Crafty As L

Happy New Year! I do love Christmas but it’s also nice for things to calm down and go back to normal again.   For my tags in recent years, I’ve started doing what my Mum used to do, which is cutting up the previous year’s cards.   The trouble with that in the Christmas just gone was that we ran out half way through the wrapping.   Quite often, people had written a little note inside, which is lovely to hear their news, but no good for converting the cards to tags afterwards.   However, a friend and my M-i-L had some pretty festive napkins so I kept the ones that weren’t smeared with mince pies with the intention to repurpose them into tags. These ones that my M-i-L had needed to be dissected to remove the “home composting” section.   These were 3-ply napkins so, after removing the two backing layers, I used a fine paintbrush and a little water to draw around the various elements which made them easy to tear apart leaving a soft edge. After watering down ...

  What a lovely few days of glorious weather we’ve enjoyed this week.  18°C in February is unseasonably warm but the sunshine was a welcome change from the gloomy grey cloud that’s been around for most of the winter.  The lovely weather inspired us to get outside and do some gardening and I ended up doing quite a lot of weeding.  Whilst this is a tedious occupation, I do like that you can see what you’ve achieved at the end! It was whilst I was on my hands and knees in the middle of the border that I saw my first bee of the year.  I love bees and find it fascinating watching them buzzing around collecting pollen.  It was a white-tailed bumble bee which flew past me to explore the camelia bush and it inspired my crafting this week. I used the bees from the Stampin’ Up! Dragonfly Dreams and Detailed Dragonfly thinlits. For my first cards, I die cut a couple of banners and stamped the bee and coloured it in using the Wink of Stella brush and so...