Little Boxes for Christmas or Table Settings

Hi everyone

Hope everyone has been well and had a great Christmas and New Year.  It has been a bit manic over the last few weeks with mum not being very well, then Christmas and then mum was 80 at the end of January.  I will hopefully blog the present I made from one of the Tonic Forever Moments storage units when I get a chance.

Anyway, I decided for Christmas this year (well, last year now) to do tiny cards but use my WRMK Gift Box Punch Board to make little boxes to go with them.  I love this Punch Board, the boxes are SO easy, the only board I was a bit disappointed with was the flower one which made flowers that were just too big for what I wanted.  Back to Christmas - the little boxes were had just enough room to fit in a Ferrero Rocher, a couple of mints, or for my nephews and nieces, some small chocolates and coins.  These boxes would also make great place settings if you put names on the top instead of cards.

The only thing I had to buy were the wax seals and the sparkly cotton to wrap round the boxes, all the card I found in my Christmas Box, some were from an old kit and some were a thick 6x6 paper pad.  So here they are!

The first picture is from the top which shows the card, the second is of the front and the third is of the side view. The boxes are 1 3/4 inches square and the cards I cut a fraction smaller so they would sit on the top.

I started by cutting my card to 6x6 inches and saved all the off cuts for the mini cards.  Then I got out the Punch Board and used the 'Small' lines for the start and for scoring the diagonal.  When I looked inside the boxes I didn't like the inside bits flapping about, so I glued the inside flaps to the inside of the box which added a bit of strength too.  In the bottom of each box I put a little bit of scrunched up tissue paper just so the box didn't look quite so empty.

Next up I used all the off cuts from the boxes to make little tiny cards

Then I used a Lily of The Valley stamp from their Happy Circular Sentiments set, which just fitted nicely on the little cards.

For the inners of the cards I used used Serif Craft Artist and created several different versions so I could mix and match. 

Finally I made some wax seals which were great fun to do, and really easy.  For some reason I have only taken pictures of the snowflake ones, but there were also Christmas trees, holly and a snowman on some of them.  I did them in a baking tray and made them all at once, changing the wax from gold to silver to red and even the ones where the wax was dual coloured came out really well.  The trick is definitely to wait a few seconds before placing the seal on the hot wax.

All that was left to do was fill the boxes chocolates, or coins  and sweets for the nieces and nephews, wrap the glittery thread round the boxes, and they were done.

No massive bloopers this time, the first card I did I sealed up and then remembered that I hadn't written in the card! The other thing is I had to put initials on the bottom of the boxes so I remembered which ones were for who, but apart from that, no disasters.

Hope you have a great week and thanks for reading.

New Baby Boy Card using Craft Artist

Happy New Year everyone!

It has been AGES since I managed to get to my blog.  With the new job and Christmas, everything has been a bit busy.  Over Christmas I did a bit of a tidy of the craft room as OH now calls the spare bedroom!  Isn't it amazing what you find.  I have more 12x12 papers than I ever though I had, and as for embossing folders ... I had a couple in every drawer, its just lucky that I didn't have any duplicates.  I took a picture of the tidy bit and put three hooks on the side to hang the bits of ribbon on that aren't on rolls.  It is still a work in progress as there is one chest of drawers and one small cupboard that need to be tidied, but one of them has got spare bed linen in, so it's not all my stash - honest!

Anyway enough on tidying ... on to the card.  This is for a colleague at work who had her baby five weeks early!  I used Craft Artist mostly because all my craft stuff was in heaps all over the floor so I couldn't get to it to do any die cutting or match up papers or card.  Excuse the photo, it was a bit of a rush so I used my phone.  I used two digikits Baby Soft and Baby Bumper Kit.  I was lucky with this card as I made it A5 so the proportions looked okay.  Another card I made was not so lucky in that it looked great on the screen (OH has bought a new PC with a massive monitor) and I spent ages designing it for my mum's birthday, but when I printed it off it looked tiny (it was 5x5) and a lot of the detail I had so carefully put on was so small it wasn't worth looking at.  I had to put a load of glitter on it to pep it up a bit!

back of card

So the blooper for this week wasn't actually on this card but another one I made at the same time that  you could only see half the detail when printed off ... still annoying though.

