Crafty As L

  Giving money is thought, by some, to be lacking in thought.  However, I like it since it gives the recipient free reign to spend it wherever they want rather than being tied to a particular store with a gift card.  One of my colleagues managed to get married last year so the watch had a collection for him and his new wife.  Quite a substantial sum was collected and we didn’t want to present it in a tatty white envelope, so I was asked to make a presentation wallet. Making a presentation wallet (of any size) is fairly straight forward but needs a bit of planning out.  To begin, the finished size and depth is required to draw up a plan view.  This will help determine if your box can be cut from one sheet of card or not.  This is my plan for the box I made which was 3¾” x 5⅝” x ¼”.  Once the front, back and pocket sections are added, together with the top, base and sides (for the depth), the next thing is to work out where the tabs need to go i...

  This fancy fold card style has lots of dimension and extra wow! when it’s opened and the parts move.  It may look a little complicated but it’s not really. To begin, I cut my card base and a layer of DSP and cut a rectangle from the front of the pair of them, attached together with a little temporary adhesive.  The piece of card base will be used later so don’t discard it! Next, I cut the liner, which is also the mechanism to make the swing fold.  Score the card at ¼, ½ and ¾ across the piece and fold ‘mountain-mountain-valley’, as shown in the photo. Place the liner with the first ‘mountain’ fold facing up into the card front and mark the left-hand side of the hole.  Remove the liner and cut away slightly bigger than the hole using either a trimmer or I used the next size up rectangle die and the partial die-cutting technique. The liner is then glued into the card base by adhering the bit around the cut away to the back of the ope...

You may remember the Christmas floating window card from a post back in September 2020.  This time, I thought I’d try it out in portrait layout.  As the acetate panel is larger than in landscape format, it’s a bit flimsy but this problem can be remedied by adding a decorative element on top, joining all three sections together. My card base was my standard size of 11½” x 4¼”, scored at 5¾.  I then cut off 1½” off the bottom and cut the card base at 1½” after the score line.  I used some (retired) mercury acetate for the window and cut some mats for the small card sections. For my decorative element, I die cut the SU! Butterfly Beauty dies using white for the base layer and the retired Lovely Lipstick foil for the top layer to really make the butterflies pop. After dry embossing the green mat layer, I assembled the card base, gluing down the mats and attaching the acetate behind. I added some layers inside and embossed the envelope flap wit...

We don’t usually send many Easter cards but with the mad year we’ve had and not being able to see people in person for so long, it seemed a good way to let people know we’re thinking of them.  Since I don’t have a lot of use for Easter cards, I only have one stamp set and that has been sent to everyone already so I needed some fresh material! Hello Cricut! I found a free SVG file from Craft House, cut out some bunnies and tails and created this card. Whilst weeding the vinyl and seeing the outline of the bunnies, it occurred to me that I could make a stencil of the bunnies.  So, I created multiple bunnies in Design Space, arranged and sized them for my card and cut out two stencils from acetate – one for the bunnies and one for the tails! Using my new blending brushes, I added pastel colours to the bunnies through the stencil. Once the bunnies were complete, I added the tails using white pigment ink.  Unfortunately, this didn’t show up as much as I th...