Crafty As L

Today is my sister’s birthday and I’ve made a fun fold centre-stepper card for her.   Ange is a total inspiration, working hard in her job as an NHS perfusionist, together with being the head of the department.   Outside of work, her passions are her cats and harp playing and she’s fiercely loyal to family and friends.   She’s a great listener with a good sense of humour and is even more sarcastic than me!   Ange is the reason that I started to learn the harp at the beginning of this year.   She’s been playing for about 12 years and played at our wedding, even though she’d only been playing for about a year then.   Very brave!   My friend spotted this die when we went to the Creative Craft Show at Farnborough a couple of weeks ago so I had to have it for Ange’s card.   I opted for gold mirror card as one of Ange’s harps (she has three!) is a very grand gold one.   This die-cut was layered with a brown one.   I then decided to cut out t...

This week, I have been doing a free tutorial by Sophie Wheatley to needle felt a portrait of a hare.   I have tried making needle felted figures, with no great success but decided to try doing a portrait.   You had to purchase the supplies but Sophie kindly gave her tuition for free, supplying the reference photo and line drawing. Step one was to transfer the image onto the fabric.   This was done by pouncing, where the line drawing was pierced and a dot transferred, creating a dot-to-dot style line drawing. The first felting tutorial focused on creating the eye and adding the highlight to make the eye look glassy. The next day focused on filling in the head shape, creating layers that would felt together and focusing on shapes within the form.   It’s largely the same process that I use when doing a pastel or pencil drawing. Day three was all about the ears and learning directional felting, which created the lovely fur tufts in the ears. The body was fille...

Our Visible Image Design Team theme this week is “Celebrate!” and there is little more celebratory than the arrival of new life.   My friend recently had a baby girl so Baby Love  was the perfect choice for my card. After cutting a panel 5¼” square, I stamped the handprints and footprints using Versafine Clair Baby Pink randomly around the panel. For the mat, I used some metallic pink foil card.   The sentiments were stamped in Versafine Onyx Black, clear heat-embossed then cut out at deliberately wonky angles.   The words were glued onto a scrap of the foil card and trimmed to leave a narrow pink edge.   If you don’t have pink foil card, any matching pink card will work. After adhering the panel to a square card blank, the sentiment was popped up on thin foam tape. This was a quick make so I made some extras for my craft fayre stall at the weekend.   For the boy version, I used Versafine Clair Arctic.   I used a block rather than a stamp posit...

This week’s post is something I’ve wanted to attempt for over a year, since I went on my first free-motion embroidery course with Alison Holt.   I fancied trying to stitch a picture of my cat’s eye and the summer challenge from the Chairwoman of my textile group to make something using textiles featuring animals gave me the impetus to get going with it. After overthinking the project, trying to think of the problems I might encounter, I finally just got on with it and figured I’d address them as they arose.   To start, I traced the picture, added gutter to define the sections and then painted with silk paints.   As you can see, the eye was dismal so here was problem one to overcome.   I didn’t want to stitch the eyeball as I wanted it to have a smoother texture. I decided to cut out the eye and do it with some other media.   I snipped the fabric, folded it back to the inside and then stuck the fabric down onto a sheet of self-adhesive dissolvable stabiliser...

A couple of anniversary cards are the subject of today’s post.   I’d made a card similar to this previously using paper hearts but I fancied using fabric hearts instead for these cards. To give the fabric some body and reduce fraying, I covered a sheet of A4 card with double sided adhesive and stuck scrap pieces of fabric onto it. Using a small Sizzix heart die (which came with my Big Shot when I bought it years ago), I die-cut as many hearts as I could get from the fabric. On 5¼” squares of white card, I drew lines 1” apart with a Frixion pen, which is erasable with heat. The hearts were arranged in place and secured with tiny dots of glue so that they wouldn’t move when I sewed down the lines with my sewing machine and purple thread.   I applied my heat tool to the lines to remove any pen lines that were showing. The threads were taped to the back and then the panels mounted on purple card before being glued to a 5¾” square card blank.   I lightly folded the ...

I love a fancy fold and I’ve not made a swing-fold card for years.   This week’s Visible Image DT post is a square version although you can make other shapes too,  here  I made rectangular versions.    I made a 6” square card but you can go smaller or larger as you wish. The first step is to make the card base, which is also the mechanism.   I started with a 12” square of card and cut two 6” x 12” pieces.   One was scored at 6” (the centre) to make the outer card blank.   The second piece was scored at 3”, 6” and 9” (the quarter, half and three-quarter points) and folded valley-mountain-mountain. For the window, I cut a square from the centre of the card blank.   I used nesting square dies to cut this and my mat layers but you could use a paper trimmer.   I also cut 2 pieces 5¾” x 2¾” for the inside of the card. To assemble the card base, I glued the section of the mechanism from the valley fold to the edge to the inside back o...