Crafty As L

  Late September and early October is a busy few weeks for birthdays for me (my own included!) and this year there were two big birthdays thrown into the mix; my sister's 50th (last week's post) and my friend’s 60 th .   This card idea had popped up on my Facebook feed as an Etsy advert so I dug out my Cricut and attempted to make my own version. To begin, I got a free SVG download of a birthday candle and imported it into Cricut’s Design Space, where I manipulated it and created background layers to mount the candles on.   I then dug out some coordinating patterned papers and set the Cricut busy cutting. I had designed 6 strips of 10 candles and had decided to stick the candles onto both sides so there were a lot of cut outs!  The next step of gluing all the bits in place turned out to be quite arduous and I was starting to regret my decision to make this. However, once I stuck the sections together, I was glad that I’d persevered as I could see that it wa...

  Last month, my ‘little’ sister turned 50.   That made me feel old!   She is a huge cat fan so that was to be my theme.   When I first got Visible Image’s limited-edition Purr-fect Birthday stamp set, I immediately thought that the various images would be perfect for using on a triple step card, like the one I made here . Usually, I work in inches but, after reading my own blog post, I remembered that the card wouldn’t fit in the envelope so this time I used cm and cut a rectangle 22.5cm x 13.5cm and scored it at 4.5cm/2.25cm intervals .   I also added an extra element with the fold out card at the front, cutting a card base 4.5cm x 9cm and scoring in the centre.   To start, I cut and scored the card bases. Next, I cut all the mat and topper sections.   I cut the black mats 0.25cm smaller at   4.25cm/2cm square and the toppers 0.25cm smaller than the mats at 4cm/1.75cm.  It requires 2 large black, 3 large white and 7 each of the smal...

Hello again!   How is it April already??   With the clocks springing forward last weekend, we can look forward to lighter nights and hopefully warmer weather.   No matter what time it is though, cake is always a good idea!   I made this interactive card for my friend’s 60 th birthday and stretched my supplies by extending the cake from Blow Out The Candles into a 3-tiered one. For my background, I blended Spun Sugar Distress Ink through the Hobbymaker Exclusive All Stars stencil.   If you didn’t manage to get one of these, Drizzle or one of the other cool Visible Image stencils will work perfectly instead.  Without moving the stencil, I applied translucent stencil paste, removed and washed the stencil, and left the panel to dry.   Once it was almost dry, such that it would hold its form but was still a little tacky, I used a dry paintbrush to apply some Pixie Sparkles dust. For the top tiers of the cake, I partially stamped each half of the ca...