Rainbows, Glitter and Unicorns

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you've all had a brilliant week and that you haven't been effected by the bad weather. We've not had any snow yet but there are warnings posted on the sea front warning that flooding is expected and not to walk along the sea front until the weather improves. Hopefully this will stop people playing chicken with the high waves but probably not! We aren't in any danger of sea flooding as we live on the edge of town (and in a first floor flat too) but I'm praying that the flooding isn't as bad as expected.

I forgot to take any photos of the desk tidy I was planning on sharing with you but I have a rather cute card to share with you instead. I was blessed so much last year to win a couple of MFT stamp sets in a Facebook giveaway featuring unicorns (with optional wings) rainbows and a load of sentiments. A lot of the sentiments I probably won't use as they have the American spellings and I prefer to have sentiments spelt correctly (or rather using the English spellings) because I'm rather fond of the 'u's in favours, flavours and favourites (lol all my f words have been underlined in red!) Luckily the sentiment I chose for this card is spelt the same in either country.

I'd like to apologise for the quality of these photos, they don't seem to be as bright as normal (though at least they aren't blurry for a change lol) I didn't have long to take many photos because I needed to get it posted and with impeccable timing my camera had very little charge left and switched itself off just after I took the third photo - still at least you're not having to wade through lots of nearly identical photos ☺.

I've been buying a lot of cheap dies on Ebay that usually come from China - sometimes they take a couple of months to arrive and the packaging they come in are just flimsy cellophane bags but considering how cheap they are (and they cut very well, at least I've not had a bad one yet!) it's worth having to repackage them and wait a while for them to arrive. The stitched sun and rainbow as well as the cloud die came in a recent order, one that actually only took a couple of weeks to arrive and I've totally fallen in love with them. I've been admiring all the stitched dies that have been doing the rounds for the past year or so but apart from the odd one, I've not been able to add any to my stash because to be honest the named brands dies are really expensive and I've chosen to spend my limited funds on other items instead. I'm so happy that I can now use a variety of stitched dies on my projects and I'm particularly pleased with how this one turned out. I teamed the sun, rainbow and clouds with the MFT Birdy Brown Magical Unicorn stamp set and I think they go perfectly together especially as I coloured the unicorns' manes and tails in rainbow colours. I made the glitter background by adding strips of extra wide d/s tape onto a piece of card and after removing the backing paper, I sprinkled the sticky surface with fine glitter and rubbed it into the surface firmly with my finger - it's a rather messy technique but as long as you rub the glitter hard, it shouldn't shed afterwards. I die cut all elements out of plain white card and coloured in as needed. The rainbow die doesn't stay in one piece but that makes it easier to colour separately. The original panel of card was A6 and the sun hung over the corner which looked good but I was worried about it getting damaged on an A6 card blank, my first thought was to add a double wonky stitch line around the edges of a blue card piece to frame the panel but I didn't have a blue that went with the greenish blue glitter on the panel so I ended up folding an A4 sheet of card in two to make an A5 card blank then repeating the glitter background using more d/s tape (FYI - I bought the extra wide d/s tape after seeing Christine Smith AKA CRaFTi PoTeNTiAl using it on some of her YouTube videos, she uses Tonic Studios Nuvo extra fine glitter or micro beads but I just used what I had on hand) and glitter directly onto the front of the card blank. I then added the panel onto the glittered front using a strong wet glue and held it in place with an acrylic block while the glue dried. I stamped the unicorn, stars and sentiment inside and coloured using very basic colours of ProMarkers as I wanted to keep the colouring simple. I added a tiny clear jewel to the tip of the unicorn's horn using some matt adhesive so if it oozed out it couldn't be seen then added some clear Shimmer brush marker to the unicorns' manes and tails and the rainbow. I added gold Shimmer brush marker to the inside unicorn's hooves and silver metallic marker to the outside unicorn's horn, hooves and wing - I went over these parts with a layer of Glossy Accents. I added some clear and blue sequins as shown and adhered a tiny clear gem to the centre of each sequin using more of the matt adhesive.

I really love this card and I just hope the recipient likes it too! I might not do the glitter back ground much until I've had a chance to bulk buy some fine glitter because it did use rather a lot especially as I ended up doing two backgrounds in the end - it was worth all the mess though! I've made an envelope for it using some embossed card stock in red but unfortunately my camera died before I could take a photo.

Weather permitting, my lovely friend Jean and her son are coming to visit on Saturday and I'm going to have a good tidy up session tomorrow so it'll be a few days before I'll have another chance to make anything. As always if you have any questions or comments then please leave them in the usual places. I love to read what people have to say and enjoy it when we get to exchange ideas. Until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx

Magical Unicorns Pop Up Box Card

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you've all had a brilliant weekend, although the weather's now cloudy the heat is unrelenting - it was 76.6 F in my crudy during the early hours of this morning and completely airless. It's officially the summer holidays in Bridlington now so I'm hoping for a good thunderstorm to clear the air and freshen things up! Obviously I don't want it to rain the entire 6 weeks but a shower or two soon would be most welcome. Enough weather talk - let's talk crafting!

