Crafty As L

  I saw this design on Pinterest whilst searching for fancy fold ideas.  As both cards I saw were on foreign websites, I couldn’t get the name of the design so I’ve called mine the Triple Step Card as I think it looks like 3 steps! I’ve made a template so I can remember what to do in future! It’s in inches but if you wanted to use cm and an A4 piece of card, cut the card base to 22½cm x 13½cm and instead of 2”, cut and score at 4½cm intervals.  Actually, the metric sized card would probably fit in a shop bought 6” square envelope – mine was a bit tight! For added interest, I wanted to add mats and layers to decorate my card.  My cut pieces were as follows: Top layers: two 3½” x 3½” and seven 1½” x 1½” pieces Mat layers: two 3¾” x 3¾” and seven 1¾” x 1¾” pieces To begin, I stamped my images using Versamark and added white embossing powder before setting with my heat gun.  I used the SU! Hand Drawn Blooms stamp and Crumb Cake card. After stamping, I used

A few weeks ago, Mr L and I celebrated our wedding anniversary at home, unusually for us.  We normally like to go away somewhere sunny for our anniversary but obviously that’s not been an option this year.  We often go to Thailand as we love the food as well as the weather so we celebrated with a Thai takeaway.  It was delicious although not quite the same as eating with your feet in the sand and the sound of waves lapping at the shore.  Oh well, maybe next year. For my card for Mr L, I used my Cricut.  There was a project in Design Space of a heart shaped jigsaw so I cut out a bunch of these in black and white, together with some purple as this was our wedding colour. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do so I cut out plenty so I could play around with them. After adhering the black frame, I decided to stack the jigsaw pieces but dry embossed the top layer to add some interest without it getting to busy. The lettering was from black vinyl using the Cricut and

Have you heard of quilling? It’s been around for hundreds of years and used to be the pastime of genteel ladies during the Georgian and Victorian times and was also practised by nuns and monks to decorate religious artefacts.  Modern papers and adhesives have changed the work produced but the techniques are based on old ideas. My book showed some Charles Rennie Mackintosh style roses and they looked to be the easiest of the Closed Loose Coils, since they started with a fold rather than rolling.  I glued a strip of pale and dark pink together at the end and started the folding. Once I’d got to the end, I released the tension and then glued the other ends in place to secure the rose shape.  I made several of these and some with darker pink strips.  The leaves were made using a different technique called Wheatear Coils.  As I haven’t done this before, I experimented with trying to make the leaves in different ways.  The flowers didn’t seem to sit well by themselves so I used

I really like the Whale of a Time DSP from Stampin’ Up! It makes it very simple to create a stunning background for cards. However, to avoid it looking like I’d just stuck a bit of paper on my card, I cut my DSP into panels and matted them.   Using the coordinating punch, I cut out a whale and glued it onto a whale cut from navy card to give more stability.   I heat embossed my sentiments in silver and also added the bubbles on the centre panel above where the whale would be.     The inside sentiment is from the Whale Done stamp set together with the shoal of fish, which I also stamped on the envelope.   The final job was to assemble the various elements.  The panels were glued onto the card base and I added foam behind the whale and the sentiments for some dimension.