Crafty As L

Happy New Year! I do love Christmas but it’s also nice for things to calm down and go back to normal again.   For my tags in recent years, I’ve started doing what my Mum used to do, which is cutting up the previous year’s cards.   The trouble with that in the Christmas just gone was that we ran out half way through the wrapping.   Quite often, people had written a little note inside, which is lovely to hear their news, but no good for converting the cards to tags afterwards.   However, a friend and my M-i-L had some pretty festive napkins so I kept the ones that weren’t smeared with mince pies with the intention to repurpose them into tags. These ones that my M-i-L had needed to be dissected to remove the “home composting” section.   These were 3-ply napkins so, after removing the two backing layers, I used a fine paintbrush and a little water to draw around the various elements which made them easy to tear apart leaving a soft edge. After watering down ...

Here I am (already!) with the last post of 2025.   It seems to me that the year has absolutely flown by.   We had a lovely time over the festive period, spending time with family and friends, old and new.   My sister and I had a visit to Waddesdon Manor, near Aylesbury, to see their light show and manor.   We are like Kevin from Home Alone in that we love Christmas trees and we were weren’t disappointed as the house was full of them.   There was a light show on the house and a light trail in the grounds, all of which made for a great day out. For this last post, I’m sharing a few of the cards and crafts I’ve made during the run up to Christmas.   My friend and I went to a glass fusing workshop to make Christmas decorations and these were my collection.   I was slightly addicted to making wreaths!   Some of these were given as gifts and some adorn my various trees. Although I try to make some Christmas cards each month, I’d not made any since e...

My projects this week are those I made for the Visible Image ATC swap.   Whilst I made them at the beginning of the month, one of them had to make its way to Australia and only arrived at the end of last week.   It’s been over 40˚C there so the thought of a snowman and some chilly weather was most welcome! Given that the theme was “Sparkle & Shine”, I started by white heat embossing snowflakes from Sketched Snowflakes onto Tim Holtz Sparkle Plaid Kraft card. I’d decided on a checkerboard design so cut a bunch of squares from white card.   I then used elements from Christmas Jumper to decorate each, starting with the sentiment.   For all the images, I stamped in Versafine Onyx Black and clear heat embossed so that the embossing would resist the metallic paints I used to colour them. Next, I repeated the procedure with the characters.   They were the perfect size for my squares which was fortuitous since I’d not planned that. I wanted to liven up t...

It’s new release time again so I’m back with another of my samples made using the amazing new  Time To Fly collection.   This time I’m only using the Spread Your Wings stamp set but here is the whole glorious collection! (It's on a time-limited bargain deal at the moment that you can find  here .) To begin, I cut a 5¼” square of white card and arranged the stamps in my MISTI so that I could repeat stamp them, partly to get a really dark, crisp image and partly for the technique I was going to use. Next, I cut up an inky panel made using Distress Spray Stains and Spritzes into three random sized windows and positioned them over the stamped panel, using a tiny dot of glue to hold them in place. The stamps were inked up again and stamped onto the coloured windows. As I’d only used a tiny dot of glue, each of the rectangles could be easily removed and glued onto black card.   Before doing so though, I used a black marker to colour the white edges for a neater f...

Hello and welcome to my first DT post, a sneaky peak using the gorgeous new Time To Fly collection from Visible Image - which will be out later today!    It’s a very striking release of stamps and stencils with sentiments in fabulous fonts and styles.   All the stamp sets and stencils work so well together; it was such fun creating the samples! To create the background for my 5” x 7” card, I used Distress Spray Stains to create a sunset sky and then added a little stencilling using Fingerprints and Dusty Concord Distress Ink. For some distant bushes, I stamped the branches from Soar using Versafine Clair Morning Mist ink across the bottom of the panel, adding the small bird from this set and the one from Spread Your Wings. Next, I stamped the large bird image using Versafine Onyx Black, adding a little gold embossing powder just along the edges of the head, wings and tail and heat-set. I had planned on doing the same with the sentiment but it didn’t really pop so...