Cardmaking marathon

On Tuesday, DH kept remembering various occasions which required a card. Every now and then I would get an email saying "it's my mother's birthday on the 25th" and "maybe we ought to send my sister a get well card" and so on until there were 5 cards needed - four birthdays and a get well one! Oh and he wanted them to post /take to our friends' house the next day.... which meant making 5 cards on Tuesday evening. For me this is a marathon, since I come home from work dead tired and with no brain left!

I made him cook while I got started :-) By the time tea was ready I had the first one finished and had made a good start on the second. After a 45 minute break to eat, I got on again. I used up some old stash (chipboard letters & swirl), christened two old stamps (film strip & happy birthday circle), made the mats and border from left over card rather than cutting into a whole sheet, used two of my Ally Pally buys (the lady stamp and the border punch) and used up some paper from a cardmaking magazine for the MIL birthday card. I finally finished by about 10pm!

I will definitely be using some of these ideas again - especially the film strip and the lady stamp with the punched border.

Decorated Box

I have been working on this box for a while, couldn't post about it as it was Sy's bithday pressie! I gave it to her when we met up at Ally Pally, and she opened it at lunchtime - and I missed seeing the look on her face cos she didn't wait for me to get down to the lunch hall!!!!! Ooh, she's a one that girl ........... :-)

The box started out as plain pale wood. I glimmer misted it to within an inch of its life, it actually started as being much redder, but I felt it was too much so browned it down a bit, then put lots of bronze mist over it. The sides were stamped with stazon in brown for a subtle pattern, and I stamped and embossed some corners and a border on the top. When everything had dried, I coated it with an acrylic varnish. Next I put some self adhesive green suede on the base to stop it scratching furniture. I ran some copper metal sheet through my embossing machine for the top panel, stuck it down and then edged it with the mosaic tiles. Last was the flower. The photo - as always! - doesn't do justice to it, the flower is more pearlescent than it appears here and the flash has given a high shine to everything else, where really it is more gleamy than shiny :-)

Now for the inside. I painted with a copper acrylic craft paint, then lined the base with the same green suede. Then I made up the spring roll recipe cards, which I have been promising her for months now LOL, put them onto a book ring and added a tassel.

She liked it :-)

Ally Pally Trip

It's taken me a few days to recover enough energy to blog this trip! On Sunday I went with some of the other crop girls to the Stamping and Scrapbooking show at Ally Pally. We got there about 10 minutes after it opened and got in almost immediately, no queue to speak of.

I had been saving for a few months for this trip and ended spending about £425 - would have bought a few more things, there were some stamps and punches I was going to go back for and the wonderful Linda E (I met Linda E! Yay!) showed me some new paint which I rather liked the look of............ but by then my back was protesting forcefully and I couldn't carry any more!

So here is the loot! The first picture has most of the 24 clear stamps I bought. The second has the 11 rubber stamps, mounted and unmounted, plus a couple of clear ones I managed to miss off the first photo! Third is the 9 bottles of Glimmer Mist, 3 of cosmic shimmer, plus punches and metal tools. I am racking my brains to try and remember where I got the flower punch from because they had another that I wanted to get, if anyone knows, can they tell me??? The fourth picture is everything else, some gems and pearls, a tray and three frames to decorate, some charms, ribbons and bows and a couple or three inkpads!

I carried all that lot in two bags-for-life, so not really surprising my back went! All in all a great day...... and next year I will be taking a trolley :-)