Crafty As L

  This week’s card is a fancy fold that I happened across on Sam Calcott’s YouTube channel and was intrigued to try it out so used it for a 60 th birthday card I needed to make. To begin, I made a template so I’ve got a guide if I want to make any of these in the future.  I make templates for all of my fancy fold cards.  The dimensions on this are so that it can be made from a UK sized A4 sheet of card.  It can also be made using any size square card blanks, just mark the mid points on the long sides and one end. The whole mechanism is simply made by folding in the appropriate directions (mountain or valley) and gluing the top triangle down onto the base piece. To decorate the triangle base pieces, I stamped and heat embossed in silver the dandelions stamp from Lavinia Stamps on Stampin’ Up! Blackberry Bliss card and layered with a white mat. Next job was to make the topper panel.  I used a hill mask and blended ink to form the landscape, darker in the foreground a

Well, here we are at Christmas already!  It really seems to have come around quickly this year.  Firstly, this week, I’d like to share some exciting news with you:  I won a competition on Craftworld.com last month!  The competition was a colour themed challenge for a Valentine’s card and the prize was a full page in Simply Cards and Papercraft magazine, issue 225.  The card I entered was  this one I made for Mr L a couple of years ago and I was chuffed to bits to be chosen.  Here’s a snap of the page in the magazine. Now onto my card for this week, although it’s actually three cards.  Our friends have a flock of Icelandic sheep so I try to do sheep themed cards for them for Christmas.  For the 2019 card, I used Clearly Besotted Feeling Sheepish and added some Santa hats, using Lawn Fawn Tiny Gift Box Holiday Hats dies. The 2020 offering used the bagpipe wielding sheep from Penny Black 12 Days of Christmas on craft card. This year, I had the idea to make a wre

Have you made all your Christmas cards yet? Every year, I think I’ll make a few each month so that by December, I can just write and send.  It never works out like that. I did make two in January but then didn’t make any more until October or November and ended up ‘panic crafting’ in December.  The trouble with that is, it’s not always much fun.  Maybe I’ll do better next year…? In the Black Friday sale, I purchased a few cutting files to use with my Cricut Maker machine to create some Christmas cards so I have not one, but six, cards to share with you this week.  To begin, here’s a card I made last year when I didn’t know much about cutting files!  I used the Cricut to write the skinny letters and draw the holly and cut out the big words in metallic vinyl. This next one was a free download called minimalist trees.  I switched the stars from the original as I prefer 5-pointed stars.  The infills made a bonus tag! My sister loves the gnomes, or gonks as they’re call

  The background for this was made during one of my experiments with my gel press.  I rolled distress oxide inks onto the press before printing the snowflakes from Colorado Craft Company Slimline Nordic Snowflakes on top and then taking a print.  I cut this piece into panels for a gatefold card and stuck them to my grid paper with some temporary adhesive whilst I stamped my scene. To begin, I stamped the pine cones onto the card and onto the sticky part of a Post-it note.  I fussy cut the pinecones and stuck them onto the card so that the branches would sit behind when I stamped them.   Next, after inking in some hills, I used a selection of stamps from Lavinia Stamps to create the scene of the animals looking at the beautiful tree, which is actually a feather!    The feather tree was decorated with a tiny star stamp and heat embossed with silver powder.   Some fairy charm stamps were added to decorate the overhanging branches before mounting the panels onto a