New Toy

I have a new toy! A Sizzix Texture Boutique, a little embossing machine, which looks like a handbag ...... really too "cute" looking for me, but thankfully what it does far outweighs how it looks :-) All you do is make a "sandwich" of the supplied plates and your chosen cardstock plus embossing folder, and wind it through the machine - it's like magic LOL.

I have now bought ...... er...... let's just say "several" and leave it at that ...... embossing folders and have been having great fun playing with them. The picture on the left shows two samples, Morrocan Screen and Spots and Dots, both Cuttlebug folders, which fit through the Sizzix machine. The latest Little Girl layout has had the letters run through the machine using the Tiny Mosaic pattern, they look fabulous. I am having to resist the urge to texture all letters now :-)

Rising to the Challenge(s)

Our normal craft weekend was postponed by a week due to snow, so we had a mini cybercrop on our forum instead :-) Six of us set challenges - mine was a sketch - and we had a whole Sunday to scrap plus a week to finish off and upload. Well. Could I find my mojo anywhere? Couldn't come up with much at all, then DH says "shall we go and watch Avatar at the cinema?" Since we don't go out much, I leapt at the opportunity, thoroughly enjoyed the film and got back three hours later still with no inspiration at all.....

At the end of the day I had done two out of the six, so I have been doing the rest over the past week and at the crop yesterday. Finally got them uploaded today and am really pleased with them. I made a conscious effort to use older papers, as I have a bulging storage problem...... I also had to make sure that most of the LOs were of Little Girl, as I must progress her album forward.... only 4 more weeks to go before handover!

...... and in with the New!

Happy New Year!

I managed to get a bit of time in the craftroom between our visitors leaving and my going back to work. Just to play around really, with no specific thing in mind. I came up with these ATC backgrounds, not sure how I will finish them yet, but have a vague idea of doing something with all the metal embossing stuff I bought last year and haven't really used. The backgrounds are various shades of ink direct-to-paper and overstamped, the two on the left have had copper metallic ink used, though it hasn't photographed all that well.

I will post the pics of the finished articles as soon as they are done - watch this space ...... :-)

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!

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.

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 :-)

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!