Crafty As L

Here I am (already!) with the last post of 2025.   It seems to me that the year has absolutely flown by.   We had a lovely time over the festive period, spending time with family and friends, old and new.   My sister and I had a visit to Waddesdon Manor, near Aylesbury, to see their light show and manor.   We are like Kevin from Home Alone in that we love Christmas trees and we were weren’t disappointed as the house was full of them.   There was a light show on the house and a light trail in the grounds, all of which made for a great day out. For this last post, I’m sharing a few of the cards and crafts I’ve made during the run up to Christmas.   My friend and I went to a glass fusing workshop to make Christmas decorations and these were my collection.   I was slightly addicted to making wreaths!   Some of these were given as gifts and some adorn my various trees. Although I try to make some Christmas cards each month, I’d not made any since e...

My projects this week are those I made for the Visible Image ATC swap.   Whilst I made them at the beginning of the month, one of them had to make its way to Australia and only arrived at the end of last week.   It’s been over 40˚C there so the thought of a snowman and some chilly weather was most welcome! Given that the theme was “Sparkle & Shine”, I started by white heat embossing snowflakes from Sketched Snowflakes onto Tim Holtz Sparkle Plaid Kraft card. I’d decided on a checkerboard design so cut a bunch of squares from white card.   I then used elements from Christmas Jumper to decorate each, starting with the sentiment.   For all the images, I stamped in Versafine Onyx Black and clear heat embossed so that the embossing would resist the metallic paints I used to colour them. Next, I repeated the procedure with the characters.   They were the perfect size for my squares which was fortuitous since I’d not planned that. I wanted to liven up t...

It’s new release time again so I’m back with another of my samples made using the amazing new  Time To Fly collection.   This time I’m only using the Spread Your Wings stamp set but here is the whole glorious collection! (It's on a time-limited bargain deal at the moment that you can find  here .) To begin, I cut a 5¼” square of white card and arranged the stamps in my MISTI so that I could repeat stamp them, partly to get a really dark, crisp image and partly for the technique I was going to use. Next, I cut up an inky panel made using Distress Spray Stains and Spritzes into three random sized windows and positioned them over the stamped panel, using a tiny dot of glue to hold them in place. The stamps were inked up again and stamped onto the coloured windows. As I’d only used a tiny dot of glue, each of the rectangles could be easily removed and glued onto black card.   Before doing so though, I used a black marker to colour the white edges for a neater f...

Hello and welcome to my first DT post, a sneaky peak using the gorgeous new Time To Fly collection from Visible Image - which will be out later today!    It’s a very striking release of stamps and stencils with sentiments in fabulous fonts and styles.   All the stamp sets and stencils work so well together; it was such fun creating the samples! To create the background for my 5” x 7” card, I used Distress Spray Stains to create a sunset sky and then added a little stencilling using Fingerprints and Dusty Concord Distress Ink. For some distant bushes, I stamped the branches from Soar using Versafine Clair Morning Mist ink across the bottom of the panel, adding the small bird from this set and the one from Spread Your Wings. Next, I stamped the large bird image using Versafine Onyx Black, adding a little gold embossing powder just along the edges of the head, wings and tail and heat-set. I had planned on doing the same with the sentiment but it didn’t really pop so...

A few years ago, I did a willow weaving day with my friend, supposedly making a chicken.   Mine took on a life of its own and turned into rather a large rooster, that you can see here .   For my birthday, my sister bought me a voucher for a local willow weaving session run by Jacquie of  www.willowandcrafts.co.uk where we would be making a penguin. After a quick introduction to the materials and some penguin photos for inspiration, we began by making our penguin’s feet.   They turned out roughly the same shape and size and looked vaguely like a pair - so far so good! The next job was to make the body base.   After making a couple of teardrop shapes, these were joined together with a ring, the size of which would dictate the size of the penguin’s belly.   I was aiming for a short, squat guy rather than a tall Emperor penguin. More rings were made in different sizes to complete the base frame.   After weaving a few bits onto the body frame, it...