Crafty As L

  This week, I’ve been playing with the Forever Lovely stamp set and the coordinating dies, Lovely Flowers. Whilst at first glance, this seems like a Valentine’s set with the hearts and sentiments, it’s actually quite a versatile set and is ideal for birthday, Mother’s Day, sympathy, get well, anniversary, wedding cards or even wedding invitations. To begin with, I just used two of the dies, the fancy floral one and the floral edge one, to create simple two coloured cards bases.  The die produces a small amount of embossing on one side of the image but then cuts the other side to give a really interesting edge to the card.   The next one I tried out was to cut the floral die, then cut it again in two different colours and inlaid the tiny pieces to create a coloured floral panel.  I really like the way this turned out. The different colour combinations really change the feel of the card despite them being exactly the same design.  The inlaid card could have had the

This week has involved a veritable feast of crafts! Firstly, it was my Mum-in-Law’s birthday.   Despite her saying that she didn’t need anything, you can’t not get anything for your nearest and dearest.  I crocheted a blanket for her from a Crystals & Crochet pattern called Rosslyn by Helen Shrimpton…. ….and made her a set of birthday cards. Next was her actual birthday card which was inspired by another SU! demonstrator from Mitosu Crafts who kindly shared a YouTube video on how to make a pop-up wiper card without using any dies for the mechanism. After making a mock-up of the mechanism to check I could make it work(!) I set to work stamping and colouring in frogs.  At this stage, I didn’t really have a design as such in mind, but I knew I’d need a few frogs! The front gives nothing away about what’s inside. This is the inside once it’s opened. Second this week was the start of the new series of The Great British Sewing Bee.  I LOVE watching this programme.  I’m not su

  Sometimes I get a bit focused on producing fancy and complicated cards and I lose sight of how I started in card making – just simply stamping.   I bought the Perennial Birthday stamp set purely for the birthday sentiments and hadn’t really considered using the other images to produce a card.   How very remiss of me!   After being inspired by Sally , one of the Inspiring Inkin’ team, I firstly copied her card to get me in the groove and then let my creative juices flow.   I cut a bunch of card fronts and just stamped away!   Some are a variation on a theme using different colours – it’s remarkable how just changing the colours can give a card a completely different feel.   I masked a section using a Post-it note to leave me a blank space to stamp the sentiment.            Others I did a bit more with and fussy cut the flowers and leaves and layered on an embossed stamped background.       I even managed a ‘male’ card just using the large sentiment and a rainbow palette of inks

My challenge to myself this week was to make a card using colours that I don’t normally reach for.  I like purple, grey, green and blue so tend to use those frequently and the other colours don’t get a look in. So, I decided to use some new purchases: Bermuda Bay, Lovely Lipstick and Sahara Sand.  I also used Very Vanilla cardstock too instead of my usual white, together with my new Buffalo Check background stamp and one of my prizes from a couple of weeks ago, Hello Cupcake. The biggest job was working out the dimensions of the parts of the card as this is my first one of this design.  Once that was complete, the actual card only took about 15 minutes to create so it’s a great option for putting into card packs or making multiples. For this card I used: Sahara Sand:  card base4⅛” x 8⅝” (scored at 5¾”) and mat layer 4¼” x 2¾” Very Vanilla: liner 5½” x 3⅞”, card front 4” x 2½”, mat layer 2⅝” x 3⅞” (you could use some DSP for this piece instead), sentiment 1¾” x 2” Fi