I bought mum the Heritage Project Life Kit for Christmas, she is just starting to decide what journalling to do for each photo, but I will let you know how she gets on as I am fascinated to see if mum really gets into it or if I have forced my desire to see the old photos scrapbooked on an unwilling victim!

Have a great week everyone.

Serif Twosome

Hello again, what a lovely sunny day we've had today, makes up for the week of rain!

This time I've got two Serif Cards in one post.  Both made for my nephews, you will see my nieces and nephews names pop up quite a bit in my posts as I mostly make cards just for me or my mum to send.

Both cards in this post are created in Serif Craft Artist 2, and as there isn't much technique actually making the cards after you have designed them on the PC, I have included two!  The thing I like about Craft Artist is that you can get great looking (in my humble opinion!) results fairly easily and can undo and redo until you get it right.  I have to say that I had a copy of Craft Artist for AGES and didn't use it until I saw Michelle Jackson-Mogford (Michelle's Blog) demonstrating on Create and Craft and I just had to have a go!

The first card is so new, I haven't even given it to him yet.  I used the Purple Ronnie digikits that I downloaded recently from Daisytrail, there are some really different sentiments and phrases, as well as lots of funny embellishments.  This was my first go at a double easel and it didn't go quite as smoothly as it could have as I ended up cutting a slice out of the middle of the folding part of the card between the two easels.

I used an A4 sized page and created the two easel parts (with a blooper as usual! ... more of that later) and the two shields.  I used the decoupage tool for the first time on the shields to give a different look.  On the second A4 page I created the base of the card and the Happy Birthday message.

To assemble I folded over the front of the A5 card and scored it down the middle to fold it to make the two easels.  I glued the base of the card down and then stuck the shields on with foam pads to act as stoppers for the easels, I put them at different depths so the easels would stand up at different angles (it was at this stage I realised that my easels wouldn't fit on the card properly so I had to cut the base card down to size.  After cutting out a slice of the base card I added the easels and then made a triangle of card and added the Happy Birthday message.  I bent the triangle of card back slightly so that when the easels are put flat the Happy Birthday would also fold a bit so I can get it in the envelope.  After that I added Card Candi and a bit of gold glitter which doesn't show up very well in the photo and there it was!

The second card, although created in Craft Artist, uses images from the Polkadoodles Pretty Tuff CD.  As Joe likes fishing and football, I went with that theme!

I used three papers for this 6x6 card, first I printed one design directly onto the card and although it doesn't show very well I inked round the edges using Ink Dusters.  Then in Craft Artist I opened an A4 page and brought on the star paper as the background, then in the top half of the page I added the figure and other embellishments adding shadows to them all and then created the text in the bottom section of the A4 page.

I went to my metal dies binder and found my favourite Spellbinders set Labels 1, and cut out the top and the bottom half of the page in different sized labels and then got a matching paper and cut out two more Labels.  I use Labels 1 all the time they are so useful for sentiments, frames, backing for the main element of the card, even as the card itself when I use the large ones. Anyway, back to the card!  I got out one of my fine liner pens and drew some dots and lines round the borders of the Labels as they needed something to make them stand out on the page.  All that was left to do was punch out the sentiment and a larger circle to mat it onto, added the buttons tied with a bit of bakers twine and that was that!

The bloopers for this time, both on the first card.  Firstly I couldn't get the easels to fit correctly so I cut out the middle strip between the two easels.  Secondly when I was in Craft Artist and I was matting and layering my rectangles, I removed the black borders on the right hand easel, but there they still were on the left hand easel.  Now I look at it I think I prefer the side with the black borders after all!!

Before I go I would like some advice ... I want to stick my heat proof craft sheet onto something.  I tried using an old cutting mat and some Collal glue, and you could say it didn't go well!!  First of all it didn't stick very well and second, I had a couple of goes with my Melt Pot (that's a whole other story!) and forgot that the cutting mat wasn't heat resistant.  So now I have a hilly, not stuck down very well craft sheet.  So my questions are 1) what glue do I use to stick it and 2) what do I stick my craft sheet onto?  Any help would be much appreciated.

Have a great and crafty week and thanks for stopping by.