Happy Christmas

Hello all, it's that most special day, Christmas Eve, and so I'd simply like to wish you all a very happy Christmas. I've loved getting to know my fellow bloggers this year, it's been such a pleasure.

I'm still not up to doing any crafting, but I can feel the spark of interest growing again, so hopefully it won't be too much longer before I'm back.

Till then, all the best from me.

Anything Goes at Sundays With Crissy

Hello everyone, no I haven't emigrated and left blogging for good, I'm just having a break until the New Year to get a bit stronger. But this is a card I made recently for this month's challenge at Sundays With Crissy, the theme being everyone's favourite: Anything Goes. How easy is that?

This sweet image is one of Crissy's that is available from Wags N Whiskers, called Zoe & Gemma's Snow Fun - don't you think it's cute? Coloured in copics as usual, and the backing paper is actually the cover of a brochure I received in the post....I liked the design so much I thought it would come in handy for a Christmas card.

A couple of felt snowflakes, a punched snowflake, gem brad, navy gingham ribbon and stamped sentiment were added to complete the card.

Hope you like the card and feel like coming along and joining us at Sundays With Crissy this month.

More apologies for not visiting any blogs, I'm just not up to all the reading and commenting right now, but I hope to be back reinvigorated in the New Year.

Till then, happy crafting!

Leap of Joy....non-traditional colours

Hello everyone, I'm here with a couple of cards today, they form my DT project for this month at Sundays With Crissy. This time, we'd like to see a Christmas card in non-traditional colours, so any colour other than red or green. I've used a tiny bit of red and green in my colouring, but there wasn't really any other colour I can do berries and holly.

I chose to make a non-traditional blue, white & silver card and a pink, white & silver one, using Crissy's image Leap of Joy in both - being a digi I was able to print the gorgeous reindeer at 2 different sizes. Colouring was done with copics, and I over-coloured with pencils to modify the shades and also add a little texture to the reindeer, as the colouring was too smooth with just the copics. In both cases I cut the image out with a nestie shape using the 'outside the box' technique so that the hind feet overhang the nestie. 

The blue card measures 15x15cm and is made using a piece of very shiny foiled Kanban cardstock in blue and silver, to which I added a square doily and a wide strip of blue and silver Christmas ribbon. Although it looks as if the background is uncoloured, it's actually a pale blue. A white poinsettia made with Marianne dies and a foiled 'With Love' sentiment finish it off. 

Cardstock is really very shiny and reflective!

The pink card is a book-fold C6 size, and made using paper from the very first designer paper pack I ever bought (5 years ago and still going strong....it was a BIG Papermania pack!).  The ribbon is a nice shiny silver one, and I made another white poinsettia to embellish.  I finished it off with a Papermania sentiment, stamped in grey.


I bet those carefully shaped poinsettia petals will get flattened in the post!

I'd like to enter these 2 cards in these challenges:

2 Sisters Challenge - Ribbon

ABC DT Challenge - Christmas card challenge

Cardmakin Mamas - Cut it out (nestie shapes round the images, and poinsettia die cuts)

Crafty Ribbons - Bingo (punch/dies - flowers - ribbon)

Papertake Weekly - Anything goes

And I'd like to enter the blue card only in these challenges:

Crafty Purple Frog - Sparkle

Secret Crafter - Flowers ribbon lace

Truly Scrumptious - Bingo time (lace - flowers - ribbon)

I hope you like my cards. The SWC Design Team upload their projects every few days, so keep checking out the challenge blog to see more non-traditional Christmas colours. You have till the end of the month to enter and be in with a chance to win 5 of Crissy's images.

Happy crafting!

Beer mat gift box

No, not a gift box for beer mats, silly! A box MADE using a couple of cardboard beer coasters that were headed for the recycling bin. Unused ones, I hasten to add, he hee.

I wanted to make a gift box just big enough to hold a few chocolates to give a very special person, and this is what I came up with. There was a tune going round my head at the time, a Billy Joel song called You're My Home, and there's a nice line in it which goes "Home is just another word for you" which seemed very appropriate for the person I was thinking of, so it became a sentiment on the box lid.

The lid and base are made from 2 beer mats which I covered both sides with brown dogtooth-checked paper, sanded a little around the edges. I made a small box from cream card using a box-maker and adhered one beer mat to the top of the lid and the other to the bottom of the base.  This is what the beer mats looked like before they were repurposed:

To decorate, I first used a lacy doily on top of the paper-covered beer mat, then I took a square of paper and made a background by aging it around the edges, crinkling it up and running a distress ink pad over it to highlight the creases. Then I added an epoxy flower embellishment, some roses, a die-cut gingham heart and some pearls.

The ribbon wrapped around the box is a beautiful patterned white ribbon from my good blogging friend, Kevin.

Background is made from some pale pink backing paper which I aged and distressed a little, then I scrunched it up and wiped a distress ink pad over the flattened out paper to show up the creases.

I'm entering this is these challenges:
2 Sisters Challenge - Ribbon (round the sides of the box)
Bearly Mine - Anything but a card
Bunny Zoe's Crafts - Lace it up
Cooking It Up With Katie - Anything but a card
Crafts & Me - Let the music move you
Crafty Cardmakers - pink, brown and cream
Crafty Emma's Store - Entertain us, song- or film-inspired
Lollipop Crafts - Anything goes
Secret Crafter - Flowers, ribbon, lace
Southern Girls - Can you hear the music?
Sugar Creek Hollow - Trash to Treasure vintage
Top Tip Tuesday - Make your own background
Truly Scrumptious - Bingo time (Gems-Flowers-Diecuts line, I used pearl gems, roses and a diecut heart)

Have a good weekend all.

