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.

Lovely Lottie - New Baby Card

Hello again.  After a lovely long weekend in sunny Whitby, this week's post is a new baby card that I sent a while ago now but I really enjoyed making.  I don't get to make many baby cards and brand new babies are just so  lovely (especially when they're someone else's!!)

It was my first go at making flowers with dies, these are Tattered Blossoms from Heartfelt Creations.  I didn't have the stamps that matched the dies at the time so for some layers I inked through the die, and on some I inked up the edges ... anyway back to the beginning of making the card ...

I started with an 8x8 card blank and some pink spotty paper from my stash (printed from a Polkadoodles CD originally I think), next I took a piece of snow white Centura Pearl card and embossed it with the Radiant embossing folder from Couture Creations, inked lightly round the edge with pink Distress Ink and then gave it a quick spritz of Spray and Sparkle.  

For the flowers I alternated the pink spotty paper with some paper printed from the Wild Rose Studios Spring CD and then curled the petals round the end of an embossing tool.

For the centre sentiment layers I cut out two of the largest Splendid Circles, one in silver mirri card and one in white card and then inked the white layer in pink.  Next came a plain silver circle and then I printed off the sentiment and cut out a smaller layer of Splendid Circles and then inked it in the same pink.  It took a little while to match the ink colour to the sentiment colour in Word, but I think I got away with it!

The new mum and dad had sent us a picture and a text showing us the new baby .... she is just so cute!  So I used the picture and shrunk it down until Lottie's face fitted in an Epiphany circle, so I made two (well actually three, but more about the blooper later) one for the card and one for the box.

All that was left to do was the bow ... I am rubbish at bows and they take me AGES to get right!  I am so glad that the fashion is now to cover up the centre of the bow with something, as mine usually need covering.  I used a flower gem from my stash for the middle of the bow and the other gems are Kort and Godt gems that I got from Joanna Sheen, they are just the most beautiful colours and so sparkly, I really wish I had bought more of them now as they don't sell them any more.

All that was left to do was mat and layer everything and add the cute baby embellishments that I also had in my stash, pop on the Epiphany circle with the picture of Lottie and add the pearl flourishes which were from Creative Expressions and there it was!

As usual, there were a couple of bloopers!  One of them irritates me even now when I look at the photo above, which is I stuck the pink paper down and forgot to ink round the edges!  The other blooper which you can see above is the Ephipany picture.  I die cut a small flower in silver mirri card and then stuck the Epiphany circle on with wet glue, it was only when I took the photo I noticed that the glue had wet the inkjet picture and made a big yellow splodge in the middle of it.  As it was on the box, and the first thing you saw I couldn't leave it so had to do it again.

Anyway that's it for this week, thanks for stopping by.