then tipped glitter over it in different colours depending on the page.

The frames for all the photos I used in this card are made using my trusty old Slice Machine and then I sprayed them with Crafters Companion Spray and Sparkle.

Even though die cutting has come on massively in the last couple of years, I still get the Slice machine out now and again to cut out embellishments!

The balloons and candle embellishments on the picture below were confetti type things that I'd had in my craft box for years, but thought they fitted in quite nicely with the theme and the Happy Birthday along the bottom is a peel off.

The back of the word book was printed but not embellished as I wanted it to sit in it's box okay.  (Please don't look at the messy desk ... although it looks A LOT worse now than it did then!!)

The nearest I got to a blooper on this one was that I didn't cut the hole for the 18 quite high enough on the box but all in all, not too bad, and I have made much worse mistakes than that!

Hope everyone has a great week and thanks for taking a look.

Delicate Asters in Pink

Hello again.  This week I am back to my one of my favourites ... die cut flowers.  What I liked about this one was that it has plenty of dimension but the flowers are not actually very deep so it just went in a normal envelope (although I did put a piece of light card at the front of the envelope). 

Apologies (again!) for the photography, I thought these pictures weren't too bad but when I uploaded them I realised that at least two of them are a bit blurred. 

This was for my aunt in Ireland who was 90 this year and I thought I would try doing it back to front, in other words stamping white onto coloured card ... or not so white as it turned out.

I started by die cutting lots of the Heartfelt Creations Delicate Asters out.  I didn't pre stamp them and then cut them as I thought I would try just popping them on the stamp after I had cut them, it was irritating that no matter which embossing powder I tried, I couldn't get it to look white it always looked cream as you can see from the pics.  For the middle of the flowers I just brushed the ends on to a Perfect Medium pad and then dipped them in embossing powder.  After that I just put a pearl in the middle and I was quite happy with them (apart from the white looking cream!)

Next up was the background, I used the Embossalicious Rose Garden embossing folder and although it looks okay once the card was put together the embossing was definitely lighter in some patches than in others.  On the picture below, looking at the pink card, the top left is quite strongly embossed and the bottom right is a bit fainter - this could be down to my worn plates on my HappyCut but it doesn't happen with any other folders, so I'm not sure. After it was embossed I matted it onto a piece of white that I had pierced with my Tim Holz ruler.

I then cut out two of the Botannical Swirls and Accents corners, I love these, they look so effective and it makes the card as a whole a bit less pink.  As before I taped them together first before sticking them down so I didn't get wet glue everywhere.  My favourite nesties, Labels 1 was next to put the sentiment on, and I cut the larger shape out of Decorative Labels 1.  I was going to ink round the plain smaller label but decided I wanted it to stay white as the pink was getting a bit much.  If I did this card or similar again I would definitely use a paler pink.  All that was left was to cut out the sentiment with my Britannia Word dies and add some pearls and it was done.

No blooper this time either, although there was a lot of swearing under my breath when I was trying to stick the sentiment onto the label - I really must get a fine tip for my wet glue!

That's all for this time, thanks for looking.