Sheena's Birthday Card

This little lovely is for one of my KraftKrazy forum friends, Sheena.

As hers is a December birthday I toyed with the idea of a winter birthday card but decided to use that one as her Christmas card instead when I suddenly remembered this fabulous image I just had to have and had already stamped out with Sheena in mind!

I come from a motor racing family so was quite sure I would get a lot of use out of this stamp, and knowing his much Sheena loves the F1 (especially Ferrari!) this was a must for her card too!

Tilda's outfit is coloured with Black and Berry Red Promarkers and her hair is Spice. The backing paper is from a K & Co stack and a small off-cut of a Black Magic Coredinations paper embossed with Swiss Dots, which was used on a Christmas card but just seemed to work well with this card!

A simple peel off from Craft Creations, some flowers and brads from my stash and some sticky backed gems (Crystal Stickers) which I bought at the NEC just finished it off nicely!

Christmas Robin #1

This gorgeous Christmas image was sent to me by a lovely lady known as ChrisAndCat on the DoCrafts forum.

The robin is coloured with Berry and Shale Promarkers with Gold Promarker legs.
The boot is coloured with Cocoa and the sole with Caramel Promarkers.
The holly leaf was coloured with Holly Promarker (not a huge surprise!!) and the snowdrop leaves with Forest Green.

The whole image has been lifted with Star Dust Stickles glitter glue, an absolute favourite of mine all year but especially at Christmas!!

The image was sent in response to a request I posted as I needed a traditional Christmas image for a card order and didn't really want to go to the expense of buying a stamp that would hardly be used. When I eventually get round to blogging all my ordered cards you will be able to see what I did with this image!!

A duck for Christmas

The thing with commissioned cards is that you can be asked to make absolutely anything! This card was for one of the children in Joseph's music class to give to his grandparents. The initial request was for a little boy and a duck in traditional Christmas colours. When this proved to be a little beyond possible the mum said anything cute would be fine! At the NEC I picked up this cute stamp (the duck has a duckling on its head!) from Stamposaurus and felt it was one I would be able to use again so it was worth paying out for! He is stamped with Memento Tuxedo Black ink and coloured with Summer Sun Promarker from the Summer 2012 Limited Edition set, and Mustard Promarker. His hat is red card from Papermania with everyday cotton wool stuck on it!!!!

The duck is sitting on an image which was a free card blank with some Forever Friends chipboard shapes either last Christmas or the one before, mounted on Dovecraft / Trimcraft Christmas paper with ribbon from Wilkinson's.

A very special card

This card was made for a friend to give to her new foster daughter. She was amazed to find that even the fostering and adoption society don't sell cards for carers to give to children and yet they are expected to give cards to the children! This is where handmade personalised cards definitely have a place!!!

Tilda has been coloured with Pink Carnation Promarker with highlights using the pink metallic pen from set 2. Tilda's hair is coloured with a combination of Burnt Sienna and Sandstone. There is lots of Star Dust Stickles on the card as the little girl is 6 and very much into pink, pretty and girly!!
The flowers are from Prima, the butterfly is from Syntego and the wording was done on the computer using Angelica font, written over with the pink metallic Promarker and then with Star Dust Stickles on top.

A child in need

After hearing how much money some people working for Children in Need get paid, I have decided not to donate to them this year but instead to donate directly to one child who is in need. Evie is one of my Rainbows, she is 5 years old and has Cerebral Palsy. As a result of this she cannot walk and relies on a wheelchair. Her family, friends and supporters have been desperately raising money to enable her to have an operation which will hopefully enable her to walk. Unfortunately, just as we were approaching the £30,000 needed for the operation, Evie's mum received the awful news that the surgeon who had agreed to carry out the operation was moving on from the hospital where he worked and would no longer be able to help. This left only one option, to turn to the USA. This meant resubmitting an application and a very nervous, worrying time for Evie's amazing mum, Donna. After an agonising week or 2 of anxiously checking for emails from America, Donna received fantastic news yesterday...Evie has been accepted for the SDR operation at St Louis in the USA! Now we just need to meet her new fundraising target of £50,000 to get her there!

