A few new cards to share...

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you are all having a brilliant weekend, it's an extra long one here in the UK as we've a bank holiday on Monday. I haven't actually done any crafting since my last blog post as it's been quite a busy week, it was my husband's birthday on Monday and we met up with his mum and dad and my mum for a meal in a local pub - I had a cocktail (just the one!) and was a bit tiddly afterwards as I rarely drink - perhaps a Long Island Iced Tea wasn't the best choice for a near teetotaller lol (it tastes so nice though!) even if it has the word tea in it 😉. The following day we went back to the same pub with my lovely friends and my God-Daughter for another meal but I was very good that time and stuck with soft drinks - I even had a salad instead of my usual burger. For some unknown reason the pub had it's heating on and as the seating was built against the radiators, it was extremely hot! I haven't done a lot since Tuesday, I don't make a huge thing about it but I am bordering on being agoraphobic and have only left my flat around a dozen times this year so to actually go out two days in a row is quite debilitating and takes a lot out of me. I'm not even sure if my closest friends realise this about me because I manage to hide the symptoms well in front of people and I don't talk about it.

Here are the cards I want to share with you.

This is the card I made for my lovely God-Daughter who was baptised almost four weeks ago. I did have to look on Pinterest to get a few ideas about what sort of card to make as I was really struggling to come up with my own ideas. I do love this card though, I don't make monochromatic cards very often and I suppose with the small touch of silver this isn't a true one but I felt the added silver layers made the white ones pop plus a white on white sentiment would be quite difficult to read lol. I used a Verity Rose (Starlet) embossing folder to emboss the sun rays behind the cross panel and dies from my stash to cut out the cross shape and the stitched oval.

My second card is the card I made for my lovely husband, he wanted a nautical themed card and I wanted to make him a pop up shadow box.

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Everything on this card started off as white and was coloured with either distress inks, Metallic markers or Promarkers. All the diecutting was done using unbranded dies purchased from eBay with the exception of the smallest anchor die near the sentiment which was from a Xcut scene building die set and the sun which was a Diamond Press stamp and die set. The 44 were scrap die cuts from my stash and all the stamped images were made using unbranded stamp sets from eBay.  Lawn Fawn have a die which cuts out the shadow box shape (you need to cut two for each box) but I don't own it and it would have been too short for my purposes so I just made one from a sheet of A4 card and cut the front part out using a rectangle die. I would have liked to have added a ship to the waves (or a mini mermaid) but all the ones I currently own were too big to fit inside the box. One of the best things about this card design is that it folds flat enough to go into an envelope.

I hope you've enjoyed my latest card share, as always if you have any questions or comments then please leave them in the usual place. Enjoy the rest of the weekend and until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx

A couple of cards to share

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you all had a wonderful Easter Sunday and if you are blessed enough to have a day off today, are having a wonderful time today too. We had my mum over for a roast chicken dinner and it was fantastic. (Hope that doesn't sound too boastful!) My lovely hubby even prepped some of the veg which made things a bit less stressful for me - once I'd left the room that is! As you may know my husband is severely sight impaired - he's been blind in his left eye since birth and his right eye has very little sight as a result of scar tissue - and the stubborn so-and-so refused to use a veg peeler and insisted on using a small kitchen knife to peel the carrots and potatoes. My hands were itching to take the knife off him and do it myself not only because I was dreadfully worried he'd cut himself but because he was wasting so much of the veg that he had to peel an entire 2kg bag of potatoes just so we'd have enough for mash and roast potatoes (if I'd done it myself or if he'd used a peeler we could have used half the amount!) In the end I went into another room and wasted veg (and oddly squarish potatoes which were 'interesting') aside he did a good job and I was able to prep the cauliflower and get the chicken in the oven so it worked out okay.

Another thing I managed to do was make a very quick Easter card for my mum because Chris and I have been on a bit of a Game of Thrones bender the last few days and we've been watching series 6 together, two episodes at a time (*sobs* we've finished it now!) which really ate into my crafting time so I hadn't made any cards apart from the very first Easter Egg hunt card I shared a few posts ago. Although neither of us go to church anymore I wanted to make my mum a faith based card so came up with the following card.

I am a huge fan of eBay dies from China and this ornate cross was one of my earlier buys. It die cut through the gold mirror card perfectly even though I was using my Sizzix Sidekick which is past it's best and not designed for thin dies. I stuck it down on a piece of purple card and cut around it. I got an C6 sized piece of white card and ran it through my Big Shot machine in an embossing folder called Bubble Explosion from Crafter's Companion. I adhered the cross to the embossed card using plenty of tape runner (normally I'd use wet glue or red liner tape but I couldn't find any and I was in a hurry.) and stamped a Happy Easter sentiment from one of the stamps that came with Creative Stamping magazine during the past few months on a non-embossed area of the card. I then added this panel to a pre-scored card blank from Dovecraft.

The second card is my favourite. Men's cards are always a challenge for me so I'm very pleased with how this one turned out. The motorbike die for this card came from eBay (are you noticing a pattern) and embosses the card stock as well as cutting it out. I die cut it three times out of silver mirror card, metallic red card and black card. I kept the red die cut shape in one piece (though some inner parts did fall out and got lost) and added parts of the silver and black to the top of it as shown so that the wheels and the chrome areas were the right colour - it's probably not all that accurate as I'm not all that familiar with motorbike design but I thought it looked pretty cool. The crash helmet was diecut out of the same metallic red card as the motorbike and I used one of the dies from the Icons die set from Mr Mister collection from DoCrafts, the map paper also came from the same collection. The Route 66 sign was made using a die from the same collection but is actually a Best Dad shield die. I cut it out using the die out of black card and carefully removed the Best Dad words so only the thin black border remained. I traced around the die itself onto white card and carefully cut it out. I added the black border onto the white shield shape with glue and once it had dried added a thick line using a black marker across the top as shown and wrote out ROUTE and US. I coloured in two die cut sixes from my stash with the same pen and added them to the shield. I found a thin strip of Kraft card in my scraps and cut it to the right length to use as a pole for the sign. I made a double Z fold card using Kraft card (see my Easter Egg card post for details on how to make one or check YouTube for a tutorial) and decorated as shown. The stamped Happy Birthday was yet another eBay buy from China. I made the envelope using my WRMK envelope punch board and decorated it before sticking it together  using some stamps from my stash - the tire marks stamp is a roller stamp which doesn't have a brand and only cost 29p quite a few years ago, it's actually the first time I've used and I'm really glad I didn't purge it at some point as I really love the effect. Once it was decorated I stuck the sides etc with tape runner.

I hope you like my latest makes - I had a lot of fun making them and the motorbike card was very time consuming but worth the time, whereas the Easter card was a lot quicker but still quite a nice card. As always if you have any questions or comments then please leave them in the usual places.

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx

Oh, Baby.

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you are all well and had a good weekend. It's not long until Easter - have you made all your Easter cards yet? I've still all but one to make but I'm planning on keeping them simple so hopefully they won't take me long to make. Our family has been blessed with a new arrival - a beautiful baby girl was born on the 8th April 2017 to the Cornish part of our family. I've made a new baby card to send as soon as I have an address. I got some sweet little stamps off eBay yesterday so I decided to team them with some baby dies also from eBay to make a 6" square card.

Aren't these sweet images??? I'm a bit leery about buying stamps from eBay as the first lot I ordered were faulty but these stamps stamp beautifully. They are very small less than an inch square for the most part but are very cute. I coloured them in using a mixture of Flexmarkers for the main image and some fine point markers (can't remember the brand) for the small details in the background just because it's hard to colour in something that small using a Flexmarker - even a regular Promarker would be too large for the tiny hearts and stars that appear in the backgrounds. I fussy cut around each image after I coloured it in leaving a small white border as some of the images poke outside of the line borders and it looked better with a border than without. I punched out 8 1" squares using a Woodware square punch out of pink heart paper from my stash and stuck the cutout images onto the squares with tape runner. I made a 6" square card blank by cutting a 12" x 12" piece of Bazzill Vanilla cardstock  in half and scoring it at 6". I cut a piece of DCWV Glimmer card from a 6" x 6" paperpack that I've been hoarding for years (lol) to 5.5" square and added it to the front of my card blank. I cut a piece of paper decorated with glittered paws taken from Dovecraft's Bazoo by Helz Cuppleditch (this collection came out about 5 years ago or more but there are still some paperpacks floating about out there - they are perfect for baby cards) to 5" x 5" and then cut a piece of funky foam slightly smaller and stuck it to the back of the paw paper with double sided tape. I added this panel to the glitter paper panel using Tombow Mono adhesive as wet glue is advisable when sticking anything to a glittered card. I added the 1" square panels as shown using tape runner and die cut a baby bottle and a rattle using the scrap of glimmer paper that was left over after cutting out the first mat. I added these to the card using more Tombow Mono adhesive. The card lacked something so I added faux stitching around the toppers using a white gel pen and then added black faux stitches using a .7mm Promarker fineliner pen to the paw paper and the card blank which tied the card together. I added dots of black glaze pen to the bears eyes and noses to make them raised and shiny. I added a strip of the paws paper to the inside of the card and did some more faux stitches in black above it. I stamped a sentiment from a We R Memory Keeper's baby stamp set (it's a mini stamp set featuring this sentiment and a pair of baby footprints - so cute!) I made an envelope using my WRMK Envelope punch board and stamped some bunting on the front and on the flap as shown. I coloured these in pink using a coloured pencil.

I think this is one of my favourite baby cards I've made, the images are really cute and because they are so small you can use all of them without the card looking too fussy. At some point I'll probably use these stamps to make a waterfall card as they are the perfect size for one. The stamp set only cost £1.59 and took just under a month to arrive from China. The dies were from a set of 8 dies in total (4 baby related items and 4 cute insects) and cost £2.39, again they took nearly a month to arrive. I won the DCWV papers quite a few years ago so the glittery layer and die cut embellishments were either free or very little cost and the Bazoo papers were from ECAP and have been in my stash for at least 3 years so again cost very little. My biggest expense for this card was probably the Bazzill Vanilla card which cost 90p a sheet and I used half of it so all in all this was a really economical make 😄

I hope you like my latest make, as always if you have any questions then please leave them in the usual places. I'm not sure if I'll be adding another post before Easter as I've got a few things planned so I hope everyone has a wonderful Easter - and that you get lots of Easter eggs!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx