Crafty As L

Welcome to my second Visible Image blog post, this time featuring patriotic cats.   The idea for this card came to me whilst I was driving home and saw some red, white & blue bunting with a cat sat underneath.   Instead of bunting, I subbed the Grungy Union Jack stencil instead, which I love. I have a quickie YouTube video of the making of this card here . To begin, I stamped multiples of the cats from That Lovin' Feline onto masking paper and fussy cut them. On a 5¼” square piece of card, I stamped the cats along the bottom, masking the foreground cats then stamping others in the background until about a third of the panel was covered. I replaced the masks on the cats and then positioned the Grungy Union Jack stencil and taped it in place.   Using sticky notes to cover adjacent areas so as not to mix the colours, I used small blending brushes to add traditional colours to the flag.   Once complete, the cat masks were removed. The cats were coloured ...

To celebrate VE Day earlier this month, I wanted to put up some bunting even though we were not doing any actual celebrations.  I went to get the bunting from storage and realised that my Mum-in-law still has it – she has it on permanent loan for WI purposes!  Since I didn’t view bunting collection as being a critical journey during lockdown, I set about making some more.  As I wanted a patriotic look, I rifled through my fabric collection and pulled out all fabrics that had red, white or blue in them - most were offcuts from clothing or other sewing projects – and set to work.  First job is to make a cardboard template for the flag size.  You can make the flags whatever size you like - mine were 6” x 7½”.  I also cut out a 2” cardboard spacer although you can put the flags next to each other if you prefer.  After drawing around the flags, I cut them out using pinking shears, which have a zig-zag edge so prevent the fabric from fraying.  I cut t...

  You may have seen our jazzy music room wall behind our parents in the Christmas Carol Evening blog post. When it came to decorating our music room, so called because it houses all our musical instruments including Mr. L's kazoo (!), we decided on a red, white and blue theme. Now nothing is more red, white and blue themed than the Union Jack or Union Flag (I’m never sure what we’re supposed to call it) so that seemed a good starting point. I thought the whole flag would be too much so decided on just a quarter of what would have been a HUGE flag.  It’s quite tricky to draw the Union Jack and have it look right so Google came to my aid and I found out what the ratios should be. The cross of St. George is red and is one fifth the flag’s height.  The white border is one fifteenth of the height. The saltires of St. Andrew and St. Patrick are intertwined, with the St. Andrew cross being one fifth the flag’s height.  This is then divided into 6 and then two of the six b...