If you can join me in making a small donation to a child in need today, i would be very grateful. Thank you.

4 forum members, a sister and a friend!

This is the other reason for going to the NEC last weekend - to meet some of my lovely forum friends from www.kraftkrazy.proboards.com (we used to be the forum members on MadAboutCards but after it closed down we created our own forum so we could keep in touch!)

We met up at the end of the show - myself, my mum, Sheena, Chris and Chris' friend Carol - and headed back to our hotel with all our goodies!

Later on we met again and went to Frankie and Benny's, joined by Sheena's sister Sinead and part-way through our meal Linda and her sisters popped in to say hello before heading out in town!

This photo is the only one I have of us all - Linda, me, Sheena, Sinead, Carol and Chris so I thought I'd share it! We all had a fantastic time and the staff in Frankie and Benny's couldn't believe this was the first time we had all net face-to-face as we got on so well! Luckily the accents (2 from Northern Ireland, 2 from the North West and 2 from the North East!) didn't cause too many problems either!!!

NEC 2012

Well what a busy day yesterday was!

We left home at about 9am eventually and arrived at the NEC just after 10:30. We soon realised just how busy it was going to be and changes our initial plan of starting on the left as everyone else did and instead headed over to the far right hand corner where all the workshops and demonstrations were! This was the side where all the art materials were so we had a quick look and then found the decopatch make and take stand so mum and I joined the queue and had a go at decorating a heart each - great fun and I kept finding glue varnish on my hands all afternoon... Brought back memories of primary school and peeling PVA glue off hands after arty activities!!

After that we braved the crowds and started our purchases! There were some bargains to be had and we picked up a few of them! I got lots if things that were on my wish list... And a few that weren't and discovered some new retailers to buy from in the future!

I got quite a good assortment of goodies (as you can see from the photo!) and still came home with some money in my purse so may have to pop over to Lili of the Valley (who are offering show offers until tonight on their website as they didn't go to the show!) for a last little spend!!

Kate's birthday

My friend Kate loves Tatty Teddy and this year I decided to make her a Tatty Teddy card instead of the Halloween-themed cards she's had for the last 2 years (her birthday is October 31st!) and here it is!

I used a 13cm square card (slightly bigger than 5") and inked it with Stampin Up's Pool Party ink which matched very well to the turquoise shade on the image which came from the first DoCrafts Tatty Teddy papers pack.

The image was mounted on yellow card which also matched the shade of yellow on the image.

The sentiment was stamped in Pool Party onto a small piece of the same yellow card and punched out using an SU punch, mounted on 3D foam pads with 2 lemon pearls stuck on the ends.

The large flower in the bottom right hand corner was coloured with the Pool Party ink with a lemon pearl stuck in the middle and the 3 lemon rose buds were bought in a sale at my local craft shop, The Craft Bug in Chirk.

Jack's 2nd birthday

You can't have one without the other, so here's Ruby's brother's card as well...

Unfortunately there isn't a lot to say about Jack's card. The backing paper is a piece I took out of a little-used pack of football themed papers which I sold on EBay.

The Happy Birthday is a peel-off paper ribbon (I think it's a Kanban one) and the lettering was bought a few years ago when a friend of mine ran a craft shop. The image is a Wild Rose Studio stamp, coloured with Promarkers, on white card with the corners rounded and the edge inked with Stampin Up ink in Red Riding Hood, layered on 3D foam pads to add some depth and interest!

Ruby's 2nd birthday

Joseph's best friends (twins) turned 2 in October and thus is the card I made for the little girl...
Tilda is coloured with promarkers in Blossom and Summer 2012 Limited Edition Pink Lobster.

The papers are scraps from my 'pink drawer' layered up with a couple of punched edges to add interest.

The Happy Birthday sentiment is from Stampin Up and stamped in Melon Mambo, cut out with an SU punch. The gold lettering is from a pack I have had sitting in a drawer for a long time and the pink flowers are by Polkadoodles.

Ruby refers to herself as 'Princess Ruby' so I though this image was just right!

Wedding card

Friends of ours got married in Croatia in the Summer but unfortunately we were not able to attend the wedding.