I really should have made this card a couple of weeks ago as it's a thank you card for Quick Card Made Easy magazine. As you'll know if you read the previous post, I won a couple of giveaways on Facebook (don't hate me but I've actually won another prize but from Orangina (not on FB) this time!). The second prize came last week (finally!) and when I've made stuff with my nieces I'll post a couple of photos (pending their mum's permission of course!) so you can see what we make - it's a pirate themed fun box so it should be quite good. Obviously my favourite prize is the MFT Magical Unicorns because they're unicorns! I've had an idea buzzing around my head for a few weeks about what sort of thank you card to make and finally settled on a pop up box card because let's face it a pop up box card has a lot of wow factor and isn't that difficult to make (usually - not sure if it's the weather but I kept mucking the card base up and this card has taken me nearly 3 days - on and off - to make!). It isn't quite what I'd imagined but I'm pleased with how it's turned out.

MFT Magical Unicorns Pop Up Box Card

Close up of Pop Up Elements

The Clouds are made using a CC Die'sire Die

Every Cloud should have a silver lining especially when saying Thank You

Rainbow Unicorn on one of the side flaps

Back Panel with die cut clouds

I don't have the matching dies yet so I've had to fussy cut all the stamped images which is why the castle in the clouds is without it's flags. I coloured all the images using Flex Markers and I added a layer of Spectrum Noir Clear Glitter brush marker over the castle and unicorns, the clouds were cut out using a CC set of dies and I added a layer of glossy accents to the top cloud on the back panel. I really like how this card turned out and I'm thinking of making a similar one for my niece's birthday next month (though I have kind of promised her a cheer leader card so I'll see what her mum thinks). I shall be posting this card to QCME magazine in the next few days along with a letter of thanks, hopefully they'll like it too and know how much I appreciate my fantastic prize. As the second prize is for the girls, I thought we could make a card together to say thank you at a later date.

I'll be making a couple of cards tonight but as they are for rather sad occasions I'm not sure it's appropriate to share, hopefully I'll have some cheery cards to share soon. As always if you have any questions or comments then please leave them in the usual place and until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx

Unicorns and Heatwaves

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you've all had a brilliant weekend and if you are in the UK - how's the heatwave for you?? I'm finding it a bit hot to do much apart from laying around gasping like a fish out of water lol. My crudy is probably the worst room because it's so small and packed to the gills and it tends to be a degree or so warmer than the rest of the flat except in winter when it's a few degrees colder! This hasn't stopped me from crafting though, I've just done it in spurts rather than having a long crafting sesh. Ideally I'd quite like to craft outdoors but having a shared garden and extremely nosy neighbours prevents this so I'd just have to grin and bear it :) - knowing typical British summers I doubt it'll last too long in any case especially as a lot of kids break up for the summer holidays at the end of this week. Enough weather talk, it's time for the important things in life -crafting! I was very lucky a few weeks ago to win two Facebook giveaways within 48 hours of each other. One of them still hasn't arrived but the second one came within two days of being notified of my win. I've not really had a lot of time to have a play with my lovely new stamps and deco-patch papers but I really love my gorgeous prize from Quick Cards Made Easy.

Close up of the unicorns

 The stamps are the Rainbow Greetings and Magical Unicorns by MFT (My Favorite Things) which I absolutely love!!! I really want the matching dies for the Magical Unicorns but they are £23.25 at the moment so I'll have to keep my fingers crossed that they'll come down in price after a while. I was inspired by AmyR on YouTube (Prairie Paper & Ink) who made some beautiful Unicorn fridge magnets using the Magical Unicorns stamp set, matching dies and Xyron creative station's magnet cartridge. I only own the stamps so made my own version by fussy cutting the unicorns and adding magnetic tape to the backs - obviously mine aren't as sturdy as they aren't laminated or have the magnetic backing but I was still pretty pleased with the result.

I made these to give to my sister-in-law so added small pieces of the magnetic tape to a pre-made box (I made this ages ago using my envelope punch board) and stuck the magnets to these so they don't move about in the box. As you can see from the second photo I added lots of Spectrum Noir Sparkle pen over the images. These unicorns are super sweet and with a bit of masking you can turn them into ordinary horses (though why would you want to do that!) you just need to add a thin line of pen at the top of the horse's fringe where it's covered by the mask. I'm in the middle of making a cloud/unicorn floating box card to send to QCME magazine as a thank you for my lovely prize and I'll share it with you once I've completed it. I hope you like my latest project, please check out AmyR on YouTube to see what inspired me and as always if you have any questions or comments then please leave them in the usual places. Until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx