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...

Well, I know it’s usually Christmas in July in the crafting world, however, over at VIHQ, there’s exciting news coming next month so we’re doing the festive stuff early.   For my CAS makes this week, I’ve done a bit of batch making to get ahead.   I’m not a big fan of all my cards being exactly the same so using an inky background ensures the cards are the same but different whilst still offering the speed of production-line style stamping. For the inky backgrounds, I got busy with my Tim Holtz Distress stains and spritzes and half A4 pieces of card.   I like to use a bigger piece of card so that I can trim the part that suits my project best.   Invariably there’s a dodgy edge so it allows for trimming that off! The stains I used were: Dusty Concord, Picked Raspberry, Chipped Sapphire, Stormy Sky, Broken China and Lost Shadow (for the snowy part).   The spritzes were Picked Raspberry, Wilted Violet, Uncharted Mariner and Weathered Wood.   I tried not to m...

Last December turned out to be a bit frantic one way and another and the fact that I had to make most of my Christmas cards didn’t help.   I have therefore decided to take the pressure off and to do what I did a couple of years ago and that is make a few cards each month so my last post of the month will be a festive one.   You may remember the background of the wobbler cards I made at Christmas and I was so pleased with how they looked that I decided to make them the feature rather than the background.   The stamp set is 'Let It Snow' by Visible Image.  After stamping the snowflakes with Versamark, I added Cosmic Shimmer embossing glitter.   I wanted the sentiment to stand out more so stamped that in black Versafine Clair Nocturne but added the same embossing glitter so it had some sparkle. I mainly used the large snowflake but rather than cleaning it, I just use a piece of old packaging as a mask whilst I get the stamp in the right position in my MISTI. ...

As I have mentioned before, I’m in a Facebook birthday group where we exchange cards with other card makers all over the world.   When I saw the Birthdays Around The World stamp set by Altenew, I thought it’d be nice to be able to add the birthday sentiment in the recipient’s native language.   We don’t have every nationality in the group so, after seeing this inspiration idea on the stamp packaging, it was a great way of using all of the different birthday greetings. To make the stamping easier and to make 4 cards, I used my MISTI stamping platform.   I used Versafine Clair inks in Glamorous, Morning Mist and Warm Breeze and started with just one stamp in the centre. For the next round of stamping, I added 2 stamps that would be inked in the same colour. I kept repeating this process until most of the card was filled. Last, I just filled in any little gaps at the side to complete the panels which gave me 4 colourful backgrounds. One of the smaller sentiment...

This week’s post stars some Altenew goodies that I bought a while ago but hadn’t got around to playing with.   I’ve got the die version, called Rolled Roses, but I really liked the look of these Charles Rennie-Mackintosh style roses and I loved the fact that they also came with stencils for easy colouring and coordinating dies. As I planned on batch making a few of these cards, I set up the stamps in my Misti and stamped each image twice, rotating 180˚.   The stencils come with both the positives and negatives so I used these as masks when stamping the overlapping roses. I stamped and clear heat-embossed 6 panels plus some of the smaller roses that I could die-cut later. The stencils made the colouring super-easy! After stamping the sentiment, I used the Wavy Grid stencil and a very light blending of black ink to lightly stencil the pattern.   The tiny roses were die-cut and fixed in place with foam tape. To add a more organic feel to the panels, I put them in...