Dream Valley #19 - Anything Goes

This fortnight, the challenge at Dream Valley is an old favourite.....Anything Goes.  Melly, our wonderful leader, will be offering a very lucky person a £10 voucher to use in either Crafty Emma's delish shop OR Saturated Canary's Digi's image Esty store - you choose!! How fab!!

My card is a new baby card using a photo, 2 designer papers (Crafters Companion pink gingham, and K&Co pink paper), ribbon & lace, an epoxy sticker, pearls and embossed vellum.

No, my copics haven't broken! hahaa. I just felt like a change and used a printed photo instead.

Check out the challenge blog for my clever teamies' fab projects. Happy crafting!

Colour some texture

Hello bloggers, I hope everyone is well. I've had a bit of a change round on my blog and added a second sidebar so I could do some tidying up. The header etc is different too but it won't stay like this for long....I was messing about with backgrounds yesterday when something happened to my blog so that I could no longer open it (shock horror!) and it kept making my laptop freeze to even try and open my blog. So I didn't get a chance to change the background to something more crafty. I'm too scared to touch it now in case it won't open again!

Anyway, we have a new challenge today at Make It Colourful, which is to COLOUR SOME TEXTURE. This could be anything you like: some grass, a woolly jumper, straw, fur......anything! If it's got some texture in there then you can enter. You can use any make of image in your colouring, doesn't have to be a Make It Crafty one, although there is an extra prize draw for MiC images.

I had been dying to colour this image by Crissy Armstrong, Turk In Boots. The tailfeathers I coloured in a deeply-grooved corrugated effect, and the pumpkin was coloured in long strokes of my copics to look like the many little ridges on the surface. And my final bit of texture is in the body of the turkey, which I coloured smoothly with copics then added little feathery pencil marks to look, well, feathery.

I kept the colours very autumnal, browns, golds and oranges with a little green, and picked up some violet from the backing paper to make a faint violet shadow around my turkey.  The chippie leaves are coloured with the same greens from the hat band. Hope you like it.

Image: Turk in Boots by Crissy Armstrong

Colouring: copics and pencils

Chippie leaves: Butterfly Leaves by Make It Crafty

DPs: K&Co, Brenda Walton Brookfield

Spellbinders: Lacey circles and standard circles

Computer printed sentiment

Ribbons from my craft stash



Don't forget to check out the Make It Crafty gallery to see more inspiration for colouring a little texture.

I'd like to enter this card in these challenges:
Charisma Cardz - Anything Goes
Crafty Boots - Autumn or Halloween
Crafty Creations - Leaves and fall palette
Digi Doodles - Anything Goes
Paper Crafting Journey - Use a digi
Partytime Tuesdays - Anything Goes
Shopping Our Stash - Halloween OR Autumn/Fall colours

Colouring snow for Make It Colourful: Ragged Angel and winter background

Hi all, I did some colouring last week and have only just today made something with it.  This is my DT project for Make It Colourful, where the challenge this fortnight is to COLOUR SNOW. This means not just adding glitter to look like the white stuff, but actually using your colouring to depict snow.

We are so lucky in that there are some new background snowy winter scene images now at Make It Crafty, and I've used 3 of them in my scene together with this fabulous image from Mo Manning. Now, I have to admit that Ragged Angel melts my heart, she's beautifully drawn and so adorable, and a poor little child out in the freezing snow - well, it can kinda move you to tears. So I had to colour the Angel in warm colours so that she could be warm inside despite the cold environment.

Colouring is in Copics as usual, and the way I've coloured the snow is to leave the majority of the paper white and uncoloured, and added some shadows and little areas of very pale blue (B0000) and a pale cool grey (C1 and some C3). It's a daytime scene, hence the lightsource from the right, but I decided the street lamp would be lit even though there's daylight, so it just casts a little warm light onto the snow on the lantern itself. The sky is coloured in a pale violet as if there is more snow in the sky - oh that poor little urchin!




Images merged with permission from Mo Manning


The finished colouring has been made up into a shadow box card so the image is sunk into the cardstock. The paper in the border is from Websters Pages, inked around the edges and matted onto green card.  The sentiment is from Stempelglade, and some lace, a metal filligree corner, a poinsettia, punched snowflake and a couple of roses finish it all off.

I hope it is OK to say that I do like this scene that I merged and I'm really pleased with how the colouring went. Always room for improvement but I'm happy.

I made this card for Mo's Bronte & Bella's challenge which this week is Inspired by a Song. When I was planning this, I had the song "It may be winter outside (but in my heart it's spring)" going round my head because I didn't like the thought of our little Angel suffering the cold and kind of imagined that she'd have an inner warmth to keep her OK. Kind of like the old Ready Brek advert, for those of us old enough to remember, lol.

Images: Festive Lantern (from Festive Elements), Large Pine Tree,

and Winter Fence from Make It Crafty;

Ragged Angel from Mo Manning

Colouring: Copic markers

DP: Websters Pages

Metal corner: Wild Orchid Crafts

Martha Stewart snowflake punch

Prima poinsettia, lace, roses from my stash

Sentiment: Vintage Christmas from Stempelglade

I'd like to enter this in these challenges:

ABC Christmas Challenge - U for Unused Stash (all my images are brand new, and this is the first time I've used this sentiment stamp)

Bronte and Bella's Challenge - Inspired by a song ("It may be winter outside")

Aud Sentiment Challenge - Winter theme

Bunny Zoe's Crafts - Lace it up

Fabulous Friday - Fancy trim

Flutterby Wednesday - Open challenge

Whoopsie Daisy - Free & easy

I hope you like my project today. It's gone very cold here in Brum and I'm sitting with a hot water bottle as I type this, lol. Keep warm everyone!