quick crafty tip 1 of 2

Hello and thank you for dropping by.

Today my copy of "Papercraft Essentials" arrived together with this free gift.

When I decided to use it this afternoon I had a problem, which I often find with dies that are rather intricate,  and  in particular sentiments.

On the first cut it took a long time to release the cut card from the die and when I finally got it out everything looked very untidy and bent.

I used a trick I discovered, some time ago when I was first having this problem.

Many of you may have already discovered the magic of talcum powder .... anyway please do scroll down to see what I did.

quick crafty tip 2 of 2

 Although I managed to get the sentiment and butterfly out of the die it wasn't an easy job.  As you can see from this photo they looked very untidy  and there is even a hole in the butterfly's body where I had to poke so hard from the back to release it.

I find by putting quite a lot of talcum powder on the cutting side of the die before putting it through my Cuttlebug everything comes  out much more easily and the diecuts are much neater than those shown in this photo.  If you enlarge this photo you will see how much powder I use.  When I used the powder the die cuts looked nice and clean and tidy as shown in the picture on the previous page.

I hope some of you will find this tip helpful.


Happy Crafting!

A Perfect Day!

Yesterday my husband went to an Adobe lecture so I had the day by myself.

I had a lie in, a couple of hours crafting then pizza and a big glass of red wine watching the last Sunday football match of the season.

I've been trying to use up old stuff since the beginning of the year so I made up six cards from old decoupage.  I'd previously cut out and assembled the decoupage over several weeks at our craft club which is held every Monday morning in the village hall.

This is one of the cards I made using some Lucy Attwell decoupage that I bought from Create & Craft many years ago.  The "Hello" is a die bought recently from Greatly Besotted and  the hearts are punched out with Glossy Accents added.  The paper is from my stash.

I've submitted this card to The Cutie Pie Challenge Blog.

Contemporary Parchment Card

I came across this card this morning checking through a box of completed cards.  It was made several years ago and I had completely forgotten about it.

It's not my usual style of parchment card but I do remember making it.  There was a lot of work involved, as with all parchment work, but I really like how it turned out and it was a lot of fun to do.

I coloured in the fans.  The leaves were cut out and that was the most time consuming part of the card.

The card insert is a piece of  brightly coloured rainbow parchment,

Useful die sets

Just thought you may be interested to see these two very useful little die sets.

I used them on the following cards as they work well together for matting and layering.

They are a great size for using on ATCs

Now I'm really not mean - but I punched out 20 of the small gold hearts from these scraps that were left after making my cards.

Butterflies and Dragonflies

Happy Saturday Everyone.

Today I've been out crafting with a friend and had a great time.

I made eight cards like this a couple of days ago using up scraps of coloured, black, silver and gold card plus odd bits of parchment paper.

They are A6 size cards folded lengthways.  I think they are rather an elegant type of card and also don't require a great deal of decoration if you are needing some quick cards.  Unfortunately I don't have envelopes this size so have to make my own.

I wanted fantasy type images so used Dawn Bibby's "Woodland Butterfly" clear set which I stamped onto the parchment with a versamark ink pad and heat embossed with silver  embossing powder.  I  coloured in the bodies with a gold gel pen and did just a little embossing on the back of the parchment.

Fussy cutting probably took more time than anything else and a few dragonflies lost their antennae!  So I made them some more with craft wire.  Just a little spirelli with some Twinney thread  and they were almost done.

More Brusho

Here's the second of my Brusho practise pieces that I decided to use on a card.

This is on watercolour paper using three colours of Brusho, turquoise, scarlet and yellow paint in separate areas.  The paper was well spritzed with water before I tapped on the paints and then spritzed again.  This time I dried with my heat tool before stamping the leaf and then the flower head using a black dye ink pad.

As there was not a lot of  definition between the two stamps I outlined the petals of the flower with a fine black liner pen and drew lines on the leaves with a white gel pen.

I added a green button to pick out the green colour where paints had merged and a scrap of embroidery yarn tied into a bow for added decoration.

After matting onto a piece of black card which I tore at the bottom I stuck on a couple of self adhesive pearls from my craft stash. The sentiment is a well loved Judikins  stamp, bought a long time ago from Stamp Addicts.  The flower and leaves stamps are by Paper Artsy.

Karma

I hope you all enjoyed the Bank Holiday weekend.  I certainly did.

We  visited Aunty Stella in Cambridge, I watched lots of football and we had a takeaway Chinese meal.

Well, this is one of my Brusho samples which I decided to use to make a card.  I'm pleased with how that little scrap, in the picture below, turned out when it became a card.

I used Turquoise coloured Brusho crystals onto glossy white card.

The stamp on the left is one of a set of  Woodware stamps called Plant & Meadow JGS402.   I stamped twice and then once again without re-inking.

The sentiment, which was heat embossed is a Visible images stamp. This set is called "be happy" and comes with three other sentiments.

I added three self adhesive dew drops for added interest.

This Brusho colour is probably my favourite at the moment from the starter set that I bought.

Busho Workshop

Last week I went to a Brusho Workshop at Coleman's Warehouse in Rushden.  It was really an introduction to using Brusho paint.  These are just 3 of my sample pieces.

We used different types of card, plain white, glossy white card and watercolour paper to find out how the paint reacted on different surfaces.  Sometimes we spritzed the paper with water before tapping on the paint and sometimes sprinkled the paint on then spritzed with water.  We used either one colour, two  or three colours of paint on the different samples to see the effects we got.  There were about a dozen of us in the class and it was very interesting to see how differently our samples turned out depending on the colours we chose to use and how heavy handed we were with the spritzing.

The following day I decided to make cards from some of my samples and I'll post them over the next few days.

Now I'm afraid I have to get the ironing board out as DH is running short of shirts but after that it's up the garden to my craft cabin for a bit of playing!