The sentiment on this card proved quite tricky to get right, mainly because I knew in my own mind what it was I wanted to do but couldn't quite reproduce it in real life!!! Eventually I managed to stick the piece of card into a piece of printer paper, and get the printer to accept it, and get the colour right!!

The ribbon was taken from their wedding invitation and folded in half, the dies used are Spellbinders Romantic Rectangles and the pearls are from Dovecrafts.

This card was finally send along with their Christmas card so at last I can publish it on my blog!

National Cardmaking Day 2012 swap

For a few years I was a member of a forum belonging to the website of a craft retailer. Unfortunately the website has now closed and so our lovely forum was lost :-(
Fortunately, most of the forum users were friends on Facebook and all managed to keep in touch while one of the group set us up with our own forum!

So now we have new forum www.kraftkrazy.proboards.com and we are all back together!

We are planning our first ever meet-up at the NEC in a couple of weeks and I'm really looking forward to it!

Anyway, this card was made for a swap we did for National Cardmaking Day at the beginning of October. I had seen a card in a magazine a while ago, which was on an A6 card and used very bright, vivid colours in this same style, but I have recently been using these square cards a lot and wanted to use more Autumnal colours as we are well and truly into Autumn now!!! A couple of flowers in the same shades all layered up and a sentiment printed on the computer, cut with a Nestie and layered on black to match the rest of the card, in matching colours finished it off nicely!

Back to the cards!

This latest addition is a christening card for my friend's little boy. The card base with blue insert came in a pack of 3 (blue, pink and lemon) from Every Craft's a Pound. The image I am sure many people will recognise from Lili of the Valley. The image was coloured using the Spring Limited Edition Promarker set with a little Diamond Stickles to highlight the christening gown. The image was edged with Stampin Up Baja Breeze ink and the cross (from my stash) was attached with a piece of Stampin Up Bakers Twine in Island Indigo.

Still not cards!

My Rainbows this term are working on a Cupcakes badge and when we had our leaders' meeting at the beginning of September before starting back after the summer I thought I should take some cakes along with me...

The result of Joseph co-operating and having a decent sleep was that I managed to make chocolate and vanilla marbled cakes, topped with chocolate butter cream and shaved white chocolate! They went down VERY well with my leadership team and luckily there were enough left to share with 3 of my best friends who came down to visit the next evening (nothing to do with seeing the photos of the cakes on Facebook!!!!!)

Something a little bit different!

At the end of August we finally announced the news we had kept to ourselves for 10 weeks! Following a scan which took 2 attempts due to the baby's awkward position at the first attempt (as you can see from the photo!!) we found out we were having a healthy baby who measured exactly the right sizes for our due date :-)
With a toddler to run around after, working part-time and the tiredness of being pregnant, card-making has taken a bit of a temporary back seat but I am feeling more like crafting since my bi-annual scrapbooking weekend so I have had a good sort out of the tower of stash balanced on the edge of the desk and have created a much smaller pile of stash to use up in my next card making session before using any more new stash!!!

Last teacher thank you cards for 2012!

As the title says, these were the last of my teacher thank you cards for orders.

The first card was created using various blue papers from my stash, to match the little girl's school uniform colour. Tilda was coloured with Promarkers and the Prima flowers were edged with the same blue as the school uniform.

The letters are from an old DoCrafts box of Scrabble tiles I bought way back many years ago coloured with blue ink and the letters re-written in Pewter Stickles. The flower centres were made using a tiny SU flower punch and off-cuts of the blue glitter paper the image is mounted on. The tabs at the side also came from the same glittered paper, using SU's Modern Label punch with one end cut straight and some interest added with blue gems from my stash!

The second card uses the same image; checked paper from stash; tiny flowers punched with the blue glitter paper and SU punch; and bunting created using the blue glitter paper in the SU Petite Pennants Builder punch and SU Pool Party Baker's Twine.

Dance teacher thank you

I made this card back in July and have intended to upload it on numerous occasions since then but life has just got in the way! Anyway, at long last, here it is!....

Tilda's dress is coloured with Pink Lobster Promarker from the Summer limited edition pen set and highlights were added with pink Stickles. The sentiment was produced using Word on the computer and both were cut into circles using Nestabilities. The circles were then edged with Stampin Up Pixie Pink ink (now retired) and mounted on 3D foam pads.

The ribbon is SU sean binding coloured by running the Pixie Pink ink pad along it and the Prima paper flowers were coloured in the same way. The spotty flowers came with spots on and the middles are black gems and pink crystal brads from my stash, which were also used on the circles.

The backing paper is from a DCWV glitter stack with added pink Stickles dots to tie everything together!

This thank you card was a little bit different to the others as it was a thank you to a teacher who was also going on maternity leave!

The little girl's school uniform is navy so I used SU Concord Crush cardstock as my base, but I thought that was too dark on its own and as the teacher had not announced whether she was expecting a boy or a girl I decided on lemon as the second colour.

The lady is a Sizzix die, cut out using scraps of paper from my stash, mounted on a piece of patterned paper from the first Tatty Teddy /Me To You range, edged with Barely Banana (retired) SU ink. The same ink was used to edge the borders which I was sent as a free gift with some items I bought from a blog sale. The roses I picked up from a sale basket at The Craft Bug in Chirk and edged them with some Iced Stickles in Lemon Ice.

Thank you to a playgroup leader from a little girl going to the nursery class at school in September. Her school uniform will be navy, so I thought I'd go with the navy colour scheme to reflect that.

Doily from The Craft Bug in Chirk. Large silver flowers made using a Stampin Up punch, decorated using Dark Blue Stickles, blue paper flowers from stash and large silver brads from stash.
Small flowers (also an SU punch) also decorated with Stickles
Blue flowers and ribbons from stash.
Sentiment printed on computer and mounted on silver mirriboard cut with Petite Scalloped Ovals Large Nesties.

More thank you cards!

This one is an absolutely unique card... Because I had to give Tilda a hair cut!! The girl who was giving the card has short blonde hair and so Tilda also had to have short blonde hair!!! Wording chosen by the customer, an 11 year old girl moving on to high school this year.

Image coloured using Promarkers. Striped paper from an old DCWV stack, flowers from stash!

Evie's Dream

I would like to say a huge thank you to all my lovely customers who have ordered thank you cards from me recently. As a result of all these orders I have been able to make a donation of £15 to Evie's Dream, taking her a little bit closer to her £30,000 target for her operation. Evie is the younger sister of one of my Rainbows and can't wait to also become a Rainbow in September but more than that she would love the chance to walk just like her brothers, sisters and friends. If you would like to know more or feel able to make a donation (no matter how small, every penny really does count) please copy and paste the link below. Thank you x
http://www.treeofhope.org.uk/index.php?page=evie-lou

Nursery thank you card

An old friend asked if I could make a card for her daughter's nursery teacher. The room she has been in at the nursery is Eeyore room so she really wanted an Eeyore themed card if possible, or otherwise the request was for the little girl image in blue.

As my crafty friends will be aware, Disney are very strict with their copyright rules but I had amongst my stash some (legal!) lovely Winnie the Pooh paper featuring Eeyore, which I used as backing and then added the image, die-cut lettering, flowers, gems and butterfly (a recent eBay bargain... I think there were about 30 of them in the pack and I only paid £4 something for them including postage - I was thrilled with those!)

A nice change

2 cards for 2 little girls to give to their teachers. The girls chose the words they wanted and what colours, their mum chose the images and in their school uniform colour of red, I did the rest!!

Mr Maths teacher

Another teacher's thank you card (and there are still a few more to come!)...

This time we're back to a male teacher again, from a little girl, blue school uniform and a request for a maths theme if possible as that's what he has really helped the little girl with! Well, where to start with that one?!?

I started with the colouring, using Azure and Grey Green (it seemed to match better to the tones in the papers than the actual greys did!) Promarkers as I know that's as close to the school uniform as I will get! Then looked through my stash for suitable papers and found a few possible options!

Using a sketch from my ideas book which I used the other day (but felt it had too masculine a feel and had to embellish with flowers for a lady's card!) I set to work!

