Crafty As L

Aside from the actual enjoyment of doing hand lettering, part of my reason for attending the course on modern calligraphy earlier this year was to be able to create sentiments that aren’t available with stamp sets.  Never was this more applicable than when my friend asked me to create some simple but rude cards!  She didn’t want fancy writing as that was too nice(!) so I went for block lettering with a mix of lower case and capital letters. Another friend has just set up a cat rescue charity and is having a launch party and fund raiser at the end of the month so she asked me if I could create some cat-themed things for them to sell to raise money.  I started by sketching out the letters on graph paper and then traced over them onto tracing paper using a marker pen. The next stage was to put the card base and lettering template onto a light box and effectively trace the letters onto the card base.  I don’t concern myself if the letters aren’t perfectly traced – th...

  Frosted Foliage stamps and the Frosted Frames dies are part of the Feels Like Frost suite in this year’s Autumn/Winter catalogue.  The suite includes Seaside Spray metallic ribbon, chunky glitter and some gorgeous DSP.  I don’t often buy DSP as I never know what to do with it!  This DSP has such beautiful images so I thought I’d challenge myself to use some on a card. The Frosted Frames don’t actually cut out any of the images from The Frosted Foliage set; they’re more complimentary than coordinating. I used the large greeting from the set and also the ‘Seasons Greetings’ from So Many Stars.  The snowflakes and foliage stamps were repeat stamped to fill in the blank space surrounding the greetings.  I used silver embossing powder on Whisper White card and on vellum and used the smaller frame to cut them out. I tried white embossing powder but wasn’t happy with the finish.  The colour was slightly off white and the images weren’t crisp.  I m...

Z-fold cards are very cool! This card was demonstrated by Amanda from Inspiring Inkin’ during a recent team training video.  I have made Z-cards before but I liked Amanda’s addition of the ‘foot’.  This card also offers the opportunity to use up any odd bits of DSP. Whilst the supplies list may seem extensive, once they’re all assembled, the card comes together really quickly.  As well as a fab Christmas card, this can also be modified to include a gift card holder too.     I scored only the centre of the card base to begin and masked the back with a sticky note.  Using the same ink as the card base, I randomly stamped the tree image.  This process was repeated on the reverse side. The tree image was also stamped on the card liner and envelope. I heat embossed the tree and cut it out using the punch.  The sentiment, from Itty Bitty Christmas, was stamped on the white circle. Next, I added the second score line onto the front of the card, to...

  On page 31 of the holiday catalogue, there’s a suggestion to make traditional cracker boxes using the Brightly Gleaming suite of products.  Whilst these aren’t the usual pulling-banging crackers, they can be at least filled with decent stuff rather than useless bits of plastic.  The crackers would also make ‘cracking’ gift boxes! ? The trick is to use the small ornament punch to make the holes which allow the ends to fold in.  In case you’ve not got the ornament punch, I did try it out using a circle punch. The sides are smaller on this one, 3.5cm each.  For this end, I used a ¾” punch…… ….and this end used the 1” punch.  This end’s a bit gappy. Anyway, onto the ornament punched cracker.  Since I don’t have any Brightly Gleaming DSP, I decorated some Highland Heather card with the ornament stamps.  Whilst the catalogue suggests sizes for the sides, that’s all the information it gives.  I cut out a square 7.5” and scored it as follows: ...