A blog for cooking and crafts

Thursday 31 December 2009

Out with the Old Year.......


Whilst chatting with Sy on our regular Tuesday night meet up on MSN, I realised I was only 3 pages away from my scrapbooking target for the year - 10 pages a month = 120 pages. I was at work on Wednesday and our visitors for New Year were arriving that day too, so what to do?

Simple solution - I explained the world shaking importance of my completing 3 pages over two evenings and disappeared into my craft room :-) Anti-social I know, if I had been ten pages away I wouldn't have bothered. But to be so close! I couldn't not try to achieve my goal :-)

So, here I am, 3 pages later, sitting in a smug glow of self satisfaction. The page shown here is for Little Girl's second album (due in February, I only have 5 pages done.....eek!). It features a couple of things I am not usually known for, the most obvious being the F-word...... *flowers* that is :-( Also there is some white space, a scary thing, I had to resist the urge to fill it with something, anything! I am quite pleased with it overall though, a nice page to finish the year on!


Tuesday 29 December 2009

Dancing Trees


So here it is, the finished cross stitch. I am really pleased with it, though it came with some sad news - the lady who does the stretching of the fabric before sending it to be framed is very ill. I got a phone call from her daughter saying that although she was in hospital, she was still worrying about all her customers' pictures - bless her. So we arranged that it could be brought over to my workplace as I couldn't get over to the shop. I sent my best wishes to her - it seemed inappropriate to say "Merry Christmas".
She has done so many of my stitched pictures over the last 15 years and from what little her daughter said, it seems likely that this will be the last. She is a lovely lady, who treated each customer's piece with as much care as if it were her own work, and I will miss discussing all things embroidery related while we tried out various combinations of frames and mounts.


Tuesday 22 December 2009

Christmas Decorations

A while ago I bought some blank chipboard tags with the intention of making some sort of decoration with them. In the end, I decided to keep it very simple (something to do with running out of time...........!)

I painted each tag with two coats of acrylic craft paint on each side, 5 tags in burgundy, 5 in green. Then I stamped and embossed using a Hero Arts cling background stamp and a gold embossing powder. Next a protective coat of acrylic varnish, again on each side. The letters are Basic Grey monograms, I coloured them gold with a Krylon leafing pen, then stuck on jewels in wine or green. To fix the letters, I used strong double sided tape.
They are now hanging above the bay window in my living room and I am really pleased with them :-)




Sunday 20 December 2009

Some Christmas cards!

How on earth did it get to be this far into December without me noticing???? Despite my resolution to have all cards made and posted out by the 1st, somehow here I am still with half a dozen left to make......

I don't do complicated cards! A stamp, a mat and a greeting, that'll do me - oh sometimes I add a background LOL. I bought this gorgeous Elusive Images holly stamp, it stamps really well with a lovely clear impression. It takes yours truly to mess up such a nice image.... on both of these, the mistakes are covered up; one with ribbon over the offending area, the other by the tiny red dots pretending to be holly berries :-)




The next one also is also a cover up job - I seriously mis-stamped the background and had to be a bit creative with silver squares, nailheads and peel off borders. I gave it to a lady at work who admired it greatly, saying she didn't know how I had the patience to put it together! Needless to say, I didn't enlighten her :-)


Finally a medallion - I tried using 1mm foam squares instead of my normal 2mm as it has to be posted - but I am not sure it has turned out quite dimensional enough, so I won't do it that way again. The intended recipient (who does not make cards LOL) will be quite happy with it, though, so that's ok.

Apologies for the not-so-great photos - I am finding it hard to get a decent picture of cards, either the flash bounces off all the shiny bits, of which there are many on Christmas cards LOL, or they come out too dark. Still, hopefully you can see the ideas............ :-) Oh and both the snowflake and swirl backgrounds are Hero Arts, again very good stamps in anyone's hands but mine!