The backing paper is a Frances Mayer paper, called No. 2 Pencils.
The navy with white squares on is from Making Memories and is called Plaid just Chillin' Boy - a double-sided sheet and I have altered it to suit the theme by adding some addition sums with a white Sakura Gelly Roll pen.
The small squared piece is an off-cut from a recent SU class I attended.
Everything has been matted into blue textured card stock from my 12x12 stash, and the embellishments are from a Craft Planet pack I found reduced in a local craft shop last week (brilliant timing!!)

I am really pleased with how this one has turned out too!

Pretty In Pink

Another commissioned card, this time from a little girl moving on from nursery to big school. The only requirements I was given were the wording and 'possibly pinks or purples if you can?' so I picked out some papers (from the huge pack I bought at a bargain price last year, K&Co big Stack Too or something like that I think it was called?) in those colours, found an ink pad (SU Pink Pixie) to match and had a quick rummage through the Promarkers to find the best matches were Bluebell, Blossom and from the limited edition summer 2012 set Tropical Orchid and that's pretty much it!!

I have been desperate to use this SWALK image which has been sitting in my box of stamps waiting to be used since this time last year but all my orders so far has been for cards from boys or older girls! When this request popped up in my Facebook inbox I just knew which image I wanted to use! The layout came to me from nowhere so I sketched it quickly on a piece of scrap paper and when I was blog hopping earlier I came across a quite similar sketch which I think I might just have to use for the next card with this image on!

The Big One!

This was my biggest single order to date for thank you cards... One for my cousin's little boy's teacher and 4 for the teaching assistants. All in blue shades as his uniform is dark blue! I started with the lighter shade of blue papers and Midnight Blue Promarker and then realised I was not going to have enough papers to continue with this particular shade, so moved on to my Stampin Up Stash in Concorde Crush which actually matched very well with the Indigo Blue Promarker. I son't like making any 2 cards the same, even if an order is placed based on a photo I one of my cards, I still like to make slight changes! Some of the cards were inspired by layouts or pictures of other people's cards which I have cut out from various magazines over the years and kept in my inspirational ideas book, others came straight from
My head!!!

18th birthday commission

A very quick (in terms of notice and time taken to create!) 18th birthday card for an order which managed to creep its way in with all the thank you cards!

Forever Friends stamped image, stamped using Rich Cocoa Memento ink and coloured with Promarkers.

Made using Craftwork Cards goody bag which has been sitting in one of the drawers in my craft room for a long time!

Teacher order number 2

These are the cards I made for a little boy to give to his teacher and Teaching Assistant at the end of term.

Thank you teachers!

It's been a whole since I was last here as I have been working a lot, covering for teachers on courses and teachers who have been off sick. As we approach the end of the school year (only 3 weeks left here!) I am getting less work in schools but more and more orders... For end of year thank you cards to give to teachers and Teaching Assistants. So far I have been asked to make 14 cards for 6 families! The first order I finished at 1 o'clock this morning so here they are...

My other creative hobby!

One I don't have enough time for these days, but when I was at school I did GCSE Home Ec and loved cooking, sweet things mainly and when I do have time I still love to make cakes and biscuits. I have just baked my 4th Herman cake this year and having had our fill of apple and raisin versions I thought I would experiment with something else....

Chocolate and banana Herman cake!

I don't know what it will taste like but it looks ok and smells gorgeous so fingers crossed it will taste good too! Just waiting for it to cool a bit so I can pop some ice cream on top and try a bit!

Baby in bed, husband out for the night, one episode of Masterchef New Zealand to catch up with on Sky+ and then I'm off to make some cards for a change!!!

New Year's Resolutions!

Having joined in this weekend's bloghop as organised by Redrottie over on Doctafts, i had a quick look back through my posts from this year to read the lovely comments people have left, and realised i never did get round to copying and pasting my list of new year's resolutions! So here they are, a little late (in the same way that Joseph' birthday / Christmas thank you cards are!!!) bit here nonetheless...

1. Tidy my craft desk and keep it that way, with only my current project (card, notebook, photo frame, candle, etc) left on it and any bits I am still using for the project on my work mat!
2. Post more regularly on the Docrafts forum and make a conscious effort to comment on cards in galleries when I look at them.
3. Use up what I have - piles and piles of paper and every other type of craft stash and not buy any more unless it's essentials (glue, DST, foam pads, card blanks NOTHING ELSE!!!!) until I start making some money from either selling things I have made or selling unused/unwanted stash, clothes, etc on eBay!
4. Make my Christmas cards throughout the year.
5. Actively look for selling opportunities in the local area AND sell at them!
6. Spend less time on the iPad and more time upstairs creating!

So, now for a quick review...

1. Started off well and stayed that way for the first couple of weeks of January but then I started getting lots of supply teaching work and if I was working an afternoon I often had to abandon things half-finished in order to go to work, or would craft downstairs while watching tv (eg cutting and assembling decoupage) and that would all end up piled on the desk too, until such a time as I could use it for a card (there are still some sitting there now!!)
2. Again, until life was taken over by work I was doing well with this one, but in my defence there are also a lot less posts on the forum to read / comment on at the moment!
3. Oops!
4. Ooops!
5. I have been to one sale (sold one card and some car boot-type stuff!), was turned down for another event because they already had someone selling cards, and have 2 more events in June to make contact about, plus my local craft shop is going to sell my cards (with my profits being donated to www.eviesdream.org) and a friend has offered to take a selection into her office and see if they sell so not doing too badly on that front!
6. Once again, until work took over I wasn't doing too badly on this one!

I guess I should now head off upstairs and make some Christmas cards with the tonnes of Christmas stash I still have piled up around the bedroom, then I will be back on track with my resolutions!

Nothing to post for a while!

And the reason for that is this little bundle of mischief!!

Tabitha came to join us almost a fortnight ago after we lost our beautiful Tilly in February half term :-( and she is as much of a little madam as Tilly was!

If you have seen photos of Tilly you will know how scarily similar looking they are but this was not intentional! When I was told there was a grey tabby and White kitten in need of a home I immediately thought of the little one on the Whiskas cat food boxes, but I was wrong!

This little bundle of mischief, plus me working almost full time for he last 5 weeks has left mr with very little time for crafting - or anything else for that matter!

A lovely award

I have been given a lovely award from 2 of my friends, but am not quite sure how to link to it using the Ipad so please bear with me while i give it a try!

Claire is my Stampin Up upline and runs all the fantastic classes I go to on Friday mornings. She also does a quarterly all-day class and is starting a Wednesday evening class to! Any local crafters who are interested in joining one of claire's classes please contact her via her site

http://stampinupscrapper.blogspot.com/

The other award came from Andria who is a forum friend from www.madaboutcards.com/forum

And her amazing work can be found here:

http://iona-rose.blogspot.com/

Thank you to both of you, now I just need to work out how to get the actual award on here!!!

Baby girl

No reason for this one, so no personalisation on it at the moment! Another card made to use up some old stash, lots of bits of plain and patterned pink papers were sitting in my scraps box so I thought I'd use some of them up!

Dydd Santes Dwynwen Hapus!

For all my non-Welsh followers and readers, that's Happy St Dwynwen's Day (welsh equivalent of Valentine's Day) for tomorrow as I may not manage to get on here with Mums and Tots in the afternoon and Daft About Craft evening!

I was teaching Year 2 and 3 today so after we had looked at the story, done some work on the characters and used Google maps to find the setting on Anglesey, we made some cards with woven hearts in the front...

From 2 strips of paper with slits cut in the end to beautiful hearts in a few easy moves (or not so easy in some cases!)

Apologies for the poor quality of the photos...

Mother's Day #1

This is one of the cards I made using the decoupage kit I blogged about last week, from www.thecraftbug.co.uk which I was given at our Daft About Craft night on Wednesday. Sentiment reads 'Mum's Day Off' and personalisation is available if wanted.

Easel card... Something a little different!

For my non-crafting friends and followers, this is an easel card and how it stands up! This particular one is he smallest version I make; they can be made in pretty much any size and shape. Colours, images, sentiments, etc can be specified when ordering. This size is £2 with personalisation if wanted, plus postage costs, other sizes can be made at a price to be discussed depending on the cost of producing them!